'Marina Benjamin can take the everyday ... and transform it into deeply affecting prose.'
-- Francesca Brown * Stylist *
'Acerbic and tender all at once, A Little Give voices the unspeakable tangle of feelings that assail women in middle age. I can think of few writers so astute and exact as Marina Benjamin.'
-- Katherine May, author of
Wintering'With its unfailing attentiveness to the sensory and emotional textures of everyday life, Marina Benjamin's beautiful writing feels like a model of good care. A wry, absorbing, and very moving book.'
-- Josh Cohen, author of
How to Live. What to do.'A small book with a big heart, A Little Give re-humanises those household chores that fall to women - cleaning, cooking, picking up after others, caring for elders, the constant emotional labour involved - and lights up the meaning of dailiness.'
-- Beth Macy, author of
Dopesick and
Raising Lazarus'Bold and tender, fierce and true - I loved it.'
-- Rachel Seiffert, author of
A Boy In Winter'A wonderful, insightful, absorbing account of the work women do and the roles they inhabit (or which inhabit them). How do the competing claims of care for others and personal freedom shape us? Benjamin is brilliant at evoking the everyday and the unspoken, those most intimate moments that are often left out of the public idea of a life - the time spent cleaning a floor, grooming a dog, lingering in the empty bedroom of a child who has departed for college. No one writes more movingly, or with more intellectual breadth and incisiveness, about the lived experiences of women.'
-- Sandra Newman, author of
The Heavens'One essay collection captured my attention and wouldn't let go. A Little Give: the unsung, unseen, undone work of women by Marina Benjamin (Scribe, February) is one of those books that reorients our sense of how society is ordered. Its interlinked pieces take another look at those human tasks traditionally designated as women's work and recasts them as profound and essential acts of labour and love.'
-- Geordie Williamson * The Australian *
'Brave and curious, an examination of what it means to live and care.'
-- Emilie Pine, author of
Notes to Self'We all know the existential funk that housework can incite, women more so than men as they have traditionally carried the load. Not to mention the mixed emotions that go with caring for others. Marina Benjamin ruminates on the historical and societal pressures, constraints and value of this work through the lens of her own Iraqi-Jewish family - her dynamic, frustrated mother who drummed into her that women were put on this planet to please and her creative father who didn't question that being looked after was his due. No simple solutions are offered. Instead, she rewardingly riffs on the visceral push and pull of this work.'
-- Cameron Woodhead * The Sydney Morning Herald *
Praise for Insomnia:
'A darkly thrilling beauty of a book ... Benjamin's talent is Arachne-like. The materials she integrates are eclectic, and the resulting constructed web of her thoughts is architecturally robust and resplendent with dazzling prose.'
-- Tali Lavi * Australian Book Review *
Praise for Insomnia:
'A short, ludic book about long white nights ... [Benjamin] writes feelingly about the frustrations of being awake when you don't want to be ... Her moans about her futile thought-loops alternate with flattering descriptions of her radiant nocturnal consciousness.'
-- Zoe Heller * The New Yorker *
Praise for The Middlepause:
'Lucid and sophisticated ... A restrained but wonderful guide to the convulsive changes of 50 and over ... This is a book that yields valuable insights on almost every page.'
-- Melissa Benn * The Guardian *
