Fiona Wright and Jessica Friedmann are two of our most celebrated new wave essayists. Their work fuses traditional aspects of memoir with critical investigations associated with the essay. In their books, they explore the experience of illness, recovery, the meaning of making art, and the feeling of foreignness associated with one’s own body.
Wright’s collection of essays Small Acts of Disappearance is a compelling account of her experience of living with an eating disorder that escalates to life-threatening anorexia. Her writing is a combination of memoir and literary observations; detailed, humorous and hauntingly honest. Similarly in Things That Helped, Friedmann navigates us as readers through the experience of post-partum depression after the birth of her son. Powerful and moving, her writing touches on race, gender and sexuality as well as motherhood and depression.
This talk will explore the common themes in their writing and ask how Wright and Friedmann are reinventing these nonfictional forms. In what ways is contemporary memoir evolving? And how does the writing of memoir result in a new kind of essay?
Fiona Wright and Jessica Friedmann will be in conversation with Roanna Gonsalves in this UNSWriting event.
Born in 1987, Jessica Friedmann is a Canberra-based writer and editor. Her essays and other non-fiction have appeared widely, both in Australia and internationally. Things That Helped is her first published collection.
