BJ Silcox

on our most vulnerable because the stories that we read about trauma are often about our women, our children and our minority groups and if we keep performing that as a form of art, do we create a sense that we are again enacting the same systems

that cause that trauma to begin with.

There are really difficult ethical questions in here, and I want these books to exist so that we face up to them.

That's a really interesting connection, and one that I've been thinking about since I wrote the article.

A lot of people have kind of brought to my attention this idea that there's an incredible boom in amazing true crime writing.

I'm not sure of how I feel about that connection, but certainly there is also that sense that true crime offers us a way to engage with social trauma in a way that's really engaging and really entertaining.

But we need to ask ourselves questions about what we do with it, what we learn from it.

Just joy.

Oh, that's such a wonderful question to be asked.

Such a wonderful question.

This year, I moved to Cairo and I was homesick and I read my way through the Stella Prize shortlist as a way to connect myself

to Australian writing and to Australian stories.

And that list was just an extraordinary list of these amazing women writing my country.

And it just felt like I was reading my way home.

And there's a book on that list, Chrissy Neen, who I actually interviewed for the article that I've written.

But she wrote this book called Uncertain Grace, and it's confronting, and it's really ethically complicated, and it's erotic, and it's brave, and it's...

It brings me into that conversation and I have never been floored by a book like I've been floored by that book.

And so when I think about my reading year this year, that one just, it knocked me out of the park.