Hi everyone,
I’m writing to you from my hotel room in Adelaide before I check out, and by the time this lands in your inbox I’ll be in Perth doing another event. It’s week three of this glorious book tour! I’ve been thrilled by all the different conversations I’m having at the events, and meeting you in the signing lines is a treat, and my publishers are happy with the figures. I got a strong enough response to my Instagram story poll about selling caps, with all profits going to Freadom Inside, that I’ll get that organised next week when I have two days off in a row lol.
In less glorious news: I realised when I got to the airport yesterday that I had left my reading glasses on my desk at home, and then when I checked into my hotel here I discovered I’d brought my laundry bag of last week’s dirty clothes instead of this week’s clean ones.
The clothes is funny, but the lack of glasses is a serious problem. I can touch type—which is how I’m writing this to you now, by looking out the window instead of at my laptop—but I can’t do the close reading and quote-pulling and hyperlinking that a regular edition of News & Reviews requires. If I spend more than ten or fifteen minutes at the screen here I start getting a tension headache and while I’m touring I just can’t risk tempting the migraine gods. I seem to squint less with my gigantic sunglasses on, so here I am looking like a dickhead in aviators indoors.
And this is such terrible timing! I have many hundreds of new subscribers (welcome!) who’ve found this newsletter during my tour. And it’s one of the biggest news weeks of the year for Australians. You can imagine how much it’s paining me that I can’t read Justice Lee’s Lehrmann judgment myself. It’s the most epic serve of a defamation judgment since Ben Roberts-Smith and it’s right here at my fingertips and I can’t read it. 😭😭 What to do? I thought I’d just write to you a bit, until a headache forms, and hit send. Let’s see how far we get.
For those of you new to News & Reviews, please know I normally share links and commentary on three items of good news, three items of bad news, one bad review, three good reviews, and then we do a giveaway. You’ll see next week.
What I would have covered this week, of course, would have been the colossal self-own Bruce Lehrmann could have avoided. There is important nuance in the judgment too, I’ve seen Annabel Crabb praising how bipartisan it is. The bad news of course are the two different stabbing incidents. But I am uneasy with a lot of the coverage, especially of the Bondi attack.
I was asked by a major news outlet to write about the Bondi stabbings and ‘how we make sense of this’ as a nation. (Lucky I said no, given this disastrous glasses situation.) But I am yet to find any official confirmation of this man’s motives or intentions. We have one part of the puzzle, which is that he was experiencing some kind of psychotic event, but as I’ve seen Elfy Scott write, that does not ‘explain’ it. We see his victims were mostly women, but we actually don’t know yet whether he was targeting women (in a consciously mysogynistic way) or avoiding men (who might be able to stop him). There was no ‘incel manifesto’ that I am aware of, for example. Obviously the result of this horrific incident is women feeling unsafe. I would never minimise that terribleness. But I said ‘no’ to the editor’s request because we simply do not yet have enough reliable information to actually ‘make sense of this’. Every year I become more wary of the speed of the news cycle and more afraid of contributing to the noise. There will be a proper inquiry. We will chew on those results together, when we can discuss things with more facts and fewer presumptions. I don’t like how the media found his parents at their home and hounded them. I don’t like how Channel 7 misidentified the man they said did the stabbing and shared conspiracy theorists’ Tweets. I don’t want to be a part of this panicked, knee-jerk churn of hot takes.
The silver lining I keep thinking about is that if this were America these attackers would have guns instead of knives and the deaths could easily have been in the dozens. This is no comfort to the people who have lost loved ones. It is a comfort to the rest of us who must go about our days as we did before. The truth in Australia, for women, is that you are still most at risk for violence (either sexual or physical) by someone you already know, and in a domestic setting. We are shocked by this incident because it is out of the ordinary; we must try not to let fear limit our lives.
What else?
A strong contender for the bad review slot was the USA women’s Olympics outfits just announced. It’s basically a g-string at the front. Many hilarious memes about labia have resulted. Athletes are rightly complaining that they’d have to worry about pubic hair coverage while competing. Nike fucked up!
In an attempt to chill out over the weekend I re-watched the three ‘Fantastic Beasts’ movies and was reminded of how brilliantly the trilogy started and how terribly it ended. Does anyone have anything fun they can reccommend for me for an escape-watch?
Thank you to the person in the signing line in Adelaide last night who gifted me this amazing gin:
I lost your name! But do you work at Fiction Distilling? If you’re a newsletter reader, please announce yourself in the comments with the recipe for the Lally-inspired cocktail! I swear to you I will find blueberry jam and make it when I get home.
Okay, starting to feel sick. See you next week (literally) when I promise we’ll be back to regular programming.
I agree Bri, it’s too soon to try to make sense of it. I also want to add that in my mind it doesn’t really matter what his motivations were if he was psychotic at the time. It doesn’t matter because if he was in psychosis then it’s completely nonsensical anyway.
My brother had schizophrenia (he died by suicide when he was 26) and when the Bondi attack happened and “mental health issues” were mentioned I just knew it would end up being paranoid schizophrenia that this person suffered from. When my brother died one of the may feelings I felt at that time was that I was so relieved that he didn’t kill anyone else. In the last year of his life (in particular) he became very violent. He attacked (but didn’t make contact, thank god) my Mum with a knife and multiple other violent incidents. I loved him so much but I was really afraid of him in the end. His obsessions were about the army and sexual assault and he 100% believed his thoughts/the so called “voices” in his head. He was so convincing that sometimes I believed him too and I would help him write letters to the army(!) etc. All of this to say that I also completely believe the family when they said that he would have been devastated about what he did if he was in his right mind and hadn’t “lost touch with reality”. And one of the “bollard men” commented on how his eyes looked like he “wasn’t there”. I know that look intimately. I am not excusing what he did in any way. Not at all. It is absolutely tragic and it really really upset me, I was paralysed with sadness and grief for all involved. Including his family when they said, heartbreakingly, that the officer did the right thing shooting him. I could so relate to them feeling this way. We have a huge mental health crisis in this country and this incident shows how easily those with really severe illness just don’t get the support they need. And nor do their families.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a N&R reader must be in want of a Lally cocky 🍸🫐 Oh thoughtful af gin gifter please show yourself!!!! Haha fangin for the recipe Bri! Serious Q: what would SOPHIE’s cocktail be?!