Childhood

by Shannon Burns

Things may have been good for a while, but it didn’t last: they argued fiercely and he left. Weeks later, she tracked him down and said she was pregnant. So he moved back in with her and they prepared themselves for parenthood.

Eleven months later I was born. By the time my father discovered the deception, it was too late.

There is something chastening about this mode of conception, about knowing that, by most standards, your beginning was aberrant.

In this arresting memoir, Shannon Burns recalls a childhood spent bouncing between dysfunctional homes in impoverished suburbs, between families unwilling or unable to care for him. Aged nine, he beats his head against the pillow to get himself to sleep. Aged ten, he knows his mother will never be able to look after him: he is alone, and can trust no-one.

Five years later, he is working in a recycling centre—hard labour, poorly paid—yet reading offers hope. He begins reciting lines from Dante, Keats, Whitman, speeches by Martin Luther King, while sifting through the filthy cans and bottles. An affair with the mother of a schoolfriend eventually offers a way out, a path to a life utterly unlike the one he was born into.

With its clarity of purpose and vividness of expression, Childhood is a powerful act of remembering that is destined to be a classic.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Australia, Biography Memoir

272 pages, Paperback

Published October 5, 2022

Reviews

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wish that I could have enjoyed this more. It was highly praised and started well but something happened along the way. The interchangeable first and third person narrative, the sense that this was as much a writing exercise as a memoir and the slightly pompous academic debate that dogged the final third third of the book.

To travel from an absorbing and honest account of a traumatic early life to reasons why the Western literary canon has lost its relevance is admirable but not between the same covers. Finally I was tired of this man - his self-justification, his posturing, his intellectual swagger, his life.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much of this account of Burns’s childhood reads as a punch to the guts. It’s one thing to grow up poor but to have been so neglected and abused is heartbreaking. The power of the book is the armour and courage Burns must brandish just to survive. He switches from first person to third and then back to first which allows the reader intimacy and immediacy at the beginning and end of the book but some distance during the hardest parts of the memoir. Also it’s quite possibly a self-preservation technique for the writer himself. I imagine some readers will be frustrated by the mostly absent account of how he went from this childhood to the decidely educated middle class life he now leads but I think the answer to that lies in the inner life he cultivates through reading and sheer good fortune.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Childhood by Shannon Burns is a confronting, honest, moving and powerful memoir. To say I enjoyed this book would be wrong, but once I’d fished reading it I needed, to sit with my thoughts for a while.

I find memoirs are always an interesting read and you always learn something, but on the other hand, because some of them are about abusive childhoods such as this book they are at times difficult reads, so for that reason I feel they are not for everyone.

[Text Publishing]

The following book reviews have been shared by Text Publishing – publisher of Childhood

‘Childhood is about more than reliving trauma—it shows us how literature can offer a pathway to survival, if not redemption. Shannon Burns demonstrates how to soldier on when all hope and dignity are lost.’
Tyson Yunkaporta

‘Childhood is raw and authentic. It tells a truth that can only come from being lived.’
Justin Kurzel, director of Nitram and Snowtown

‘Childhood is honest, confronting and lovely. We don’t hear enough from the hearts of poor children, and rarely like this. Shannon’s demonstration of the power of words is inspiring. And it reminds us all that we should never underestimate a boy with a fire inside.’
Paul Kennedy

‘Childhood reads like Gorky and Tolstoy—not nudging but shoving the reader headfirst towards hard-won epiphanies with a brutal yet transcendent urgency.’
Alice Pung

‘Moving and inspiring…What makes this book truly exceptional is the power and perceptiveness of the writing. It’s a marvellous work.’
Mark Rubbo, Readings

‘[E]xquisitely written…I haven’t read a memoir with such a savage, tender, idiosyncratic narratorial voice – one that at once embodies and eviscerates toxic masculinity – since [Craig Sherborne’s] Hoi Polloi and Muck…Fathoms-deep hurt and anger seethe beneath the surface of meticulously controlled, forensically observed prose.’
InDaily

‘That the boy depicted in Shannon Burns’s nightmarish memoir survived to write it at the age of forty reflects no credit on society or on those around him. His persistence seems remarkable, given the world he entered…Never is the [book’s] tone self-pitying or sentimental…The narrative is admirably cool…It would be impertinent to analyse or patronise the boy so compellingly memorialised in this uncompromising book. Any vindication or overcoming was all his own work.’
Peter Rose, Australian Book Review

‘Childhood recounts domestic horrors in a matter-of-fact voice devoid of self-pity, yet it is not without feeling. It offers a compelling view of Burns’ turbulent formative years.’
Brigid Magner, Conversation

‘Haunting…Burns’ powerful voice pierces swiftly beyond a mere recollection of domestic hardships into a confronting truth…The work shines because of its tone, which always avoids the sentiment of commiseration…A testament to being and becoming, in all its desires and cruelties.’
Brandon K. Liew, Guardian Australia

‘Eloquent and visceral.’
ArtsHub

‘This book is really something…Propulsive, beautiful, wise, frightening. I loved it.’
Andrew Pippos

‘I won’t give the ending away but I will say this: he can write.’
Caroline Overington, Australian

‘I was humbled by the understated dignity of this painful story and inspired by the surprising direction it takes. Shannon Burns…shares a journey of liberation worthy of the most heartfelt admiration…Burns is a clean and honest storyteller…He has taught himself a bright, crisp and fearless way of communicating…Readers of Childhood watch something take place that seems both extraordinary and wonderful…Burns knows that life is fragile. Yet he has built this book with indestructible resolve.’
Michael McGirr, Age

‘Closer to home, Shannon Burns’s unflinching memoir of an abusive upbringing – Childhood – elevates an often lazy and indulgent genre.’
Peter Rose, Australian Book Review

‘Shannon Burns’s memoir Childhood is a surgical account of youthful trauma and literary redemption that will, I suspect, go on to be regarded as a classic. Burns writes class like no one else.’
Yves Rees, Australian Book Review

‘My year’s stand-out is Shannon Burns’ shattering Childhood, a work of unsparing self-depiction, coolly detached and brilliantly analytical: a nightmare recounted by a calm and sophisticated intelligence.’
Helen Garner

‘[Burns] brings a powerful, textural quality to his relationships and experiences…A terrific book.’
Robbie Arnott

‘The narrative is sculpted so skilfully that it is never less than propulsive…[Burns] writes about his past with remarkable, clear-eyed objectivity, and yet he always honours his child-self’s innocent, subjectivity, and purity of feeling.’
Adele Dumont, Mascara Review

‘Beautifully crafted, utterly compelling.’
Alison Flett, InDaily

‘Possibly the best Australian book of last year…I can’t recommend it enough. I loved it.’
Read This Podcast

[Lia Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up because I’m in Adelaide for the weekend and wanted to read something by a local. I’m very pleased with my pick. I don’t think I’ve read a book about being poor in Australia which was as raw and full of internal emotions in this way. Truly reignited my love of memoirs

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this memoir felt like smoking my first cigarette - sucked the air out of lungs and reminded me we’re all human.

Shannon recounts being in his youth chasing freedom and finding out it doesn’t exist. Feeling like the world is collapsing around him he sounds himself with literature. Instead of torturing himself with his childhood trauma he can recount it with such a fondness despite the horrific abuse he remembers.

There’s a warm familiarity when I was reading this - not in a cozy by the fireplace way, in a way I thought I’d only experience when I was burning in hell - relating in ways and in moments I’d always felt alone.

You watch as he goes from being so close and loving towards his mother - disregarding all of the trauma that she creates in his life - to being an adult and having this revelation that he cannot forgive her. Realising that no matter how much he needed her as a child, covered for her and craved her motherly love and affection - she never returned or felt the same for him. His father tests his moral compass and he feels immeasurable guilt for needing to rely on him. He realises that his silence places a role in his fathers freedom.

Its brutal, translucent and authentic. He writes about his experiences with such honestly and reflection, I cannot imagine having this level of insight into my own past. A required reading for those with a broken childhood.

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad book but i've probably read too many traumatic childhood memoirs lately and i'm burned out as far as that subject goes.
Well written and it was interesting to see Adelaide places i know written about.

[Peter Dann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This brave and lucid memoir by Shannon Burns is bracing and unexpectedly confronting. Not the least of its many merits, for me, is how seriously it has challenged some of my own rather comfortable assumptions.

There is a striking passage early in this book where Burns describes how, as a university teacher of nearly a decade's standing, "(i)t was easy, and often fun, to shock students or a new colleague: all I had to do was reveal a few tidbits about my early life. That was enough for them to ask the inevitable question: How did you go from that to this? Unsettlingly, fellow academics who thought of themselves as outsiders in the same environment (because they had attended a public school or were the first in their family to attend university) were often dismayed to learn that I had a rougher beginning than them. Their sense of who and what I was did not align with their experience of what it meant to come from somewhere else, to be comparatively ‘disadvantaged’. I was too comfortable. I never complained."

"Exactly," I thought as I read this passage. I’m not an academic, but if I had ever been one of Burns’ colleagues, I’m pretty sure I would have been guilty of exactly this reaction myself on learning something of the treatment Burns experienced at the hands of his natural mother and father, and then of various other partners of family members, extended family members and complete strangers who would be roped in to "care" for him through his often chaotic and disrupted childhood and teen years. Certainly there was nothing at all about the Shannon Burns I encountered primarily through his rich and fascinating Twitter feed during 2020 and 2021 that in any way conformed to my (obviously highly limited) ideas about how a person who has experienced a very disadvantaged childhood might be expected to deport themselves.

At every turning in this memoir, Burns rigorously eschews sentimentality.

"Even as a boy," Burns writes in his Epilogue, "I was in the habit of converting life into narrative. For the most part I constructed stories that would create sympathy for the child I was and condemn his parents. Each abuse was stored in my memory for safekeeping. I was perfectly aware that the more suffering I accrued, the better my story would be. Readers would sympathise with me all the more. But while I still have that same storage facility, it holds nothing I desire to use. Fierce beatings, constant hunger, meaningless cruelty, cynical manipulation: none of this is of value. The problem, as it so often is, was that I was writing the wrong story and accumulating the wrong information. It was my first failed novel, which, fortunately, never made it as far as the page: despite all odds, the young man liberates himself from his circumstances, then documents that liberation to the great, echoing applause of the sympathetic masses—when the book becomes a film."

In fact, writes Burns, "I’m far from deserving the sympathy these facts (ie, the facts about his early life that he has recounted) demand. In truth, I’ve been as merciless as stone." He goes on to characterise his early life as being like the mock-execution that Dostoevsky endured after allegedly taking part in anti-government activities. His reaction, he writes, was that "(i)nstead of reaching the grand heights of tragedy, (my life) became a joke. I found reprieve in the black humour of the world, my first escape route."

Towards the end of his memoir, Burns recounts how, having been estranged from his mother for several decades, he receives from her a letter out of the blue in which she seemingly reaches out to him, citing Jesus' injunction to forgive. In a letter of response that he never actually sends, Burns writes "I don’t believe in forgiveness. The idea confuses me. It’s from a different story, a different world. If I were to forgive, I’d be play-acting." How chilling, I want to say. How heart-rending. And yet, clearly, I have no right to say any of this, for I have never had an experience, in my own life, anything like what Burns has been through. My only experience of such trauma has been an imaginative one, through reading this remarkable book.

Recurrent themes in Burns’ narrative include what it’s like to live as a half-Greek, half-Anglo in the midst of a multi-ethnic melting pot, early exposure to a wide range of sexual experiences, and the progressive discovery of Burns’ own passion for reading and writing and his discovery that, as he puts it, “I will never have a connection to my father, but I will always be able to read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.”

Intriguingly, Burns seems distinctly wary of what psychologists might have to say about the way his experiences have shaped him. “I can make myself numb when a situation requires it,” Burns acknowledges. “This is, I’m told, common in people who are said to have been abused or neglected.”

Nonetheless (and despite the prominence of a bandage bearing his initials in the book’s cover design), Burns seems uncomfortable with any suggestion that he might now, as an adult, be suffering from a “psychological wound” as the result of his experiences.

“In my mind,” writes Burns, “I say: I have learnt the necessary lessons from my childhood and they hold me in good stead. A reader or therapist might say: He is the damaged product of his childhood, which leaves him too distant from the world, too sceptical, too unfeeling.”

In reality, I’d be astonished if any therapist worth their salt accepted that these two statements are in any way antithetical or incompatible with each other. A Beacon House pamphlet on “Dissociation in childhood and teens” emphasises that dissociation (one form of which is the numbness Burns writes of) “is, in many ways, to be celebrated! When it was needed, it helped the child survive unbearable moments of pain and fear.”

This, though, is the most minor of quibbles on my part. I think this is a marvellous book.

[Margaret Galbraith · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a memoir this is. It’s a bit like Jimmy Barnes meets Angela’s ashes but in much more modern times. About a boy looking for love and just getting kicked in the gut literally. It’s an awful story about the abuse and injustice yet amazing how it ends. Perhaps all the bad turned him into something good. Well done Shannon for finally realising that literature can become your saviour. A bright child never given the life and care he so deserved nor the chance to excel at school. But he did in the end at university of Adelaide and became a better man. He had no bitterness despite what he went through but just wants to be a good father figure for his own children and I feel he will be and is! It’s not an easy book to read but one which makes you realise life is not all bad and thank you Steve at BookClub for bringing it to my attention.

[Jillwilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The memoir has really lingered with me after reading. Perhaps mostly because it is a story of neglect – and the adults who failed to protect and nurture a small boy. And I think about how many years I worked in a school – and potentially how many kids went under the radar in terms of missing out on some basic needs - like food, somewhere safe to sleep and affection.

Burns was born to parents who weren’t happy together. The setting for his early years is Elizabeth North – a working class suburb 20km north of Adelaide also associated with Jimmy Barnes’ dysfunctional childhood. Most members of his family were on benefits, rendering them “human waste” in the eyes of his unsympathetic working class neighbours. By the age of five, he had learnt some hard lessons. He was not wanted; his mother lied to his father to make him accept someone else’s child as his own. His mother is unpredictable, blowing hot and cold, leaving him watchful and anxious. He is shuffled between families including his grandparents, his father and stepmother and other relatives. After one fracas an aunt takes him and his mother in, only to send them on their way because of the mother’s lying and screaming and general hopelessness. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to do,’ the aunt tells the boy. ‘You can’t stay here with me forever. You are your mother’s problem.’

At one stage in the book, about his teens, he writes “His friends are each the object of a singular maternal devotion, a fate he can barely imagine. He occasionally tries to make them understand how lucky they are but none can grasp what he is driving at. Coming home to a loving mother is like breathing air or drinking water. It’s the substance of life, not a privilege.”

He writes: “I’ve discovered an important truth, and it’s all I care about, all I can depend on, the only thing that means anything, the one sure thing that will help me survive. No one can be trusted. I am on my own.” This is because on a few occasions, when something bad has happened, authorities such as the police, social workers or teachers ask him about his home life. ‘He knows that they don’t want to hear anything that would complicate matters for them, that no one ever really wants to hear the truth, even if they pretend to, because the truth would make demands of them that they are not prepared for.’

The book begins in first person by halfway through moves to third person where Burns =describes himself as ”the boy”. It’s an effective distancing tool. In an interview I heard, he said he was “trying to reach a place of honesty, not truth” acknowledging that people in his family might have differing perspectives on what happened. He said that he wasn’t aiming to be punitive. One of the influences on his work is the Holocaust tradition of writing – not that this memoir is similar to the situations that writers like Primo Levi were describing but Burns said that he was hoping to achieve a “plainness of writing”. I think he does.

One of the most interesting pasts of the book occurs towards the end when he includes a response (unset) to a letter sent by his mother after they had been estranged for many years. She wants to reconnect with him. He compares himself to a dog he encountered in foster care that ate its own shit, from sheer hunger. “Here is the real calamity”, he writes to his mother, “the tragedy that keeps us apart: we’re characters in two different stories, and yours is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape.” Burns asks her to “imagine” that her boy forgives her when the truth is that he doesn’t believe in forgiveness. Long ago, he taught himself how to live without his mother, and there is no going back.

Through the awfulness of his childhood and adolescence, Burns found some succour in reading -he discovers Frankenstein. “There are numerous possible lessons or meanings, and the language is appealingly foreign … It doesn’t yield to him … because it leaves him uncertain and unsettled, it lingers.” He writes about his encounters with James Joyce, Thomas Hardy and Dostoevsky. Reading these writers sort of saved him.

This memoir has a great cover – I loved that the designer had clearly read the book and chose imagery that reflected both the literal text and worked as a metaphor. And I agree with Michael McGirr who wrote of this book: “ I was humbled by the understated dignity of this painful story and inspired by the surprising direction it takes.”

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

Confronting memoir.

[Robyn M Brady · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shannon Burns did it tough. One of the things that impressed me the most in his memoir was his commitment to seeking and expressing truth and doing so in spare prose.

[Hazel P · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an invaluable autobiographical account of a child navigating through unsupportive and abusive family environments, both maternal and paternal, as well as a broken welfare system (his depiction of foster care is desperate and chilling). The writer also guides readers to witness the profound insecurity, deep isolation, and yearning for belonging that such experiences engender.

The first part of the book is relatively more like an objective recounting of the experience, highlighting the challenges a child faces in an unfavorable and cold environment. Several aspects mentioned by the author that made me reflect are:

1. The stark contradiction between the child's lived experience and the idealized world portrayed on TV and taught in schools.

2. The alarmingly high occurrence of sexual harassment, disturbingly often perpetrated by close family members.

3. The conspicuous absence of responsible adults, from police and teachers to caseworkers, none was willing to investigate potential parental abuse.


As the author transitions into adolescence in the second part, the focus shifts to inner exploration through literature. I found the shift from first-person perspective to a third-person perspective clever, which effectively mirrors, and serves as a reminder of the child's disillusionment with the concept of family and reflects the isolation experienced in an abusive environment. In the second part, the transformative power of literature is also moving, offering the author both consolation and enlightenment. The author's comments on a range of literary works are also a highlight of the book.

On the writing style, I like how the author is able to articulate his complex inner feelings with remarkable clarity in accessible language. I do wonder, especially in the second part, if the feelings were expressed by his teenage-year self or embellished and refined in a certain way - as if he looked back at his teenage years from a mature point of view and wrote from there.

The epilogue also stands out as a testament to the author's sincerity; as a reader, I feel it's an honest piece of writing resulting from the author's deep reflections and extensive personal work.

Lastly, reading this book also allows me to appreciate "Poor" by Katriona O'Sullivan more. O'Sullivan tells her story of growing up in poverty, and the confusion and self-exploration she shares in the book during her teenage years and early twenties are valuable, as they highlight commonalities in many women's experiences. O'Sullivan also writes in a more objective and system-analytical way.

[Ashton · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautifully heartfelt memoir of a childhood. Also, to some degree, felt like a eulogy, a mourning for a lost childhood to poverty and abuse. The bleak descriptions of his childhood in the slums of Adelaide, bouncing between parental and foster houses was chilling and also so very real. The connection he felt to books and literature was heartening.
The story itself held my attention, and I enjoyed following him through the years, but it was nothing revolutionary. I suppose it doesn't have to be, and perhaps that was the charm of it. It *was* nothing revolutionary, and yet it was *his*.
Now, I'm not sure how much of the Advance Praise at the end of the book accurately depicts public opinion, but it did make me a little uneasy when I read one in particular. This is largely unrelated to the memoir itself, and more a sidenote on the praise, but I wanted to mention it nonetheless.
"Childhood is honest, confronting and lovely. We don’t hear enough from the hearts of poor children, and rarely like this. Shannon’s demonstration of the power of words is inspiring. And it reminds us all that we should never underestimate a boy with a fire inside." -Paul Kennedy.
How heart warming, right? Never underestimate a boy with a fire inside. But this feels a bit shallow to me. What about a poverty-stricken boy with no fire inside? What if his circumstances had snuffed that fire out before it could catch? Does he then deserve what he gets? Shouldn't he be treated with just as much respect and compassion as someone with a fire inside him like Burns?

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Childhood by Shannon Burns is a highly introspective account of his time spent growing up in suburban Adelaide in the 1980s. The time spent bouncing back and forward between his dysfunctional families and foster parents obviously wounded his psyche deeply as evidenced by his clear recall and minute cataloguing of his reactions, thoughts and feelings during his childhood and early young adulthood. At times I wondered how Shannon, as a young child, had the language and experience to articulate his complex understandings of himself and those around him - his carers, his friends, his teachers, his workmates and the welfare system which offers him so little. Shannon obviously wrote his story with the benefit of hindsight coupled with his understanding of human nature gleaned through both his own turbulent life experiences and those of characters he encountered whilst reading the literature of Tolstoy, Hardy, Dostoyevsky and others.

As Shannon reveals in his story, he struggles to trust anyone or anything throughout his life until he discovers that he can trust literature to bring stability and something approaching happiness to his life. Putting his trust in literature was a wise move for Shannon Burns who today is a literary critic, a lecturer and a writer; earlier versions of sections of Childhood have appeared in various periodicals.

[Ann Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Burn’s brutal memoir about growing up, unloved and uncared for, in the impoverished suburbs of Adelaide. Abandoned by his mother and, eventually by her Greek family, barely existing in foster care, enduring indifference, at best, and cruelty, at worst, at the hands of his father and step mother, he turns to stories and literature to try to make sense of his life. The change from the first person narrative to the third person ‘the boy’ was a little disconcerting, but maybe this was to show his gradual detachment from any meaningful relationships and his life as he grows into a teenager.

[Jillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so engaging and hard to put down. It's so rare to be able to receive an account of a childhood like this one, and I cherished the unique perspective Burns brought to what it was like to live through child poverty, neglect and mistreatment. I was hoping to learn how he was able to create a very different life from the one he was born into, but with the title 'Childhood', it was also made clear where the book would end. I hope to read a volume 2!

[Melinda Charlesworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

It doesn’t feel right to have an opinion about the story told in this book other than… I’m so sorry that happened to you.
A harrowing tale of growing up without the safety of love and a family who cares. A reminder to notice what’s going on for people around you, listen, speak up. Act. Give.
Told unflinchingly with more compassion for the other players involved than they perhaps deserved.
I won’t forget this one.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling memoir that tracks who a troubled boy from a traumatic working class childhood in Adelaide managed to leverage the reading he used as an escape into a career as an academic. I first encountered Burns at the Gerald Murnane conference I attended several years ago. He was writing a biography of Murnane that I'm still waiting to see appear.

[Suz Bennett]

A moving memoir. Burns childhood is totally foreign to me even though I grew up in the same city.
You have to admire a man who can grow himself into a responsible adult, educate himself and hold down an academic career from beginnings such as his.
Well-written and moving.

[Chils27 · Rating 5 out of 5]

1,如何处理原生家庭与其在自己身上的烙印。2, 阅读拯救灵魂。3,遗憾的是作者没有写最重要的一环：他如何脱离底层而成为精英。4,文笔和文风极好，审视和反思有批判也有同情。5,读完这本，我又想重新读经典了。

[Ann Koenig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir is very confronting and amazing how he survived to become a writer and academic with a love of literature.

[lagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautifully written

[Hannah Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Devastating memoir. Brilliant to see Shannon talk at the Bendigo Writers Fest.

[Tim Waters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raw and unflinching in its retelling of awkward childhood and teenage years. Be appreciative of what you have in your life. There will be tears and feelings of astonishment.

[Michael Hastings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immersive , complex, difficult; a wonderful contrast to the bog-standard what-i-did-next narratives currently passing for memoirs.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rare to hear this voice, in a form which felt authentic. Possible because he must have burned all his bridges with his family, friends and childhood community. It brought to mind Tara's life for me.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Burns recounts his life from earliest memories (about aged 2) through to late teens. The son of dysfunctional parents, he eventually finds salvation in literature, devouring the classics and immersing himself in poetry. All the while he is either struggling at school (bored, disruptive, distracted, permanently hungry), or working in dead-end jobs. When what passes for home life becomes too much he leaves and is homeless or living in bare bedsits or couch surfing. Somehow, he survives and manufactures out of less than nothing a separate, settled, successful life.

Astonishing, gripping writing. Thankfully my childhood was not as extreme as his, but I identified with quite a number of his experiences. I barely know him personally, but my limited impression of him couldn't have been more inaccurate. The book deserves more recognition than it appears to have received.

This is an engrossing read, though not an easy one, and some readers may find it too disturbing.

[Andrew Deakin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The underbelly of life is exposed unrelentingly in Adelaide creative writing academic and writer Shannon Burns's 2022 memoir of growing up abused and neglected in the welfare suburbs of Adelaide in the 1980s.

Most kids would not survive such continuous mistreatment, or would emerge disturbed and destructive, prepped to pass on the misery to the next generation in a seemingly unending cycle of poverty and distress.

Amazingly, Burns is highly intelligent and resilient. and survives, despite a failed teenage suicide attempt. Even more extraordinarily, when a teenager, he reads widely the great writers, Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoevsky, Hardy among them, recognizing intuitively and immediately that they have a quality and genuineness that his life obviously lacks. He devours them, and they are a lifesaver bearing him eventually into a literary career a world away from his brutally ignorant upbringing.

Memoirs such as this provide a glimpse of the worst of life that exists even in otherwise materially successful modern societies. It is not a genre for the faint hearted. I was reminded of two examples that I had read or seen before, both evoking the cruelty of life for its victims: Hugh Selby's 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, set in a desperate and alienated 1950s America, and Robert Bresson's 1967 film Mouchette, from the 1937 George Bernanos novel about the miserable life of a young French peasant girl (who does suicide).

Burns's strength of character and intelligence seems more obvious to the reader than him, providing the means of survival where most would subside and fail. Understandably, he does not seem to fully grasp his own value, and he is honest about his occasional, complicit weaknesses in his late teens, when recounting some unfortunate sexual affairs.

He finally develops enough personal strength to separate from his destructive family and develop his own independent life. His reflective remarks late in the book on the pain caused by the pitiful absence of genuine mothering when young is a relatively rare reminder in our times of the crucial importance of proper parenting.

Burns finds it necessary to stop seeing his family, and only later in life does he revisit where he was reared to try to see it as it really might be (one is reminded of Eliot's 'We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring shall be to return where we started and know the place for the first time').

The memoir ends before Burns begins his academic life, but one remark struck me: he records his surprise that the university academics he eventually encountered scorned the fiction and poetry he had read as examples of elitism, Eurocentrism, colonialism, and sexism.

Regrettably, Burns finds the criminal idiocy of these pampered middle class moderns understandable. He surmises that this derision might be the product of the now plentiful accessibility of the great writers of the past, deprived of their scarcity value.

Perhaps, but more likely the contemporary disdain for the best of the past denotes a culture in decline, or one that needs saving, or even simply that the democratisation of higher education in a time of unparalleled wealth has unleashed people into the academy who lack the intelligence to understand the struggles and achievements of the past. 'It's not relevant,' is a bleat that recurs among many of today's students in the humanities.

It would be disrespectful to the pain of Burns's childhood to suggest that he has escaped the abuse of the welfare wretched only to fall victim to the hapless pretensions of modern intellectuals. But the temptation ...

Burns records also the residual ingrained anger engendered by his past. He passes up the opportunity of a legal career, because mixing with mostly middle class advocates triggers 'a murderous impulse.' He similarly abjures a political career, after finding himself nodding along furiously when reading a biography of Robespierre, the architect of the French Revolutionary Terror ('Terror is the only justice, prompt, severe, and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue', wrote that greatly derailed romantic activist).

Childhood is the testament of an intelligent, capable, talented man who survived almost overwhelming odds that would destroy most people. It is inspirational.

[DC · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good but confronting read content-wise. The author is born into a welfare class family in Adelaide's northern suburbs. He's shuffled between family members and foster carers, all of whom are dysfunctional, and he's exposed to abuse in different forms from an early age. The focus of the writing is on how his identity and resilience are built and eventually, his transition to a middle class life. He differentiates himself from his family members as much as he can, yet at an emotional level deeply craves their love and acceptance (particularly his mother's), a contradiction he struggles with. Reading is ultimately the mechanism for his transition to a middle class life, but the book seems to end abruptly without articulating how he breaks his stop-start cycle with his schooling and makes the transition to university life.