Torrey Peters talking to Liz Duck-Chong about Detransition, Baby - SWF 2022

Torrey Peters on Detransition, Baby. SWF 2022

At 8pm on Thursday 19 May I walked into a cavernous hall at Carriageworks to hear Brooklyn-based writer Torrey Peters talk via video from Poland to Liz Duck-Chong in Sydney.

It was an absolutely mesmerising conversation. Even via screen Peters was dazzling! She brought the house down. And Duck-Chong asked such beautifully nuanced, thoughtful and searching questions that at the end Peters praised her exceptional contribution to the evening. The questions from the audience were also excellent, including one that prompted Peters to reflect on ‘sad girl lit’ and Jean Rhys.

Peters was there to talk about her 2021 novel Detransition, Baby, her breakthrough book which became an internationally acclaimed sensation. Its three central characters are bound by the question of a child: trans woman, Reese; her former partner who’s detransitioned from Amy to Ames; and cis woman, Katrina, who suddenly finds herself pregnant with Ames’s child. Peters called Reese a trans version of Fleabag, living in Brooklyn, NYC.

Sydney Writers' Festival 2022 opening address - and Marcia Langton & Julianne Schultz

Sydney Writers’ Festival 2022: opening address - and Marcia Langton + Julianne Schultz on ‘Australia’

It’s been a while! - nine months to be precise - since I last blogged here. I spent the summer working on my essay My mother’s silence, my nation’s shame, which was published in Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning last month. The first bookish thing I did after that was head straight to the Sydney Writers’ Festival. It was the first time I’d been able to go since 2018.

The opening night address in the Town Hall with its wildly applauding crowd and standing ovation set the tone for this excellent festival. That night three acclaimed First Nations artists - Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jackie Huggins and Nardi Simpson - spoke to the festival’s theme ‘change my mind’, reflecting on the changed, changing and changeable nature of their minds.

It was dark in the Town Hall, I didn’t have a notebook and pen, and I was so stunned and excited to be at the SWF for the first time since 2018, it didn’t occur to me to take notes. But here’s my recollection of the opening night, followed by the notes I took from a brilliant conversation two days later between Professor Marcia Langton and Professor Julianne Schultz, chaired by acclaimed historian Clare Wright.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong’s first book, the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), circles obsessively around fathers. (Vuong’s violent father left soon after the family – grandmother, mother, father, son – arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, from Saigon via a refugee camp in the Philippines when Vuong was two years old.)

In its middle is a four-page poem called ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, which opens like this:

Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand to your chest.

After war, with violence and trauma in our bodies, what happens to love? How do we connect, body to body?

See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse by Jess Hill

Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse (2019) is a wide-ranging examination of love, power, the perpetrators of domestic abuse and the systems that enable them. It won the 2020 Stella Prize, was made into a 3-part SBS documentary and is essential reading. Domestic abuse is a national emergency:

‘In Australia, a country of almost 25 million people, one woman a week is killed by a man she’s been intimate with. These statistics tell us something that’s almost impossible to grapple with: it’s not the monster lurking in the dark women should fear, but the men they fall in love with.’

Hill’s book is beautifully written, forensically researched, comprehensive and excellent. It puts domestic abuse in its historical context and canvasses a vast, complicated and ever changing terrain …

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