Monsters

A hybrid of memoir and essay from award-winning writer and critic Alison Croggon.

This figure I see in the foreground, this me. How monstrous am I? What does it mean to be a monster? From Latin monstrum, meaning an abomination ... grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible ...

I was born as part of a monstrous structure - the grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible relations of power that constituted colonial Britain. A structure that shaped me, that shapes the very language that I speak and use and love. I am the daughter of an empire that declared itself the natural order of the world.

From award-winning writer and critic Alison Croggon, Monsters is a hybrid of memoir and essay that takes as its point of departure the painful breakdown of a relationship between two sisters. It explores how our attitudes are shaped by the persisting myths that underpin colonialism and patriarchy, how the structures we are raised within splinter and distort the possibilities of our lives and the lives of others. Monsters asks how we maintain the fictions that we create about ourselves, what we will sacrifice to maintain these fictions - and what we have to gain by confronting them.

A marvel of a book ... Croggon spares no one, least of all herself, as she unearths colonial history and family complicity to scrutinise those demons that both torment and shape us. This is exactly the kind of book I have longed to see white authors write, and I love it for its refusal to provide easy answers to the dilemma at the heart of the modern human condition.
- Ruby Hamad, author of White Tears/Brown Scars

In language at once fiery and elegant, Croggon reckons with the collective failures of her imperialist ancestors and the personal shame of their legacy. It's a book I will return to often for its power and its truths.
- Marina Benjamin, author of Insomnia

Steady and acute self-scrutiny such as Croggon's is necessary to a widening interrogation of privilege that underpins the illumination and refusal of racism and sexism and promised a historical pivot away from over and cover violence ... Monsters is full of gloriously expressed insights, such as the image of the internet as 'a trauma machine, recording and reproducing millions of psychic wounds' and, on the subject of #MeToo, the way an accumulation of incidents can contribute to a 'deformation of self' ... stylistically, the rhythms and sonic patterns of Croggon's prose are a poet's.
- Felicity Plunkett, The Age