Thursday 25 May
Title: Do We All Turn into Our Mothers?
Location: Wharf 2 Theatre, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road
Time: 11.30-12.30pm
Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.’ In this intimate discussion led by Louise Adler, three writers explore the relationships between mothers and children. Caroline Baum’s memoir Only recounts being caught between two damaged people. Nadja Spiegelman describes unravelling a web of family relationships in I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This. In Things That Helped, Jessica Friedmann lays bare her experience of post-partum depression.
Saturday 27 May
Title: Lost the Plot: Writing About Mental Health
Location: Philharmonia Studio, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay
Time: 11.30 - 12.30pm
This panel explores mental health in writing, and how a person’s emotional state can change the nature of their prose. Three writers discuss storytelling when experiences of time, subjectivity and memory are in flux. Writers address issues including psychology, personal connection and vulnerability in their work. Jessica Friedmann’s Things That Helped includes essays on postpartum depression, and Mia Freedman’s Work Strife Balance discusses female connections as forged through vulnerability. Black Comedy star Nakkiah Lui has written about the mental and emotional trauma of being Aboriginal in this country, and Tracey Spicer’s The Good Girl Stripped Bare is about how society’s unrealistic expectations of women can weigh them down.
Title: Contemporary Essay: Personal and Public
Location: Wharf 2 Theatre, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay
Time: 3.00 - 4.00pm
Acclaimed Australian writers conduct an in-depth examination of the contemporary essay. Rebecca Giggs talks to Jessica Friedmann, author of Things That Helped, a collection of essays tapping critical theory, popular culture and personal experience; award-winning writer and cultural historian Maria Tumarkin; and Fiona Wright, author of the book of essays, Small Acts of Disappearance, which examines her own anorexia and the significance of hunger. Guests traverse the borders of the personal and political, and consider the intersection of literary and journalistic modes.
