Unfinished Woman

Reviews

In this searching memoir, the best-selling Australian author reflects on her mother’s suicide and opens up about dumpster diving to survive, coming to terms with frayed relationships and living with regret. In between life-changing adventures and ever since, the restless Davidson has been on the move, roaming from London to Australia to India to America and back, gathering experiences and relationships. The journey is inward this time, but no less arduous . . . What follows is an honest accounting, painfully so, as Davidson comes to terms with her mother's life and death and reaches a kind of reckoning with her own life . . . Davidson allows us to see inside — all of it, no matter how messy — and it's definitely worth a look. Searching, captivating and miraculously honest. Davidson has a voice we want to travel with, and to know. Immersive and profound, Robyn Davidson’s Unfinished Woman is a portal to understanding a daughter’s grief. ‘We take our mothers into us; that is where they live,’ she writes. So much of her mother’s life may remain unknown, but through memoir, Davidson completes what she considers an impossible task: crafting a moving portrait of her mother. This book will stay with me. Stunning. Robyn Davidson lives and writes with an explorer’s courage, but this book is more than an adventure story. Unfinished Woman is an unfiltered glimpse into the fierce pursuit of freedom and connection, woven with a mother-daughter bond untouchable by time Complex . . . well-written and insightful. [Davidson] excavates her childhood, romantic life, and family traumas in this raw and thorny memoir . . . Her rueful tone and assertion that her fate often felt like ‘the playing out of forces [she] had no hand in’ hits hard. It makes for painful yet cathartic reading. Beautiful, thrilling and ferociously brave, Robyn Davidson's timeless story of her astonishing journey gripped me from the first page to the last. An unforgettably powerful book. A strong, salty fresh book by an original and individual young woman ... This will rank among the best of the books of exploration and travel and, like them, is a record of self-discovery and self-proving. A memoir that stands both proudly and imperfectly (gloriously so) as a testament to human ingenuity, uncertainty and raw courage . . . To describe Davidson as complicated, mercurial, brilliant, exotic or any of those mixed blessings that percolate into an artistic temperament still would be missing the mark. She is definitely her own brand, one in which fierce vulnerability is the norm. Like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, [Robyn Davidson's] prose often zooms by, but the reader must pay careful attention to each word to keep up … Davidson’s insights into legacy, travel, and creativity are often quietly profound . . . Unfinished Woman is a valuable study in the art of memoir. It reveals a messy truth of humanity — that the places we’re in and the people we’re with strongly influence who we are. It then reveals an even messier truth: No matter where we go, there we are. Expand reviews