Members of the general public are likely to recognise the names of some of the pioneering female aviators. There is of course Amelia Earhart, the American who became the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Here in Australia, many would recognise the name Nancy Bird Walton, who is known for gaining her pilot’s licence at the age of nineteen, as well as for helping to establish a flying medical service in regional New South Wales. But what of the Australian female aviator who is the subject of James Vicars’s début, Beyond the Sky: The passions of Millicent Bryant, aviator? Millicent Bryant (1878–1927) has largely passed into obscurity, but in her day she was a sensation. Vicars would like his great-grandmother to become once again a household name, celebrated for her achievement as the first woman in Australia – indeed, the first in the Commonwealth outside Britain – to gain a pilot’s licence.

Having mastered the art of using magnets
in discretionary acts
                like making a pencil
                                float above a table
or a throwdown of iron filings in stasis
becoming a shiver of black rain
                in the air between
                                points of contact & repulsion
I began to harvest my own
absence of weight
                as when appearance & illusion
                                are indeterminate
as one with luminaries such as
moonlight on ice so thin
                the face of a risen fish
                                can be seen or a vision
of skin through translations
of heat lamp steam running
                beads on glass
                                & other manifestations
of desire that turn to harm
when intimate is confused
                with intimidation
                                so careful not to wake
what was left of my own dubiety
I swore allegiance to charms
                & spells & went
                                about my work indoors
in the dark until a thin horizontal
line above the window sill
                & the heavy hem of the curtain
                                grew dim & I neared
the plaster rose on the ceiling
like some vast albino spider
                & if the story of how I came
                                to leave the earth turns
to something like heresy of hearsay
instead of myth it will be
                because I summoned as witness
                                to the capitulation of gravity
a trapped bird in the blacked-out
flyway of the living room
                that battered my face
                                with its wings & made
a sound you’re more likely to hear
in a clearing than a room
                & also a rainforest moth
                                with its avuncular disposition
& feathers for feelers
that testified to my rising
                by shaking amber dust
                                into my eyes & I know
that what has occurred within
the small parish of giving your word
               is a poor substitute for proof
                                in the form of audience
involvement like passing a hoop
as portable portal
                over the body to eliminate
                                the use of wires & yet
what of the bird that refused to leave
when the doors were thrown open
                or the moth that had taken on
                                the texture of the basal
cell carcinoma on my hand
that developed
                as in a dark room
                                of the mind.

Young writers may turn to the page for catharsis – for writing-as-therapy – but that’s not why we read them. The ageist view, that a writer mustn’t pen their memoirs until they are older and learned, neglects the breadth of excellent work by precocious writers who have a story to tell. Naïveté and inexperience can enchant, sometimes more so than brilliant craftsmanship or intellectual maturity.

Lech Blaine’s memoir, Car Crash, introduces another young author to a corpus of young Australian essayists and memoirists, which includes Oliver Mol (Lion Attack! [2015]), Bri Lee’s (Eggshell Skull [2018]), and the collected works of Luke Carman and Fiona Wright. To different degrees, these writers attempt to document a turning point in their personal lives. For Fiona Wright, the trigger was coming to terms with, and learning to talk openly about, her eating disorder; Luke Carman had a psychotic breakdown after his marriage failed; Bri Lee, as a former lawyer, wrote from a personal perspective about the ways in which the Australian legal system handles sexual abuse cases; and Oliver Mol, the Aussie hipster Everyman, related how migraines prevented him from reading, writing or – the horror! – using his smartphone.

Blaine’s turning point was a devastating accident that killed three of his friends. Overnight, his carefree youth was obliterated, and the young man soon discovered how poorly a masculine society full of slogans such as ‘harden up’ and ‘she’ll be right’ had prepared him for dealing with tragedy.

The book opens on 2 May 2009, when Blaine was involved in a car crash near Toowoomba. In a scene that feels highly metaphorical, Blaine escapes the car crash and watches amid the tragedy gawkers as his six friends remain trapped beneath the wreckage. ‘The car crash hadn’t occurred to me,’ Blaine later reminisces. ‘Not in the same way as to the others. I was a bystander to the end.’ By establishing himself as an onlooker to his own tragedy, Blaine cleverly frames the dramatic arc of his survivor’s guilt.

During the course of the following days, he receives the news in a state of deep shock. Three friends are dead. Tim, his best mate, is comatose. Dom, the driver of the car, must endure a trial for his role in the death of his passengers (he was ultimately acquitted of dangerous driving and of dangerous driving causing death and grievous bodily harm). The rumour mill is already corrupting the tragedy with fanciful retellings. Although it’s later confirmed that the P-plate driver was sober and driving under the speed limit, hostility toward young male ‘hoons’ runs deep in Australian society. As Blaine writes: ‘The driver was drunk and speeding, clearly. At some point he’d been blindfolded from behind. The front passenger – me – yanked on the steering wheel. We were committed to a suicide pact. Witnesses saw ziplock bags of weed on the back seat.’

Lech Blaine (photograph by James Brickwood)

Afterwards, the crash casts a long shadow over Blaine’s sense of self. The book flicks between episodes before and after the crash, filling the reader in about his literary ambitions, his torrid journey from adolescence to adulthood, and the beginnings of a Martin Edenesque romance with the cultivated Frida.

Blaine adopts the good old tortured artist archetype, with an outback spin. Since reading Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Blaine has considered his larrikin lifestyle and literary ambitions as being diametrically opposed. He lived a double life. He describes himself as ‘poet moonlighting as a hoon’, a stranger lost in a land of beer-drinking philistines. His father, Thomas, demonstrates a well-meaning inarticulacy when trying to console Blaine after the crash. ‘That’s a fuckin’ cunt of a thing,’ Thomas says. But ironically Blaine’s native tongue, an ocker irreverence, gives his writing an amiable charm and reflects the styles of artists such as Tim Winton, Miles Franklin, and Helen Garner.

As Car Crash progresses, Blaine begins to inhabit a darker territory of life. He spirals into self-renewing misfortune, involving trouble with the law, intemperate drinking habits, a failure to acculturate in Brisbane, disillusionment with his father’s ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, and alienation from his family and friends. The book’s epigraph, which presents a definition of a car crash as ‘a chaotic or disastrous situation that holds a ghoulish fascination for observers’, suggests the book is arranged as a series of smaller ‘crashes’ or aftershocks, all stemming from the original accident.

The words ‘ghoulish fascination’ lingered in my mind while I reread the opening pages of Blaine’s book. It clearly referred to the rubberneckers who huddled voyeuristically around the scene of the crash. But then I found a shadow meaning: was I, the reader, any better than a gratuitous rubbernecker? Was I drawn to Blaine’s memoir for the same trauma porn, the ghoulish fascination, of observing disaster?

The note of tragedy was not what stayed with me after reading Car Crash. Blaine’s navel-gazing keeps the stories of the other survivors remote; we never get to see their tragedies. For the most part, Blaine seems to have resented his status as ‘bystander’ – a witness, not a victim.

Blaine is the antithesis of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus: our ‘pessimistic poet’ never reaches the epiphanic moment of heightened perception in everyday life. Instead, the book ends without closure or cure or ‘clean endings’. For Joyce, epiphanies were profound, spiritualised moments arising from banality. Blaine’s realisation is more humble: the banality of extraordinary trauma. We see glimpses of ‘subterranean pain’, of profundity, but often Blaine’s powers of self-analysis are blunted by a penchant for bravado.

The term ‘autotheory’, despite having been around since the 1990s, gained prominence after the release of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts in 2015. Predictably, the emergent term elicited a flurry of academic interest, amid which Lauren Fournier – curator, video artist, filmmaker, and academic – established herself as a leading voice. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, Fournier’s first monograph, builds on her previous work, offering a condensed history of the genre and a number of case studies drawn from literature and the arts.

This is the first book dedicated to autotheory; it takes on the onus of circumscribing what ‘autotheory’ is and setting the parameters of future discourse. As such, it is disappointing that while Fournier acknowledges the influence of women of colour in the nascence of the genre, she does not meaningfully contextualise it using their work. Instead, Fournier gives a quick overview of autotheoretical-ish work produced since the 1960s, traces the roots of the genre to European thinkers like Montaigne and St Augustine, and dates the term ‘autotheory’ to white women theorists Stacey Young (in 1997) and Mieke Bal (2015).