THE STIRRINGS
by Catherine Taylor (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, $44.99 hb)
"The prologue is set in a cemetery: a bunch of teenage girls are scaring themselves sick being out when they know the Yorkshire Ripper could strike at any moment.
Catherine Taylor’s book is less amemoir than it is a literary study of a kind of splitting. Throughout her account of a life growing up as a girl –in New Zealand and the UK –at a time when to be one seemed particularly fraught with heterosexually charged dangers and lusts, she slices into her narrative and changes it, shifts it from being
