Description

Featured in Stylist’s ‘Can’t Miss’ Books of 2023

Sometimes I think that carrying – other people, the continuity of history, generational identity, the emotional load of the everyday – is the main thing that women do.

In Marina Benjamin’s new set of interlinked essays, she turns her astute eye to the tasks once termed ‘women’s work’. From cooking and cleaning to caring for an ageing relative, A Little Give depicts domestic life anew: as a site of paradox and conflict, but also of solace and profound meaning. Here, productivity sits alongside self-erasure, resentment with tenderness, and the animal self is never far away, perpetually threatening to break through.

Drawing on the work of figures such as Natalia Ginzburg, Paula Rego, and Virginia Woolf, Benjamin writes with fierce candour of the struggle to overwrite the gender conditioning that pulls her back into ‘the mud-world of pre-feminism’ even as she attempts to haul herself out. From her upbringing as the child of immigrants with fixed traditional values, to looking after her mother and seeing her teenager move out of home, she examines her relationships with family, community, her body, even language itself. Ultimately, she shows that a woman’s true work may lie at the heart of her humanity, in the pursuit both of transformation and of deep acceptance.

Publisher Review

'Marina Benjamin can take the everyday ... and transform it into deeply affecting prose.' -- Francesca Brown * Stylist * 'Acerbic and tender all at once, A Little Give voices the unspeakable tangle of feelings that assail women in middle age. I can think of few writers so astute and exact as Marina Benjamin.' -- Katherine May, author of Wintering 'With its unfailing attentiveness to the sensory and emotional textures of everyday life, Marina Benjamin's beautiful writing feels like a model of good care. A wry, absorbing, and very moving book.' -- Josh Cohen, author of How to Live. What to do. 'A small book with a big heart, A Little Give re-humanises those household chores that fall to women - cleaning, cooking, picking up after others, caring for elders, the constant emotional labour involved - and lights up the meaning of dailiness.' -- Beth Macy, author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus 'Bold and tender, fierce and true - I loved it.' -- Rachel Seiffert, author of A Boy In Winter 'A wonderful, insightful, absorbing account of the work women do and the roles they inhabit (or which inhabit them). How do the competing claims of care for others and personal freedom shape us? Benjamin is brilliant at evoking the everyday and the unspoken, those most intimate moments that are often left out of the public idea of a life - the time spent cleaning a floor, grooming a dog, lingering in the empty bedroom of a child who has departed for college. No one writes more movingly, or with more intellectual breadth and incisiveness, about the lived experiences of women.' -- Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens 'A Little Give is one of those books that reorients our sense of how society is ordered. Its interlinked pieces take another look at those human tasks traditionally designated as "women's work" and recasts them as profound and essential acts of labour and love.' -- Geordie Williamson * The Australian * 'Brave and curious, an examination of what it means to live and care.' -- Emilie Pine, author of Notes to Self 'We all know the existential funk that housework can incite, women more so than men as they have traditionally carried the load. Not to mention the mixed emotions that go with caring for others. Marina Benjamin ruminates on the historical and societal pressures, constraints and value of this work through the lens of her own Iraqi-Jewish family - her dynamic, frustrated mother who drummed into her that "women were put on this planet to please" and her creative father who didn't question that being looked after was his due. No simple solutions are offered. Instead, she rewardingly riffs on the visceral push and pull of this work.' -- Cameron Woodhead * The Sydney Morning Herald * '[An] exquisite book ... Benjamin's essays investigate the social and philosophical dimensions of housework, tracing the fine filaments that bind women to a system of gender inequality ... It zigzags between memory, discovery and reflection, taking the reader to the heart of the essay form. It is a journeying style of writing that constantly drives at its ideas without needing to be sure of their endpoints; it expects a question, not an answer.' -- Camilla Nelson * The Conversation * 'Energetic and thought-provoking.' -- Vicki Renner * ArtsHub * Praise for Insomnia: 'A darkly thrilling beauty of a book ... Benjamin's talent is Arachne-like. The materials she integrates are eclectic, and the resulting constructed web of her thoughts is architecturally robust and resplendent with dazzling prose.' -- Tali Lavi * Australian Book Review * Praise for Insomnia: 'A short, ludic book about long white nights ... [Benjamin] writes feelingly about the frustrations of being awake when you don't want to be ... Her moans about her futile thought-loops alternate with flattering descriptions of her radiant nocturnal consciousness.' -- Zoe Heller * The New Yorker * Praise for The Middlepause: 'Lucid and sophisticated ... A restrained but wonderful guide to the convulsive changes of 50 and over ... This is a book that yields valuable insights on almost every page.' -- Melissa Benn * The Guardian *