Memoirs Books

An extraordinary life, from ordinary beginnings.Optimism, resilience, audacity, hope, surviving daily challenges for themselves and those they love; carers embody all of these qualities. Cheryl Koenig's fifth book, a memoir, deals with all those human...

This is a memoir of an Aboriginal woman, Tjanara Goreng Goreng, who began life without any of the advantages of her fellow non-Indigenous Australians except for grit, humour and diverse talent in spades. Through one woman's story, this book...

'Alex Creece's Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is a reckless, glorious, grotty revolution. It's an insubordinate 'kissyface of cobwebs' that sticks it to capitalism, heteronormativity and the patriarchy.Quotably horny and delightfully vulgar, Potty...

'What we now want from a biography, or autobiography, is the very thing that Virginia Woolf said that we have no right to want: art. Not only art, obviously, but art nevertheless. And we love the illumination of dark corners of the soul, having...

Surveyor Thomas Scott Townsend (18121869) is an elusive, almost legendary figure, closer to folklore than to history. His name is given to the country's second highest mountain, but the details of his career are obscure and his personal identity has...

Margaret Lilardia Tucker MBE (affectionately known as Aunty Marge) was a significant Aboriginal activist and one of the first Aboriginal women to publish for mainstream audiences. If Everyone Cared (1977) was a landmark publication. In that first...

Enjoy all of Al Clark's absorbing recollections in this combined bundle of both of his memoirs.Time FliesTime Fliesis an idiosyncratic memoir with a distinctive voice and a sense of the absurd: a wistful, reflective, sometimes comic view of a...

Two men, Robert and Vras, met in 1993 and formed a committed relationship until Robert's death of leukemia in May, 2022. This short book is a farewell letter to Robert, a long lamentation and a threnody, exploring the nature of their friendship, their...

Time Flies Too is the sequel to 2021's beguiling and absorbing memoir Time Flies by Al Clark, who in its last paragraph married and settled in Australia after a Spanish village childhood, a Scottish boarding school education and nearly two decades of...

'Oodnadatta Country I can still see it, in my mind's eye, exactly as it was back in my time. The 'There are so many stories to tell of my life, and sometimes I think they are not of importance, but they are, because often it is the little details that...

'I was confined, locked into my library, tracing my heartbeats from way, way back.'In Telltale, Carmel Bird seizes on an enforced isolation to re-read a rich dispensary of books from her past. A rule she sets herself is that she can consult only...

From the authorof Travels with My Angst andAny Guru Will Do, a vivid, nostalgic, and funny memoir of growing upin Hong Kong in the 1960s.Phil Brown's lifebegins in small town Australia - Maitland, NSW to be precise - but in 1963...

When she is four yearsold Amra Pajali realises that her mother is different. Fatima is loving butsometimes hears strange voices that tell her to do bizarre things. She isfrequently sent to hospital and Amra and her brother are passed around tofamily...

In the spirit of Patti Smith's M Train, Road Series is both love story and elegy. Renowned musician Hugo Race's evocations of Melbourne, Sydney, the USA, Europe and Mali, and the life of a rock musician on the road are revealing, incisive and exquisitely...

This is the story of two flawed eccentrics. Everything they do subverts their firm intention of keeping up appearances. They meet just after the war in liberated Paris but they cannot quite free themselves from the many strings attached to them the old...

'Nanna was an imposing woman. She was large and dark, with strong arms and silver hair that fell to her waist ... Her scars bore testament to her physical adventures...yet she remained the epitome of femininity and strength.' - Gail Hunt, youngest...

An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact. is poet and critic Bonny Cassidy's fourth book. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past -...

*Shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize*No Documentis an elegy for a friendship cut short prematurely by death. The memory of this friendship becomes a model for how we might relate to others in sympathy, solidarity and rebellion. At once intimate and...

A Novel Idea is a memoir in photoessay form that follows Fiona McGregor's life as shewrites her award-winning novel Indelible Ink. It is a tongue-in-cheekrumination on the monotony and loneliness of the novelist's daily life, and theact...

Shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fictionLonglisted for the 2019 Stella PrizeThe follow-up to Fiona Wright's essaycollection Small Acts of Disappearance winner of the Nita B. Kibble...

When Zo Norton Lodge was growing up in Annandale in the eighties and nineties, the self-proclaimed Heartland of the Inner West was a heady brew of somewhat maladjusted and genuinely unsettling residents. But Annandale was changing. New words like...

Warm and wry, mixing high culture and suburban realism, the laconic and the artful, Anything Can Happen is a memoir from one of Australia's literary trailblazers. Funny, heartbreaking, it has exactly the arc of a good story, with a theme about...

What's a life look like when the reader only gets to see the birthdays? The Birthday Scrolls is a memoir of Newcastle bohemian Geoff Nicholls' birthdays between the ages of 21 and 60. Pre-gentrification Newcastle, bands and parties mingle with visits to...

In 1975, as Gough Whitlam's government hurtled towards its demise, a nineteen-year-old arts student at the University of Melbourne, Kim Carr, began a long march.Raised in an avowedly blue-collar household headed by his boilermaker father, Carr eschewed...

My father, political activist Samuel Mark Goldbloom, was my hero and my nemesis all the days of his life.Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo grew up in thrall to her father, a prominent socialist and covert member of the Communist Party. From an early age, she...

A wave of life stories and autobiographical narratives by Aboriginal women began in the late 1970s and gained momentum a decade later with the publication of Sally Morgan's My Place (1987), which became a bestseller. While some of the books of the first...

An Australian writer and a Mexican scientist fall in love reading great Latin American books aloud. But it takes a decade of journeys across the region, together and apart, for them to learn to read each other.Requiem with Yellow Butterflies is a love...

During a 1952 electric storm off Wattamolla NSW a waterspout drew in the CSIRO Cloud Physics Dakota, atomising all those aboard, including the writer's father. Or did it? When his living body has disappeared, what to make of the uniformed man on the...

A baby cries; a mother exits, leaving her family behind; a child finally begins to talk; a father stops breathing.Rozanna Lilley is a social anthropologist, autism researcher, and Oscar's mum. Oscar is on the autism spectrum, which means he has a...

Written from the late years of an extraordinary life, Ann Moyal's biography is a spirited narrative of her career as an eminent historian of Australian science and technology, her three marriages, travelling the globe, the people she has encountered, and...

With deep roots in the Kimberley region, Olive Knight shares her story of growing up with the Gooniyandi and Walmatjarri peoples of north-western Australia. As the daughter of a half-caste father, she was nearly killed on the day of her birth, as was...

So I Hit Him is an extremely powerful memoir that will shock many people, yet is intensely inspirational. Born in a former workhouse hospital in Manchester, England with multiple disabilities and not expected to survive, Michael was placed in care almost...

“The lowdown on what it’s like to be raised by a legend. Frequently funny and consistently intimate. . . . A great read.”  —BookPage“Those searching for a moving Father’s Day gift need look no further.” —Publishers WeeklyMen like John Wayne and John...

Jessamyn Stanley’s first book, Every Body Yoga, with 59,000 copies in print, taught us how to do yoga. Now, in Yoke, she tells us why. Writing about what she calls the yoga of the everyday – which is not just about poses but about applying the hard...

Stan Grant is talking to his country in a new way. In his most poetic and inspiring work yet, he offers a means of moving beyond the binaries and embracing a path to peace and forgiveness, rooted in the Wiradjuri spiritual practice of Yindyamarra – deep...

Gina Chick, the inaugural winner of Alone Australia, tells the story of her extraordinary, indomitable life in one of the most powerful, moving memoirs you will ever read.From day one of her wildly unconventional childhood, Gina Chick blazed her own...

An “intimate, intensely resonant memoir about workaholism, unresolved trauma, and the ‘addictive nature of ambition’” (Harper’s Bazaar), this is an anti-girlboss tale for our times for readers of Drinking: A Love Story and Uncanny Valley.After years of...

For readers of Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, and Melissa Febos’s Girlhood, a powerful and deeply personal memoir in essays that sheds light on the silent epidemic of head trauma.Annie Liontas...

What would you do if your husband suddenly left you with two kids to support? Go back to school? Go into real estate?Or start a new career as a pimp?Upon discovering that sex work is decriminalised in New Zealand, Antonia Murphy decides to build her own...