Tell Me Again - Dr. Amy Thunig
Dr. Amy Thunig’s debut memoir Tell Me Again is a work that is shattering and healing all at once.
Amy is a Gomeroi academic and author. In Tell Me Again, she writes a collection of stories from her life as a child, teenager and young adult. The work is made up of these fragments; the stories do not necessarily need to be read in order, although I found the memoir to be poignant when read sequentially.
I was fortunate enough to attend Amy’s book launch event on Gadigal Country. Attending this event informed my reading of the memoir in a very meaningful way. At the event, Amy discussed how people often assume her success is in spite of her family and that she must not have any contact with her family members. In fact, Amy made it clear that her success is because of her family. The author also shared how she gave her family members veto powers over any and all content in the memoir. It was made abundantly clear that there is deep love and respect between Amy and her kin. This in-conversation event became a framework which allowed me to more deeply understand and appreciate the anecdotes shared in Tell Me Again.
Tell Me Again is one of the most vulnerable and deeply personal works I have read to date. In the work, Amy shares moments of her family life - some beautiful, some harrowing - as well as stories from school and university. The stories in Tell Me Again cover many complex themes and ideas. Amy captures the ways in which our institutions and systems all too often fail our First Nations peoples and other vulnerable groups. She explores how instead of criminalisation and incarceration, those who suffer from issues such as intergenerational trauma or substance addiction need support. Often all they are met with is vilification, judgement and roadblocks.
One story in Tell Me Again that viscerally highlights this failure of our institutions is when a teenage Amy discloses to a teacher that she is living alone after her family have left her. She is promptly marched to the principal’s office, where child protection services are phoned. The services simply say “no-one wants a teenager” and hang up. That’s it. No follow up support for Amy is offered from any government department, or from anyone at the school. Not even the most practical and simple of gestures, like ensuring a teenage girl has food.
Amy herself has said that the memoir has a ‘content warning for everything’, as many of her stories do grapple with sensitive or potentially triggering topics for readers. As we always advise, go gently when reading, seek support when you need to (or even before you need to). Having said that, this was the first book in our book club’s history that I genuinely could not put down – I read Tell Me Again in one sitting in a few hours on a Saturday morning, deeply engrossed and deeply moved.
Put Tell Me Again on your reading list for the summer. It’s a unique, beautiful, gut-wrenching but ultimately healing memoir by an author that we could all learn something from.
Featured image via Future Women.
