I remember seeing this book doing the rounds several years ago when I was living in Melbourne, but the cover design had me convinced it was a romance novel, and I looked no further. But after reading and loving Seed (Bri Lee’s latest novel), I was compelled to go back and take another look. It was, of course, not a romance novel — the opposite, in fact.
Eggshell Skull is effective in being at once personal and universal. Lee’s vantage point as a judge’s associate provides many opportunities for her to zoom out from her own daily life and reveal the sheer pervasiveness of sexual assault and domestic violence, and what this state of affairs reveals about our country’s attitudes towards women.
There were times where I felt the story was repeating itself, and yet the very act of reading certain things over and over, living through Lee as she goes through yet another court date, another thrown-up meal in the shower, was sort of the whole point. In taking you through the pain again and again, Lee reveals how exhausting and demoralising it is to be a victim of sexual assault or domestic violence, whether you decide to pursue legal justice or not.
If I were to cut anything, it would be some of the tangential moralising that tended to cluster at the ends of chapters. This book suffers from a well-meaning progressive attempt to weigh in on every issue at once, and while the legal setting of the book probably lends it more freedom to do that than most, we probably didn’t need to hear about how Lee is always on the right side of history no matter which issue comes her way.
Still, on the whole, this was an incredible story, well told, and deserves its place on the mantle of Australian memoirs by tough characters.