I am a writer of literary non-fiction including the forthcoming Poor Freud (to be published by Verso in the UK and Liveright/Norton in the US). My previous books are Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (Verso, 2021), Daddy Issues (Peninsula Press, 2019), and Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Penguin, 2012).
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
Verso, 2021
An analysis of female desire, consent, and sexuality in the age of #MeToo.
rousing… elegant… incisive… ingenious
Boston Review
one of the most important books you’ll read all year
Evening Standard
Daddy Issues
Peninsula Press, 2019
An examination of the place of fathers in contemporary culture, asking how the mixture of love and hatred we feel towards our fathers—and patriarchal father figures—can be turned into a relationship that is generative rather than destructive.
All of us, daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, are enriched by confronting these libidinal energies, these daddy issues at the centre of all of our lives.
Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse
Unmastered
Penguin, 2012
Exploring desire and pleasure, grief and pain.
Unmastered is a giddily joyful book… days after reading, its images linger in the mind
Olivia Laing, The Guardian
Other writing
For more of my writing visit my profile page at Queen Mary, University of London.
The Power and Pain of Paula Rego’s Women
Frieze Magazine
Issue 221
August 2021
The painter’s largest retrospective to date, at Tate Britain, cements her place as one of Britain’s most inventive and compelling living artists.
Why we need to take bad sex more seriously
The Guardian
Long Reads
March 2021
Consent has been portrayed as the cure for all the ills of our sexual culture. But what if the injunction to ‘know what you want’ is another form of coercion?
Sex — and Everything Else
Los Angeles Review of Books
March 2021
Sex as a window onto meaning in Sex Education, The Fall and Fleabag.
Shameful
Aeon
Issue 221
January 2021
Women who write about their pain suffer a double shaming: once for getting injured, twice for their act of self-exposure
I occasionally offer writing and manuscript consultation.
If you would like to contact me regarding this, my writing, or about any speaking engagements, please contact the Wylie Agency mail@wylieagency.co.uk / 020 7908 5900
Thank you.