Dr Amy Thunig (B.Arts, M.Teach, PhD) is of the Gamilaroi woman and mother who resides on the unceded lands of the Awabakal peoples- ) This means she is Indigenous Aboriginal and living on the islands east of Australia.  

Tell Me Again
by Amy Thunig
2023
read by the author
and Clementine Ford 4h 14m
rating 7 / memoir – Native Australia

So this is a young Australian woman sharing her experience as the daughter of Native Australians who are addicts and alcoholics with prison records and frequent relocations. There is some very real poverty and racism in virtually all areas of her life. And her life with addict parents is pretty much what you’d expect, lies and hiding and moving, parental neglect along with some abuse.

It took me awhile but I got used to it. I actually appreciate memoirs written, at least in part,  with the point of view of the author at the time of the events;  like if things happened when I was 10 I would want to write what I remembered happening and what I was thinking and feeling then – what was life like for me? Sometimes that point of view works giving me insight into the minds of youngsters –  (I was a Kindergarten teacher for many years.)  

The book is made up of 28 short chapters divided into three parts basically, but not strictly, in chronological order. The chapters seem to be based on the memories she has with more philosophical type ideas toward the end.

But there were enough moments of loving humor scattered through this book and some kind of redemption because I kept reading about familial love even in that dysfunctional family, and it spreads outward to extended family, tribe and ethnic group – maybe further.    

I’m sure some of my students lived in families similar to Thunig’s.  There was an Indian reservation up the road maybe 15 miles and those kids came to our school. There were kids, many of them, in town and on the Rez,  whose parents were drug addicts or in jail and the kids didn’t have food in the house and so on. The collection of short stories Night of the Living Rez by Moran Telty feels very similar to Tell Me Again – Poverty probably affects children in similar ways all over the world. 

And I am totally reminded of Jeanette Walls’ book, “The Glass Castle” (2005) which spent months and months on The NY Times Best Seller list back then.  I tried it but couldn’t finish because it was just too sad for me personally.  But the Walls book was really rather original and Tell Me Again is not quite so much – not to me, anyway. Oddly though, Thunig, ike the Wells family, uses castles for fantasy and metaphor.  Maybe not such an odd thing for very poor girls since ancient times.