Selected Essays
The Girl in the Picture (Harper’s Magazine) On precocious puberty and its reflections
There’s No Story to Tell About Swimming (Literary Hub) Part of the series ‘When I’m Not Writing’
Marseille to Berlin in Twelve Hours (Astra Magazine) A travelogue, by train.
Unaccompanied Minor (Griffith Review, excerpted in the Guardian) On a childhood spent on planes between Sydney and Melbourne
The Year of Grinding Teeth (The Paris Review) On teeth grinding, displacement, and the manifestation of stress in the body.
The Long Goodbye: Reconciling with the End of Nature (Lithub) On a life in slow motion crisis.
Fall Risk (The Believer) A meditation on a period of weakness with no known cause.
The Slow Apocalypse of the Natural World (The Irish Times) On tackling the climate crisis through fiction.
On Patrick White, Australia’s Great Un-read Novelist (Lithub) Wondering if any of us can go home again.
Leave No Trace (The Believer 124. April/May 2019) Lost-Children Stories, a staple of Australia’s mythology, have been obsessively retold since the nineteenth century. But are they also a way the country avoids acknowledging its violent colonial past?
The Sunburnt Country (The Believer) Whiteness as disease in a skin cancer-ridden Australia.
Pattern and Forecast (The Believer) Reporting the weather in New York as it happened in the autumn of 2018.
Maybe Tell You About Phaedra: (The Believer) A Genealogy of the Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra song, 'Some Velvet Morning.'
Women Take Photographs of Themselves (The Believer) On Vivian Maier, Francesca Woodman and self-photography.
Sydney Takes Shape (Meanjin) On Christina Stead and her novel For Love Alone.
Slip: An Essay, of Sorts, About Women's Underwear (The Lifted Brow) On the history of women's underwear.
I Heart Bad Boys (Junkee) On teenage girls and mania.
Dreaming of Shirley Temple (The Hairpin) The death of Shirley Temple, grandmothers, and the resonances of memory.
Selected reviews
Something Produced Elsewhere: On a new biography of Shirley Hazzard (Astra Magazine, November 2022)
The X-Files: On Katherine Angel’s ‘Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again’ (Bookforum) March 2021
On The Diaries of Helen Garner (Lithub) July 2020 A review of The Yellow Notebook and the quagmire of the fictionalized self.
On Emily Witt's 'Future Sex' (Los Angeles Review of Books) December 2016
Not Numb Review of the Laura Poitras exhibit at The Whitney (The Believer) March 2016
Battle Hymn For The Avant Garde Review of Dodge Rose by Jack Cox (The Lifted Brow) February 2016
Life That Is This On Women's Coming-of-Age Novels and A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride (The Believer) November 2014
I Fall To Pieces Review of The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt (Los Angeles Review of Books) July 2014
Finally, Poetic Justice for Our Unrivalled Secret Streets: Review of An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman (The Sun Herald & The Sunday Age) February 2014
selected Interviews
An Interview with Lexi Freiman (The Believer) October 2018
Contending With A Blank Page: A conversation with Tim Winton (Griffith Review) January 2015
Interview with Ashleigh Young (Griffith Review) October 2013
Interview with John Kinsella (Griffith Review) June 2013
Interview with Melissa Lukashenko (Griffith Review) June 2013