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Psychobabble
Non-fictionUnfortunately for my mother, I became determined to be heard, and became both a psychologist…and a writer. Much of my life has been spent in search of frameworks to help me understand the trauma that was transacted in my upbringing, and the cataclysmic emotional and relational changes wrought. Moving between the psychological illiteracy of the world I was raised in and the fluency of our current era feels like time travel. When I first started exploring my own history in my early twenties, social media was still nascent, and I did not have easy access to the therapy language shared by influencers. I could not label my mother a ‘gaslighter’ or a ‘manipulator’, I did not know how to tell if she was a ‘narcissist’ or ‘borderline’, nor did I have the language to decide to go ‘no contact’ with her or to ‘grey rock’ her. I could read books – usually written by professionals – and I also started therapy with a trained clinical psychologist.This emphasis on understanding and naming intrapersonal and interpersonal experiences is a stark remove from my upbringing in late 1990s India. Mental health was an altogether unknown concept, emotion was spoken about only as something unpleasant to control, and my mother’s favourite child-rearing adages were ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ and ‘children should be seen and not heard’.Psychology was an almost unknown profession and was used more as a threatened punishment…rather than as any form of treatment or solace.
Getting attached
IntroductionI’ll never forget the thrill of reading Philip Larkin’s 1971 poem ‘This Be the Verse’ for the first time. I must have been about twelve – the ideal age to encounter Larkin’s deliciously forthright (and famous) opening line. You know the one: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ A timeless sentiment, to be sure, and extremely on brand for Larkin, who cultivated a curmudgeonly public persona. And yet ‘This Be the Verse’ wears its pessimism lightly; the passing on of intergenerational failings isn’t intentional, Larkin reminds us, but inevitable…
It takes two
In ConversationMost actors and painters and writers have got this strange combination where the public looks at them and thinks, Oh, I see that person on film all the time; they must be doing so well, and then if you get to know them you know that the last time they worked was four years ago. That’s a writer’s life.
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Attachment Styles
The attachments we form shape our experience of the world and our understanding of who we are. ‘Hell is other people,’ wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, his point being less about misanthropy and more about how entwined our self-perception is with the ways in which others perceive us. And alongside our personal relationships – from filial to friendship, from collegiate to romantic – sit the complex emotional connections we form with places, ideas and objects. How do we navigate these varying attachments, and what can they offer us when our lives are so mediated by technology? Can we break free of the tropes and traps associated with our most primal relationships: the social expectations of motherhood, the burdens of filial duty, the complexities of infidelity?
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Eat your words
Whet your appetite for great writing with this enticing buffet of food-themed fiction, memoir, reportage, conversations and more.
Consuming content
‘Do food bloggers realize how awful their recipe pages are?’ a Reddit user innocently enquires in a thread I stumble across while googling food blogs bad. ‘Do they take reader satisfaction into account?’ According to more than 600 replies, the answer is largely no.
Lunch bars
From cream buns and vanilla slices to cheese-filled sausages and salad sandwiches, working-class culinary culture would not be the same without the lunch bar. Typically tucked away in a corner of the city’s suburban, industrial and commercial districts, lunch bars have sustained the work force with an array of no-frills fast food since the 1950s.
The fight for the white stuff
Although non-dairy milks are hardly unique to the US, there seemed something distinctly ‘American’ about the consumerist techno-utopianism of engineered nutrition. In its seductive promises and dazzling abundance, in its massification and drive for profit, and its bold-yet-arrogant ambition, the world of plant milks became a metonym for everything I loved and loathed about US culture. Give me a carton of Blue Diamond Almond Breeze and you have given me America.
Confected outrage
Many of us can name our favourite childhood lollies. But what if a lolly’s name, or the name of another popular food item, is out of date? What if it’s racist, harmful or wrong? What happens when the name of a lolly doesn’t work anymore?
A serving of home
I think we should be proud of where we come from and be proud of what this country can offer us. We’re unique in our food culture here – we should be embracing it, and we should ask for native produce.
Big Blueberry
Today blueberries are grown across the globe. In Australia, blueberry production tripled in the five years to 2021, and the fruit is grown almost year-round – a perpetual river of fructose and antioxidants shipped across the country…
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The return of the femcel
Where male incels blame feminism for their inability to get laid, femcels identify misogyny, power imbalances and unrealistic beauty standards as the cause of their struggles. Unlike previous waves of political lesbianism, the #femcelrights movement to opt out of sexual relations with men is more of a signal than a concrete commitment.
Real men eat meat
Men eat meat. And if a man does not, his masculinity will be in question; emasculation shall be his malnourishment. Many of us today mock the ‘real men eat meat’ refrain. Yet society still insists that meat consumption is a marker of manliness – and the redder the meat, the manlier the man.
No place like home
There are more than 4.4 million disabled people in Australia. We constitute 18 per cent of the population, and over 90 per cent of us live in private dwellings. Yet only 5 per cent of private houses built here meet national accessibility standards.
Being David Cohen
Recently, I typed ‘David Cohen’ into Google Books, just for the modest thrill of seeing my name appear. The thrill quickly gave way to dismay when I saw how many other writers there are named David Cohen: dozens of the bastards.
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