Detailed depictions of Kneen’s sexual experiences are natural ingredients for this memoir: sex is as vital to Kneen as is breathing. Its purchase on her life, however, is sometimes a source of semantic confusion. ‘I’m not a sex addict,’ she says to Katherine, a friend who is trying to pin down the relevant terminology for Kneen’s outlook. But it’s not really the nouns that are important; it’s the verbs. Terms aside, Kneen is constantly sexually wishing and aware. While talking to Katherine in a café, she thinks ‘about how deeply she could reach inside me with those elegant hands’, and registers ‘the feminine beauty’ of a young Asian man who walks past.

Sexuality is something some of us have in more abundance than others, and Kneen’s descriptions of the strange interface between her sexual, ‘ugly’, desiring self and the rest of the world make for confronting reading. As natural as her sexual activities and thoughts are for Kneen, they are not always readily understood by others. Conversations with fellow drama students about sex come to a halt when she discloses how much she enjoys anal sex. And as eagerly as she approaches sexual encounters, she comes to realise that she has never said no, even to partners who take advantage of her body’s willingness in order to please themselves and to humiliate her. But there is a powerfully structured redemptive arc to this story, which sees Kneen finally embrace a new name and new wisdom with which to greet emotional curveballs like these.

I wouldn’t ever attempt to suggest that memoir be or do anything in particular. But in the case of Affection, what is proffered is both beautiful and pedagogical: it organises the author’s own prospect of her self into an illuminating narrative. To make sense of what one has learnt is a responsibility both lovely and grave, and Krissy Kneen has discharged her burden with brave honesty.

My father had a rubbery mouth — from all that fat laughter of his, I guess. My lips were thinner, like my mum’s, sharpened from making judgments. I traced my eyes but they just felt like my eyes. I found my ears. I have large ears and I will never lose them. They are listening ears. According to my mum, my dad had only ever used his to listen to his own booming laughter.

I’m almost embarrassed to write about this book because I finished it way back at the beginning of the year. So much for wanting to remember the things I read. I took it with me to the beach over summer — funny holiday reading perhaps, but it’s a satisfying, pithy and comprehensive book, a great example of Text Publishing’s quick-response, issue-based publishing (see also Henson Case, The).

There are seven chapters, each by a different author addressing a fraught facet of the war in Iraq. Gaita has arranged them in a simple, intuitive order, beginning with Robert Manne’s breakdown of relevant events, progressing through Hilary Charlesworth’s mindful assessment of the legality of the war, and ending rather chillingly with Mark McKenna’s chapter called ‘Howard’s Soldiers’. Though the viewpoints range in the angle taken, the overall tone rather leans towards emphatic, which is not surprising given the take-no-prisoners title.

Why the War was Wrong served an important purpose for me in that it brought together arguments on a state of current affairs in an accessible and coherent way. Much broader and deeper in coverage as a whole than newspapers and even the essays singly, it was a much-needed platform from which to ascertain the nature of my own unease about Iraq.

Yes, it’s about hunger. It is about the nameless protagonist’s addiction to a state so all-encompassing that it allows and eventually requires the sufferer to forego usual/rational thought and deed, but is so unsustainable that desperate measures are necessary to maintain his existence. It is also about denial, physical and psychological. Knut Hamsun’s direct, modernist style stuffs the reader into the narrow crevice between the narrator’s brain and his skull, evoking painful awareness. His compulsion towards the state of hunger is a way to escape from the ideas which are too large for his head: short, frequent, violent bursts of inspiration are frittered away by the mind now too skittish from lack of nourishment to contrive an activity for the next half an hour, let alone put together a piece denouncing the despised Immanuel Kant, or a one-act drama set in the Middle Ages. These attempts at greatness (and money-making) are made, but endangered by his weakness, his faintness, and an absence of funds sustained by continuous freudian acts.

Hunger, or escape, is the only resolution, the only goal. Hamsun challenges the mind with the hunger artist’s (a Paul Auster term) peripatetic days, featuring street names so unfamiliar to this reader that they might as well have been imaginary. His vagrant meanderings take as signposts multiple mesmerising short-term plans, more often than not the recollection of an acquaintance, or an office, where he might go and beg money or earn a living. Forays to his editor’s officer, or Kierulf the baker, or a shop assistant who owes him change, have various outcomes which are invariably negative. He is downtrodden, but the downward steps are his own. The novel ends with what seems a peripeteia, but is really a continuation; it is a radical way of sustaining the pain, the escape to facilitate further escapes, a solution which is not a resolution.

This edition includes a pedantic translator’s appendix and note, which is reassuring and (by reason of its distaste of the two earlier translations) amusing. It also includes an introduction by way of an essay by Paul Auster, which is passionate and involving.