Ann-Marie Condé’s collection of essays combines persistence and curiosity with her consummate skill as a storyteller.
Reading Anne-Marie Condé’s collection of essays is like picking one’s way through a fabulously quirky flea market. At every turn there is treasure (The prime minister’s potato and other essays; Upswell Publishing, 2025; cover design Chil3. Fremantle; cover image Edward Condé).
The author is an historian who has worked in museums and archives with collections that include, but are not restricted to, military history, and her methodology comes to some extent from the professional practice of finding small, incomplete pieces of information and piecing together a story from them.
Historical research is a form of detective work with much tedious trawling through paperwork yielding nothing, and then lighting upon a gem that allows connections to be made and solutions to be posited and sometimes proved.
We can see this orderly persistence coupled with a magpie’s curiosity in Anne-Marie’s essay topics, along with her consummate skill as a storyteller. In ‘Memories $2 each’, she recounts how she buys a randomly chosen bundle of postcards from a secondhand store in Oatlands Tasmania. Later she finds several clues to stories and investigates whatever she can find about the postcard people to piece together a coherent account.
She does this, she says, ‘to try to restore lost connections, to weave scraps and fragments together into a narrative, to restore meaning’.
Similarly, in ‘Arthur Stace’s Single Mighty Word’, she delves into the life of the man known only to most by his elegant chalking of the word ‘Eternity’ in Sydney streets.
The 17 essays, sparked by the author’s encyclopaedic curiosity and interest in her fellow human beings, cover fascinatingly varied ground, but all contrive to illuminate the lives of people who may not have been deemed of interest in the annals of history found in museums and great public libraries.
Anne-Marie writes in an easy, graceful style. The style is intimate, the author perspicacious and sensitive in her observations and affecting in her musings. Thus, while we are treated to a collection of histories of people and place, we are also given some entree into the author herself and her enormous capacity to find meaning in everything. And this gives us all hope.
The Lies we Tell Ourselves, by Maura Pierlot deals with the choice between conformity and morality.
In Maura Pierlot’s The Lies we Tell Ourselves (Big Ideas Press, 2025; cover and internal design Nicola Matthews, Nikki Jane Design), one need but follow the quotations of the philosophers which begin each chapter – from Heraclitus to Lao Tzui, the aphorisms chart the progress of her heroine, angst-ridden, body dysmorphic Harley.
This is a YA novel, but is apt for us all, dealing with concepts of perception. The author skilfully leads us through a year of Harley’s life in which she wrestles with self-doubt and her consciousness of the failure of her moral compass to override peer and self-pressure.
Harley desperately wants a boyfriend, a more beautiful, slimmer body and the admiration, of her peers. Her long-standing relationship with her best friend Griff is sacrificed to these goals as she moves through her fracturing world.
In Griff, we see the flipside to all the sheep-like conformists, intent on being accepted by being the same as everyone else – he is someone who is always himself, no matter the cost.
Harley’s erstwhile best female friend, Talia, is playing the popularity game, cosying up to the bitchy alpha females at school and pretending to Harley that she is merely ‘playing’ them. The popular girls seem to have everything Harley wants.
Enter the dreamboat figure of desire, American blow-in Carter whom she is determined to impress. But of course, the path of illusion never runs smoothly. Her life disintegrates on all fronts and she finds herself in crisis in every aspect.
Both youthful and older readers will identify with Harley’s struggles.
Without didacticism, Maura touches on body dysmorphia, eating disorders, suicide, sex, delusion, substance abuse, perception, dishonesty, depression and the seemingly irresistible force of conformity.
This is a thought-provoking work which reminds us that we hold the power to decide for ourselves when confronted with the choice to toe the line or stand up for our preferred morality. It also reminds us of the power of forgiveness, that much needed human characteristic, which allows us to make mistakes but to recover from them.
Barbie Robinson is co-founder and a content creator for Living Arts Canberra, a not for profit media outfit supporting arts and community in the Canberra region and books worldwide through its website, podcast interviews and a 24/7 internet radio station.
