2019: A Literary Memoir

I do this every year. I write about the books that I read and the places I read them. I did it in 2018. I did it in 2017 and 2015 (ah, so young). It’s interesting to track my habits, from the kinds of books I gravitate towards when I’m sad or lonely, to the amount I read (or don’t read) when someone or something new enters my life. In 2019, I read 34 books.

January

2019 begins in the local ocean pools, under a sea of stars and fireworks, with a couple of longboards against a fence and two bodies afloat in the sea. A quiet one. Perfect in its simplicity.

I tell myself I will not leave the country in 2019, unless I am paid to. For the last few years, I have sacrificed the beauty of local community to chase the fleeting friendships you find in hostels, in bars, on buses across unfamiliar landscapes. I don’t realise it in the early weeks of January, but 2019 will become my favourite year as a result of seeing this goal through. 

I hike Mount Jagungal in Kosciuszko National Park a couple of days into the new year, right in the peak of summer. I am with three new friends. We hike 50km and eat too many packets of Continental Mac ’n Cheese and spend most nights piled into the one tent, playing cards, smoking, eating Oreos. I have a battered copy of Boys Will Be Boys by Clementine Ford in my backpack, but I never open it. I write in my journal instead.

A couple of days later I finish Clementine’s book. I didn’t enjoy her first– Fight Like a Girl. It felt like a lengthy and polarising Facebook rant. Boys Will Be Boys was better, but missed the mark for me. 2 stars. 

There is a lot of pain in January, but pain gives way to space. I pour myself into my novels and my journals, unpicking learned behaviours, and distracting myself from the reality of my findings. I read If Cats Disappeared From The World by Japanese author Genki Kawamura. It is inhaled due to its simplicity and its length, however leaves me unsatisfied. 2 stars.

Bridge of Clay, Markus Zusak’s 2018 novel which came off the back of The Book Thief’s wild success is the next read. I spend a lot of time curled beneath my house plants, falling in love with landscape like I am prone to do. I enjoy it more than the critics did. Finally, I am able to immerse myself in a world that isn’t my own for a while. 4 stars. 

I finish 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which I began late 2018. This is Yuval Noah Harare’s third book. His first and most famous, Sapiens, is a favourite of mine. He continues to open my eyes to the past, the present and the future in a way that no other writer of history has done. This is a digestible book which asked more questions than answered them. 3 stars.

I meet with the NSW Police Commander of Child Sex Crimes, and then with the NSW Police Corporate Communications team. We make progress off the back of the letter I mailed in late December, 2018. They have committed to a digital communications strategy. I am overjoyed and I cry on the phone to my parents in Hyde Park. 

February

I start a Diploma of Ceramics at TAFE. I write ‘undertake’ in a form at reception and the lady who is watching me says ‘wow, undertake. That’s a smart word. Good on you’ and looks at me with a tired smile and tired eyes. It looks like all of her facial features are going to slip right off. I give up the Diploma after a semester and take home a pile of fugly mugs and ash trays.

I buy two copies of The Vigilante by John Steinbeck. One for myself, and one for a boy. He reads his copy in a pub while I go to my first ceramics class. He writes haikus.

I go to the last Secret Garden festival. In write this fragment in my journal:

She stumbles over to the volunteering tent with a friend - her blonde pigtails a mess, her high-wasted bedazzled shorts causing me to squint in the afternoon light.

“I just took this guy’s virginity” she announces with a laugh.

“Selective school kid, the fucking nerd.”

Her friend gives her a congratulatory hug and an audible cheer.

“He had a good dick though. Like, you wouldn’t expect it but it was a good dick. Finished like 5 minutes ago but I just left him. Fucked him and left him.” They laugh.

“Let’s go back into the festival so he can’t find us” she says, hauling her friend’s arm.

“Can’t believe you took his fucking virginity” her friend says as they race away hand-in-hand, past the sagging tents and the overflowing porta-loos and into the festival.

I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. I haven’t read anything written by her before, but I remember watching her TED talk on the couch in my friend’s apartment in Basel, Switzerland in 2018.

The Vigilante boy recommends This House of Grief by Helen Garner, a favourite essayist and fiction writer of mine. It is an account of the court proceedings that occurred after the tragic incident where a father drove into a lake with his children. He was the only survivor. She writes with honesty and heart. 4 stars. 

I watch Bikes of Wrath in the cinema with The Vigilante boy and cry. I always cry in films that show, with integrity and authenticity, the heart of community. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck is one of my favourite novels, and key quotes are read by various people the documentary’s protagonists come across. 

I buy four books before I head to the cinema, because it is a date and I am nervous. We Should All Be Feminists, the transcription of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk is one of them. I read it in one sitting on the train.

The Vigilante boy continues to write haikus.

March

I start volunteering at a local second-hand book shop every Tuesday. For four hours each week, I talk about books with people who happen to pass by our little sign and climb the linoleum stairs. I stack books and organise books and buy books. The space feels like home.

I read The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood, because we’ve started a book club amongst friends, and it is the first selection. We curl around a coffee table, our books open in our laps, and eat from plates of homemade cookies and pastries and cheese. It was an unrealistic dystopia novel that left us wanting more. 2 stars. 

I read Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, finally. I am both astounded and furious by just how little I know about Indigenous Australians. While this felt repetitive at times, it is an essential read. 4 stars. 

I go to Byron Bay and celebrate the people that I love under waterfalls. I start reading Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China by Leta Hong Fincher. It quickly becomes one of my favourite non-fiction reads of all time. I learn that China didn’t have a single policy against domestic violence until 2016. 

I go for full moon surfs at a local beach with friends. I earn Wave of the Day, an honourable title for a non-surfer. I fall off the board and into the white wash with a smile from ear to ear. 

I start my Masters of Public Policy majoring in Peace and Conflict at the University of Sydney. Maybe if I understand how policies are made, I can be more strategic in my approach to dismantle those that I believe are causing further injustice to the poor. I begin my studies hungry. 

April

In April, I drive down to Bright and hike the Main Ranges in Kosciuszko National Park on the way. I re-read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley while I knit a friend’s baby some eggshell-coloured beanies. I spend a lot of time sitting by the Murray River. I hike the Budawang Ranges on the way back with friends. We spend a night in a cave with a fire. I sleep in my car for a week. I spend most of the time alone. I am happy. Free. 

I read Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller on a rock by the Bargo River and I cook up some leftover butter chicken on my camping stove. My copy is wrapped in paper, scribbled with an abbreviation I can’t remember the meaning of. The Vigilante boy gave it to me a few years prior. It’s the first Christian book I’ve read in 3 years. It makes me uncomfortable, but the way that Miller writes is beautiful and full of nuance. I find myself underlining. The Vigilante boy is gone by the time I finish it, and takes his haikus with him. 

I do not believe a person can take two issues from Scripture, those being abortion and gay marriage, and adhere to them as sins, then neglect much of the rest and call himself a fundamentalist or even a conservative. The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbour and feeding the poor is, by definition, a theological liberal, because he takes what he wants from Scripture and ignores the rest.

I read The Dry by Jane Harper, the book club choice for March. It is rare that I read genre fiction, but I suppose that’s the point of book clubs– to read books you otherwise wouldn’t. 3 stars. 

I read What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape by Sohaila Abdulali. I write a letter to the man who assaulted me because I feel stronger after reading it. I never send it. It sits in a document in a folder, in a folder, in a folder, where it will likely remain.

I read The Feel of Steel by Helen Garner because I notice it on the bookshelf in the community bookstore. I inhale it. I dream of becoming a writer like Helen Garner. 4 stars. 

May

I turn 25. I move out of Bourke Street and into a new house on the same day. People start singing happy birthday, and I am welcomed with open arms. It is a delightful house and I fall in love with it immediately. Its spiral staircase, its fireplace, its bath… its veggie gardens and view of the ocean… Ernie, the young kelpie. I start to build a new life.  

I read All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. Another favourite for 2019. I tell a boy on Tinder that McCarthy writes like a seasoned dancer with a novice. He picks you up and and swings you this way and that until you stumble your way into the rhythm. I take photos of pages that move me and send them to my friends who read. 

She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.

I volunteer at the Sydney Writers Festival alone and buy more books than my budget allows. I kiss a boy on the train on the way home and we spend a few weeks riding bicycles and cooking together. 

I read Tracks: A Woman’s Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback by Robyn Davidson. I appreciate the honesty with which she writes about her journey. She strips back the romanticism and isn’t afraid to share her own faults and failings. 4 stars.

I fly to Melbourne with an empty seat beside me. A gift that that goes used. I see friends. I fall violently ill with the flu and end up at the airport a day early. I read the dates wrong. Sobbing, sniffling, exhausted, I book another flight for the same day and fall asleep before the plane leaves the tarmac.

June

I fly to Tasmania because my best friend won tickets to a $666 dinner at Dark Mofo. We eat feral cat tortellini and martinis with sheep eyes in ice cubes and watch as naked people dance on our dinner table, which happens to be the largest glockenspiel in the Southern Hemisphere. David Walsh finishes my drink. I stay at MONA overlooking the River Derwent for the night and fly home the next day. I spend most of the flight reading David Walsh’s collection of essays.

I read Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel in a lemon-myrtle bath. It’s the next book club read and we all enjoy it immensely. I have never read a graphic novel before. 5 stars. 

I read How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship by Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran who spoke with admirable poise at the Sydney Writers Festival. I learn a lot about populism and the future of the world scares me. 4 stars. 

July

I read Brett Ellison’s Less Than Zero. I loved American Psycho and commit to buying more of his books. I read Less Than Zero on my bed under the warmth of the afternoon light that filters through my bedroom window. I adore his grit, his relentlessness, his grime. 4 stars. 

I publish a survey about casual sex and 200 of my friends fill it out. I write an article about what casual sex is like for women. Lots of people read it and I have many great conversations with men.

I fly to Melbourne for work, but spend a couple of days with a boy from the internet before my string of meetings. We drive out to Noojee to camp in his van and cook a stir fry in the rain. I spend a couple of days in Daylesford and fall in love with the town and its fields of lavender. 

I score tickets to Splendour in the Grass and drive up alone. I camp with friends and watch Catfish and the Bottlemen from side stage and Dr. Karl asks me a question (about his microphone, but I’ll take it). I sleep in my car on the way up to Byron and on the way down. I write a lot in my journal.

I read Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton, another Sydney Writers Festival find. Perfect for those who enjoyed Jasper Jones, however I felt this YA novel, set in Brisbane, was a little over-hyped and unbelievable. 3 stars. 

Another boy from Instagram, one I have never spoken to before, asks if I would like to join him on a leg across the desert on a bicycle. He is engaged, so it is a request for adventure, rather than sex. I have never ridden a bicycle further than 8km before. I say yes and 3 days later I walk out of Alice Springs airport and toward a scruffy adventurer and his two bicycles. July ticks over to August while I’m on the road. 

August

I spend the first half of August in Alice Springs, pushing my way up and over ankle-deep sand dunes with 80kg of bike and water and food for 300 long kilometres. I am sore and dehydrated. My body crumbles under the pressure, and on one particularly memorable day, I run off the sandy dunes and take a squat to vomit, shit and cry at the same time. 

I buy The Mind of a Thief by Patti Miller in town and strap it to the bike trailer and try to read it once the day is done and we’ve set up camp, but I’m exhausted, and I pull my sticky body into the sleeping bag that the sticky bodies before me one curled into.  

I finish To Sir, With Love by E. R. Braithwaite in a hotel after hitchhiking 300kms on the side of the highway back to Alice Springs alone. I fly home exhausted. I write about the trip.

I re-read one of my favourite books, Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann (The Vigilante boy recommended it to me years ago). It’s my choice for book club this month. 5 stars. 

I attend my friend Chloe Higgins’ book launch for her debut The Girls. I read it the next day in one hit. I am astounded both by her story, and the grace and honesty with which she shares it. It is an honour when someone chooses to share their pain in such a tangible form. It causes me to reflect on the relationships I have with my family and I am thankful. 4 stars.

September

I start reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong aloud under a sea of leaves in the Blue Mountains. I smoke cigarettes with an old friend and we eat blueberries and nap in the shade for a few hours. I am distracted in September, and this is the only book I read. I write a few letters, and receive a few too. Ocean is a poet, and I would have preferred this book to be written entirely in poetic form.  3 stars. 

I fly to Tasmania and hike the Overland with a friend. 80kms. The first day is sunny and bright, the second torrential rain. On the third, we’re battling snow and wind on exposed ridges up in the mountains. We spend the evenings in the trail cabins with soggy hikers and our ziplock bags of scroggin.

I cry in an Italian restaurant and eat gnocchi that feels like wads of wet toilet paper in my mouth. Wine doesn’t make me feel better and I catch the train home with a cold blue-cheese pizza. Oh, September. A month of longing and hope and heartbreak and friendship.

October

I go camping with someone new, and we unpick our past on a couch made from sand by a beach fire on the south coast. We spend the next couple of weeks on motorbikes, holding hands, going on bush walks. He is a small paragraph in a long chapter, but it is one full of grace and kindness.

I read The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and I adore it. For all its cliches, and for all its romance. 4 stars.

From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.”

A friend lends me a book on Islamic fundamentalism and American imperialism called The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity by Tariq Ali. I turn the first page at Thirroul Station at midnight, while I wait 30 minutes for my train back home.

NSW Police start posting consent-themed memes as a result of the letters and meetings I had with them at the start of the year. They inform me of the video series they have started to film and invite me to contribute. I am thankful for how willingly they have heard and acted on my cries. I am inspired to look for ways I can put pressure on neighbouring state forces.

I celebrate two years self-employed. I submit 9000 words of uni essays in one week and shut my computer down. I celebrate at the Yours and Owls Festival and participate in the custom skinny dips in ocean pools under the moon afterwards. I chip a tooth and have to pay $2500 for root canal.

November

I fly to Vanuatu and spend 17 days exploring the outer islands - Maewo, Ambryn, Gaua and Malekula with a film crew on behalf of We Are Explorers. Some of the islands don’t see more than 50 tourists a year. I hike volcanoes in torrential rain and snorkel in crystal clear reefs. It’s a beautiful and chaotic experience, and I am thankful for the opportunity to do incredible things like this for work.

Shot by Ben Savage, one of the incredible young photogs I had the pleasure of travelling with.

I start reading The Little Friend by Donna Tart in a hammock on an island and my interest ebbs and flows in the storyline. I find myself wishing this book was half its size as it seems to go on and on and on. 2 stars.

I read A Place At His Table by my friend Joel Hollier, A Christian book that presents a different perspective on the traditionally conservative view that the LGBT+ folk don’t have a place at His table. Joel sits on my panel alongside poet Phil Wilcox and singer-songwriter Bec Sandridge for a panel I chair at the Wollongong Writers Festival called Navigating Inherited Christianity. Phil recites a new poem and I hold back a tear. I am amazed by how many people are in the room, and for the conversations that happen over drinks at a local bar afterwards.

December

Fires sweep through New South Wales, destroying homes and rainforests and the habitats of our native species. The air is thick with smoke. My grandfather writes to me and tells me that ‘there may be something in this global warming thing’.

I sign a contract and buy a company that comes with staff and an office and a portfolio of clients. I don’t sleep in the weeks leading up to it, and my dentist is worried for the state of my teeth due to my stress-fuelled grinding. I walk into the office with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. 2020 is going to be big and huge and scary. I welcome the challenge with open arms.

I finish a year of my Masters of Public Policy with Distinction and enrol in my subjects for 2020. I endeavour to continue despite the looming pressures of business.

I read Educated by Tara Westover in the hammock under banana palms in the backyard. This memoir surpasses all of my high expectations and I am both moved and inspired by her story. 5 stars.

I read Without Apology: Girls, Women and the Desire to Fight by Leah Hagen Cohen after joining a fighting gym with a friend. 4 stars.

My housemates play a lot of music and I do a bit of gardening, because my new routine allows me time and space to read and play without feeling guilty. We have a lot of house dinners and kitchen dances and naps on blankets in the garden. I read Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thein in a bath in Melbourne after missing my first flight and booking a second and I finally, finally get my reading mojo back. 3 stars.

Unfortunately, I use my mojo to read Andre Aciman’s Find Me, the much awaited sequel to the much loved Call Me By Your Name. I hate it for all its cliches and mirrored storylines. 1 star.

Christmas comes and so does New Years. A time for family and friends. A time to shut off and close down. I’ve learnt a lot this year, and I’m looking forward to everything 2020 throws at me. Thanks to the beautiful people who have played a role in the chaos and the beauty.

~
Header photo shot by konophotography.