A literary editor's 2016 reading from Steven Amsterdam to Tim Winton

By Susan Wyndham
Updated December 21 2016 - 11:18am, first published December 9 2016 - 8:00pm
Artist and author Kim Mahood's second memoir follows her journeys back to the desert of Western Australia. Photo: Andrew Meares
Artist and author Kim Mahood's second memoir follows her journeys back to the desert of Western Australia. Photo: Andrew Meares
Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett
Steven Amsterdam tackles a tough issue in his novel The Easy Way Out.
Steven Amsterdam tackles a tough issue in his novel The Easy Way Out.

As always, the books I still want to read from this year far outnumber those I have read. But I can still recommend a few that I loved in different ways. As I look at my choices – largely determined by work-related reading – I notice how many are memoirs, and how dark much of the subject matter is. But all are lit with intelligence and wit, and look to a wider world than the self. In non-fiction: Kim Mahood's long-awaited second memoir, Position Doubtful, about her journeys back to the WA desert and the art she created with Aboriginal communities. Helen Garner's essay collection Everywhere I Look: as James Wood says in The New Yorker this week, "Garner is a natural storyteller: her unillusioned eye makes her clarity compulsive". And, a kind of male counterpart, Tim Winton's personal essays in The Boy Behind the Curtain, are just as self-scrutinising in a less fierce way. Feminist Susan Faludi's riveting family memoir, In the Darkroom, follows her elderly father's gender change against the political changes in Hungary. Vivian Gornick's memoir The Odd Woman and the City, is a concise account of a long life in New York. Susan Duncan's memoir The House on the Hill, distracts readers with stories of the good life while really talking about ageing, loss and trauma. And All Is Given: A Memoir in Songs by Linda Neil, a book of stories about travel, music, flirtation and an adventurous soul.

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