In 2015, Haydar’s mother, Salwa, was murdered by Haydar’s father while Haydar was pregnant with her first child.
The book is an account of loss, but also what happens when a daughter, lawyer, artist and new mother is forced to move through grief while also confronting the legal, cultural and social systems that surround domestic violence.
The book moves between Haydar’s childhood, her Lebanese-Australian family life, her mother’s story, the courtroom, pregnancy, faith, race, memory, and the afterlife of violence inside a family. It also reaches back to the death of Haydar’s grandmother during the 2006 war in Lebanon, drawing careful links between war, displacement, gendered harm and the private forms of endurance expected of women. The result is controlled but devastating: a memoir that refuses both silence and simplification.
This is a book about mothers, daughters, witness, inheritance, and the long administrative cruelty that begins after catastrophe. Haydar writes with clarity rather than spectacle, holding grief and analysis in the same hand. A major work of contemporary Australian life writing, especially for readers interested in memoir, justice, domestic violence, migration, motherhood and the politics of who gets believed.
Pan Macmillan Australia paperback, first published 2021. First printing, with full number line 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. Some light cover and corner wear visible; pages clean and readable. A strong copy of an important Australian memoir.
