Author: yourseconddraft

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JENNETTE MCCURDY I’m Glad My Mom Died.

My latest review, I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Hollywood child star, Jennette McCurdy, is up now at Newtown Review of Books. This one took hold of me in strange ways. Memoir is not my favourite genre and I'd never heard of McCurdy but she writes powerfully and in the voice of the small child, betrayed by the one she loves and trusts the most. It is compelling from the start, where the title lets us know she frees herself, to the end, where we find out how and when and what came next. And laugh-out-loud funny too. Hats off.

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LAURIE WOOLEVER Care and Feeding: A memoir

Laurie Woolever’s memoir opens with an introduction noting that none of us has very much control over anything in life, despite our delusions and hubris. Her peace with this is hard-earned. ‘This is my story of being a (relatively) high-functioning addict in a world of irresistible temptations …’ For many years, Woolever’s career was in …

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SALLY ROONEY Intermezzo

In her first novel, Conversations with Friends, a young woman, Frances, enters into an obsessive affair with an older man, a jaded, not overly successful actor. Published in 2017 when Rooney was in her mid-twenties, the protagonist’s naivety is understandable, though this older reader found her difficult to empathise with. In Intermezzo, her commentary on permissible forms of love has matured

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The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor

The characters in The Late Americans are in their mid-twenties – elite graduate students in the arts at a mid-western university town: Seamus the poet, dancers Noah and Fatima, Stafford the painter. This is a coming of age novel, a reckoning with adulthood which may have begun in adolescence but is still in progress. It is a fraught time.

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A cutting satire from 1972 was an unexpected find….hilarious and oh-so-relevant today

My review of Gail Parent's 1972 novel Sheila Levine is dead and living in New York and Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe, from 2024, first published by Newtown Review of Books Content warning: suicidal ideation GAIL PARENT Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York; SARAH ROSE ETTER Ripe. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart Content warning: suicidal ideation Over 50 years …

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BRADLEY TREVOR GREIVE and CAROLINE LANER BREURE Broken Girl

First published in the Newtown Review of Books Broken Girl, Caroline Laner Breure’s memoir written with Bradley Trevor Greive, opens with light, breezy snapshots of a young woman ready to burst forth into the world. She is cocky, impulsive. A high achiever, she has finished university in Porto Alegro, Brazil, ‘proud to be a maths nerd’, …

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The In-Between, Christos Tsiolkas

Reading Christos Tsiolkas is a bodily experience. Smells, tastes, touch inhabit the pages. When a character makes the sign of the Cross, there is a pull to mimic the quick touches of thumb, index and middle fingers to the forehead and abdomen, right and left shoulders. Tsiolkas’s characters celebrate their bodies – they are a source of delight, to their owners and to lovers. And he writes good sex.