You broach the topic of the ethical position of the journalist: the question of how much scope there is to intervene, or reveal your proximity to your subject. “Am I just here to observe,” you ask, “to render this problem into something concrete without intervening in this moment. Is that all journalism can do? Is it enough?” Do you have answers to these questions, or is it important that they remain open? In her first full-length book, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of the acclaimed Mood Indigo essay I Choose Elena, writes about the secrets a body keeps, from gender identity, puberty and menstruation to sexual pleasure; to pregnancy or its absence; and to darker secrets of abuse, invasion or violation. I feel like I’m phoning it in here but rather than waffle on when I really don’t know what to say, I’m going to share some of the quotes I highlighted.

That’s what this book is. I wrote it so that I could reach out to loads and loads of people who have really different experiences of the world and bring all their stories together as a way of saying “all of our stories are different, but the impacts are shared and we’re kind of all feeling them at the same time”. I wanted to write something that built more of a sense of community than my first book, which was just about me and told a story with atypical elements. I also think it’s really important to talk about the greyer areas and those elements of trauma that we’re even less able to recognise. After experiencing a trauma, our brains are essentially rewired which changes the way we deal with emotion, memory and reasoning. These books helped me, and I’m sure they can help others, in regards to validating personal responses to trauma. Both My Body Keeps Your Secrets and The Way We Survive are also valuable in showing the range of different effects trauma can have.My Body Keeps Your Secret by @luciaoc is one of the best non-fictions I’ve ever read. Seriously. It’s up there with the greats in my hall of non-fiction fame. It’s range of topics, all centred around trauma, mean it keeps you on your toes. It’s written powerfully but without the flouncy words you’ve got to google. It’s honest, heartfelt, devastating and beautiful. Women in pain wait an average of sixteen minutes longer than men to be seen by a doctor, according to the New York Times piece ‘When Doctors Downplay Women’s Health Concerns’. When women go to a doctor with a painful condition, the pain is much more likely to be dismissed as psychosomatic or just a part of ordinary life. The accumulation of these stories paints an authentic picture of the complexity and diversity of experiences of trauma, adding depth to Osborne-Crowley’s personal account, which makes up a large portion of the book. But rather than building on the insights from I Choose Elena and stepping into a new space – to examine the structural drivers of violence against women, for instance – My Body Keeps Your Secrets feels like an addendum to her memoir that doesn’t quite manage to stand on its own.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s fly in the bottle. Wittgenstein said that systems of abuse are like putting a fly in a bottle. The fly can see out at the world because the glass is transparent. But the structure of the bottle is so vast and so consuming of the fly’s small world that it cannot see the glass it is looking through; it thinks it is seeing the world as it really is. This morning, I went for a walk on my own in the sun. I grew up in Australia, and I desperately need vitamin D to stay happy. It is a spring day in London, 23 March 2020. There is not a cloud in the sky, and there are daffodils everywhere. This book brilliantly interrogates our relationship to our bodies but also to those around us, inhabiting each daily, hourly, minute-by-minute contradiction that having a body, and so being alive, entails. A testament to the power of externalising our own stories so as to understand them through others’ eyes, demonstrating how inextricably connected each of us ultimately is. Her writing is beautiful, unflinching and clear and, most importantly, it renders shame visible – a material thing that, having been sewn into the body, can also be cast off.’I thought about taking those questions out, but then I do think that sometimes it’s important to think through things publicly that you don’t have answers to. In narrative terms, one of the aspects of the book I found really interesting was the way you captured the stories of those you interviewed: you use free indirect style, rather than dialogue. How and why did you decide to write the book in this way? How did the book become “a non-fiction novel” in your own words?

My Body Keeps Your Secrets, Lucia’s first full length book published in September 2021, examines the secrets a body keeps, fromgender identity,pubertyandmenstruation to sexual pleasure; to pregnancy or its absence; and to darker secrets of abuse, invasion or violation. My Body Keeps Your Secrets was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize in 2022. We feel shame as if it’s personal, but it’s actually not personal at all. It’s completely structural. So even though we all feel shame, and I’ve been asked a few times about male shame – there is a lot of very toxic male shame that comes with masculinity – people of marginalised genders are forced to feel it a lot more because there are a lot of things about us that society tells us we should fix or change. That’s what shame tries to get us to do: it tries to get us to conform. It’s about making everyone the same.My Body Keeps Your Secrets is engrossing, fierce and shows the writer’s intellect and talent, but as the journalistic follow-up to a straight memoir is less rigorous than expected. But there is no doubting that Osborne-Crowley is playing an important role in raising the profile of marginalised experiences of gender inequality, and for that fact alone, this book is worthy of a read. I want to move on from the men we call monsters because I am tired of talking about them. I want to talk about us.