| Title | : | Bite Your Tongue |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1876756969 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781876756963 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 246 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2011 |
Bite Your Tongue is a story of great heart. It is the story of a teenage girl’s growing up in Queensland during the 1970s, the daughter of a morals crusader: Angel Rendle-Short / Mother Joy Solider. The tale is thoroughly embedded in Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s conservative Queensland; a time of great social change for the whole of Australia.
The narrator’s family is characterised by the fervour of religious fundamentalism and extremism, which manifested itself in Angel’s highly public, right wing activism. Bite Your Tongue is also the story of the daughter as an adult and a writer, facing her mother’s mortality while at the same time ‘discovering’ her in archival materials.
These threads are woven together in a mix of novel and memoir, each informing and illuminating the other with their different voices, making Bite Your Tongue a highly original work. Using this unusual and fascinating form, Francesca presents a personal social history, documenting a strong, conservative protest movement with a very real list of books to ban and to burn.
While harrowing at times, Bite Your Tongue also displays a superb lightness of touch, and a great joy in the power of language. It is an investigation into the very nature of storytelling, displaying great humour and heart.
Bite Your Tongue Reviews
-
Abandoned half-way through. I just could not get into this book - though it was prettily written and the prose and structure were highly original, I found it self-indulgent, bordering on narcissistic. It never seemed to take me down into the true depths of the story and what it would have been like to be the child of such a mother. I felt as though I was skimming the surface of an intriguing/fascinating situation. It was like taking a trip across the Great Barrier Reef in a glass bottom boat instead of snorkelling or, better still, scuba diving, amongst the wonder and terror of it all. Other readers may enjoy it for the glimpses it gives into an unusual family and childhood, delivered with factual autobiographical material that gives context and historical significance to the story told.
-
“Glory reckons good books shed light the way strips of skin peel off from around fruit, and this light – the colour, the smell, the juice – squeeze into the cracks of our hearts. You can feel it, taste it. Books seduce us. They make our hearts beat fast. The best of them can disrupt us, shift the axis of our universe, nudge us word by word into unchartered spaces. They allow us to swing about in the breeze. They change our feelings.” (11)
-
Bite Your Tongue by Francesca Rendle-Short is a book I first saw in a different form some years earlier. What I enjoy about the published version is the crossover of genres – from fiction to memoir back to fiction. I like the way that Francesca both separates and melds. For many writers, fiction becomes a way to explore experiences and ideas from the real world blurring their origins. Francesca explores her relationship with her mother – and mother daughter relationships are complex – as well as with the meta-mother, the mother who might have been. Through her fictional self, Glory, Francesca gets to speak the words she wished she’d said. This is an enticing read, one that pulls the read back and forth. But it is also a book that makes you think, and what else is writing about? If you like Jeanette Winterson's work, this one will interest you.
I'm the publisher of this book. -
Two little girls, sisters, dare each other to touch tongues. I’ve done it, but always thought we were the only ones! The description of the act recalls vividly the singular weirdness of the Tongue Touch – the feeling of that very first soft, slippery slug of another tongue on your own and how you just knew at the time it was somehow wrong, even though no one had ever told you so. Only a few pages into Bite Your Tongue, you know it will be filled with similarly icky revelations. It doesn’t disappoint.
Read the full review here:
http://newtownreviewofbooks.com/2012/... -
An honest piece of one's not so happy experience as a daughter of a woman who saw it her God-given mission to urge the authorities to ban books of immorality (such as DH Lawrence and To Kill a Mocking Bird). Unnecessary divide between what actually happened with the author's family and real occurrences witnessed by photos, and a mirroring of all that in a fictionalised family and occurrences.
-
Brilliantly written with emotion and humour.
