Monsters

a reckoning
Alison Croggon

‘With Monsters, [Croggon] tackles one of contemporary literature’s most electric (and eclectic) forms — a kind of glorious literary mutant that braids socio-cultural contemplation and memoir; anchoring high-theory with visceral intimacy. She joins a sorority of glittering thinkers … whose work mimics what it feels like to stretch an idea out in your brain. True to type, Monsters is digressive, kaleidoscopic, and alive with questions.’

Beejay Silcox, The Guardian

‘What makes Monsters distinct, from opening bars to melancholy coda, is the nature of the pain it describes. Not the physical kind which holds at least the potential for relief, but the emotional distress emerging from a breakdown in the author’s relationship with one of her two younger sisters: a connection that has grown increasingly poisonous over time … Monsters becomes the effort to draw a global map of human hurt using the fractal experience of one woman’s domestic discord.’

Geordie Williamson, The Weekend Australian

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‘Sometimes it is in the gulf between what we value and how we act that we are truly revealed … Croggon cares deeply about this idea, of sitting with complexity … in every scorching appraisal of hierarchy and patriarchy, there is a central thought: there must be some explanation … For Croggon, the legacy of British colonialism is the notion that you can take someone’s story away from them. Monsters fights to reclaim the narrative.’

Sarah Walker, Australian Book Review

‘Monsters brings up interesting insights on trauma, power relations and the pathology of families.’

Alastair Mabbott, The Herald

‘In language at once fiery and elegant, [Croggon] reckons with the collective failures of her imperialist ancestors and the personal shame of their legacy. It’s a book I will return to often for its power and its truths.’

Marina Benjamin, author of Insomnia

‘A marvel of a book … Croggon spares no one, least of all herself, as she unearths colonial history and family complicity to scrutinise those demons that both torment and shape us. This is exactly the kind of book I have longed to see white authors write, and I love it for its refusal to provide easy answers to the dilemma at the heart of the modern human condition.’

Ruby Hamad, author of White Tears/Brown Scars

‘Refreshing … admirable.’

Josephine Fenton, Irish Examiner

‘Croggon asks probing questions about self-perception and trauma … The monsters of the title are plentiful: throughout the essays she addresses her British colonialist ancestors, her abusive mother, the “traumatic tedium” of her relationship to her sister, and herself … Lyrically rendered, this reckoning will leave readers with plenty to think about.’

Publishers Weekly

‘Croggon is an autodidact and digs deepest into issues which interest her most. Her writing on femaleness and the patriarchy is excellent and follows her own feminist evolution … This is a unique blend of memoir and critical theory.’

Bob Moore, Good Reading

‘The searing opening spares no one, least of all Croggon as she details a toxic relationship with her sister … Woven in and out of all this are other ugly but very differently scaled relationships, from colonialism through which she details her own history, to the patriarchy and how it distorts the way we see even ourselves. Croggon is a talented writer, librettist, playwright and thinker, and her focus here is to understand and, in some ways, reconcile with all this dysfunction.’

Penelope Debelle, SA Weekend, starred review

‘Croggon’s background as a poet is tangible, and her language in Monsters is flavoursome … she is witty, self-reflective, raw.’

Anna Westbrook, ArtsHub, starred review

‘Monsters is a hybrid memoir about family, colonialism and how external forces invisibly shape us, by renowned critic and impressive brain Alison Croggon.’

Jo Case, InDaily

‘Steady and acute self-scrutiny such as Croggon’s is necessary to a widening interrogation of privilege that underpins the illumination and refusal of racism and sexism and promised a historical pivot away from overt and covert violence … Monsters is full of gloriously expressed insights, such as the image of the internet as ‘a trauma machine, recording and reproducing millions of psychic wounds’ and, on the subject of #MeToo, the way an accumulation of incidents can contribute to a ‘deformation fo self’ … stylistically, the rhythms and sonic patterns of Croggon’s prose are a poet’s.’

Felicity Plunkett, The Age

‘This figure I see in the foreground, this me. How monstrous am I? What does it mean to be a monster? From Latin monstrum, meaning an abomination … grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible …

‘I was born as part of a monstrous structure — the grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible relations of power that constituted colonial Britain. A structure that shaped me, that shapes the very language that I speak and use and love. I am the daughter of an empire that declared itself the natural order of the world.’

From award-winning writer and critic Alison Croggon, Monsters is a hybrid of memoir and essay that takes as its point of departure the painful breakdown of a relationship between two sisters. It explores how our attitudes are shaped by the persisting myths that underpin colonialism and patriarchy, how the structures we are raised within splinter and distort the possibilities of our lives and the lives of others. Monsters asks how we maintain the fictions that we create about ourselves, what we will sacrifice to maintain these fictions — and what we have to gain by confronting them.