Cirrus@Austlit

'For years, Amy Thunig thought she knew all the details about the day she was born, often demanding that the story of her birth be retold. Years later, heavily pregnant with her own first child, she learns what really happened that day. It’s a tale that exemplifies many of the events of her early life, where circumstances sometimes dictated that things be slightly different from how they might seem – including what is meant by her dad being away for ‘work’ and why her legal last name differs from her family’s.

'In this remarkable memoir, Amy Thunig narrates her journey through childhood and adolescence, growing up with parents who struggled with addiction and incarceration. She reveals the importance of extended family and community networks when your immediate loved ones are dealing with endemic poverty and intergenerational trauma. In recounting her experiences, she shows how the stories we tell about ourselves can help to shape and sustain us. Above all, she shows that joy and love exist in spaces that are often dehumanised or overlooked, proving that life can be rich and full of beauty even when things are – in many ways – terrible. Tell Me Again will captivate, move and inspire readers with its candour, lack of self-pity and insight.' (Publication summary) 

'There is love in this place, just like there is love everywhere we care to look for it. There is beauty and there is hope and there is a boy and there is a mother and there is the past and there is the future but most importantly there is the now, and everything that exists between them that has got them from one moment to the next. The now is where we find the golden glow where, for the briefest of moments, the sky rips open and we see what it is we are made of.
Tell me a story, he asked me.
And so I began.

'Clementine Ford is a person who has loved deeply, strangely and with curiosity. She is fascinated by love and how it makes its home in our hearts and believes that the way we continue to surrender ourselves to love is an act of great faith and bravery.

'This tender and lyrical memoir explores love in its many forms, through Clementine's own experiences. With clear eyes and an open heart, she writes about losing her adored mother far too young, about the pain and confusion of first love - both platonic and romantic - and the joy and heartache of adult love. She writes movingly about the transcendent and transformative journey to motherhood and the similarly monumental path to self-love. 'We love as children, as friends, as parents and, yes, sometimes as sexual beings, and none of it is more important than the other because all of it shows us who we are.'

'How We Love is heartfelt, funny, confessional, revelatory, compassionate - and essential reading. It shows us to ourselves in moments of unwavering truth and undeniable joy.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Clementine Ford talks about her new book, Boys Will Be Boys, which addresses toxic masculinity and raising a son. This is a live recording from our event.'  (Production summary)