Isabella Gullifer-Laurie
About
Writing
Recent
Hélène Bessette’s Lili Is Crying / The Saturday Paper
Monica Raszewski’s Crimson Light Polished Wood / The Saturday Paper
Katherine Brabon’s Cure / The Guardian
On illness narratives, memory, and motherhood
Delphine Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up! / Senses of Cinema
On French feminist video collectives, Carole Roussopoulos and women on film
Antigone Kefala’s Fiction / The Saturday Paper
Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman / The Saturday Paper
Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait & Letters to Gwen John / Sydney Review of Books
On painting, self-portraiture, and autobiography
Lauren Aimee Curtis’ Strangers at the Port / Meanjin
On mystery, migration, and the Aeolian islands
Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons / The Saturday Paper
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow / Chicago Review
On time, souvenirs, and ways of seeing
Roberta Torre’s In the Mirror / Roughcut
On the star image and afterlives of Monica Vitti
Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium / The Saturday Paper
Audrey Lam’s Us and the Night / MIFF + Kill Your Darlings
On libraries, geography, and language games
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Un rêve plus long que la nuit / MIFF Revue
On dreams, nightmares, and art on film
Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night / Meanjin
On pleasure, reading, and the lyric essay
Anna Kate Blair’s The Modern / The Saturday Paper
Jen Craig’s Wall / Overland
Bella Li’s Theory of Colours / Meanjin
On contiguity, poetic freefall, and palimpsests
Hélène Bessette’s Lili Is Crying / The Saturday Paper
Monica Raszewski’s Crimson Light Polished Wood / The Saturday Paper
Katherine Brabon’s Cure / The Guardian
On illness narratives, memory, and motherhood
Delphine Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up! / Senses of Cinema
On French feminist video collectives, Carole Roussopoulos and women on film
Antigone Kefala’s Fiction / The Saturday Paper
Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman / The Saturday Paper
Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait & Letters to Gwen John / Sydney Review of Books
On painting, self-portraiture, and autobiography
Lauren Aimee Curtis’ Strangers at the Port / Meanjin
On mystery, migration, and the Aeolian islands
Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons / The Saturday Paper
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow / Chicago Review
On time, souvenirs, and ways of seeing
Roberta Torre’s In the Mirror / Roughcut
On the star image and afterlives of Monica Vitti
Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium / The Saturday Paper
Audrey Lam’s Us and the Night / MIFF + Kill Your Darlings
On libraries, geography, and language games
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Un rêve plus long que la nuit / MIFF Revue
On dreams, nightmares, and art on film
Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night / Meanjin
On pleasure, reading, and the lyric essay
Anna Kate Blair’s The Modern / The Saturday Paper
Jen Craig’s Wall / Overland
Bella Li’s Theory of Colours / Meanjin
On contiguity, poetic freefall, and palimpsests
Read More
Hélène Bessette’s Lili is Crying | 2025
What makes a novel? Bessette’s crackles with disobedience, advancing waywardly across the page, her style compressed, fragmented, repetitious. Chronology is dropped, time scattered in the dust. The small unit of the sentence becomes a crucial marker of duration and simultaneity. What makes a day, a life? Lili has an abortion, war breaks out, her husband is interned in Dachau. These events are introduced lightly, jumbled asides that blanch the novel of any bourgeois cosiness. Formally, thematically, it is a book about submission and dominance – the tension between various plots, between mothers, daughters, husbands. “Show me a woman who’s chosen something,” says Lili. Bessette uses the tiret, or dash, to indicate both acts of speech and inward talk. In a feverish, choral narration that collects the voices of Lili, Charlotte and other village wives, we glimpse a world of secret thought, sneaky gossip and chatter that reforms and deforms social bonds and hierarchies.
Read more > > >
Delphine Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up! | 2025
Delphine Seyrig’s stardom was celestial. Cerebral, sculpted as marble, her face flamed screens the world over, her hair bright with the heavenly tones of dawn and dusk. Her celebrity rose as she worked with seminal filmmakers of the European art cinema including Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, and Luis Buñuel. Her initials – D. S. – became synonymous with déesse, French for goddess. Yet Seyrig’s second act, her later work as an activist and filmmaker, sought to unravel some of this mythology. “I’m not an apparition, I’m a woman,” she whispers to Jean-Pierre Léaud at the end of Truffaut’s Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968). Her famous “Medusa voice,” so “tender and ferocious,” would be used to refute and recalibrate how women were represented in cinema.
Read more >>>
Antigone Kefala’s Fiction | 2025
Kefala’s women are not dramatic. They are poised, observant, hungry in body and mind for freedom, beauty, authority. Restlessly they must remake themselves, constructing a sympathy between what they have abandoned and what they can now abide. Her sentences can be crisp and scrupulous, images sharpened to a point. At other times, her prose is like a riddle, closer to a sensuous dream-work, all photographic blur and spill. Reading across this collection one can recognise the shifts in Kefala’s style, her steady maintenance of a language that guards and gives generously. Her peculiar vision is both austere and lyrical, elegantly fluent in the secret ways of the self.
Read more >>>
Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait and Letters to Gwen John | 2024
Celia Paul is filmed painting in her studio. Standing with her narrow back to the camera, she drags a bristle brush loaded with smoke-coloured paint across a small canvas on an easel. A thin grey ground has already been applied to it. She then dips the brush in a pot of turps and cleans it with a stained towel draped around her shoulders. She spends a great deal of time doing this, and all the while continues to look at her painting. The side of her face is visible, and thin puce lips twist into either a grimace or a wry smile. The effect is like that of watching a dog burying a bone, lodging a secret underneath the earth. Aside from her outstretched arm, she is, however, almost totally still.
Read more >>>
Lauren Aimee Curtis’s Strangers at the Port | 2024
Strangers at the Port is suffused with a political consciousness—its interest lies in how one might go about telling, and how authority is inscribed at every level of explanation ... Curtis is conscious of how the conditions of outsiderliness are constructed—national borders, geographic boundaries, language, appearance, forms of dress, the thresholds between childhood and adulthood, the hard line between material comfort and deprivation. Her compositional approach intends to unsettle, her characters are marked by their sense of loss, and being lost.
Read more >>>
Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons | 2024
In her poems, plays, novels and memoirs, Levy favours scenes that stage the ambivalent relationship between surprise, annoyance, pleasure and pain. The Position of Spoons delivers such preoccupations in essays, letters and stories collected over the past two decades. As unkempt as a kitchen drawer, it contains finely polished introductions to writers such as Colette and Elizabeth Hardwick, as well as some miscellany: scrappy but charming meditations on topics as varied as electricity pylons, charisma and the death drive by way of famous car crashes. “It is sometimes agreeable to just lie in bed and think our own thoughts,” Levy writes. Many of the pieces, at just a few pages long, follow the laxity of this impulse. The collection is determined towards a wayward brevity, proceeding via affinity and whim.
Read more >>>
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow | 2024
Behind the camera, it is as if the narrator cannot be seen; it furnishes her with a place to hide. This mode of perception is an orchestrating one, whereby the narrator can exercise her control through the framing power of a lens. Yet this gesture is also replicated in the narrative style itself, as the impersonal texture of Au’s prose offers the narrator a form of protection. This is a text which renders language with a soft and smoothing touch, shyly and also slyly. For despite the narrator’s humble glance—always looking out, and around—she maintains a narrative voice that invites authority with one hand whilst seeming to give it away with the other. The narrator is also self-conscious of her manner of speech: as if “applying a kind of firm but gentle pressure”. She appears to abdicate the fictive pact that begins with the use of “I,” straying away from proximity, favoring distance. This is not quite a feint at narratorial impersonality, although Au seems enamored of the cooling effect of such a voice. Rather, this textural choice implicates a desire to hew something smooth from what was once rough or uneven. There is an understanding, then, that prose style is a careful mediator of personality. If the text exhibits the narrator’s toil, the deft but difficult work of saying something just so, it arrives at a style through a deliberating effort that conceals its own labor.
Read more >>>
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Un rêve plus long que la nuit | 2024
Saint Phalle appropriates her sculptures as stage props and scenery, and her illustrated letters and drawings are employed in title cards and animated sequences, each marked by her distinct, curvaceous scrawl. Rapturous, raucously joyful, childishly naive, yes. But these recurring figures of Saint Phalle’s dreamhouses also suggest despair, rage, shame, guilt: suited men slain with swords, the tempting serpent, the monster scaled in green, the many-tongued golem, the devouring mother split in two during birth. Enormous sculptures dominate the dream world ... It seems as if Camélia has entered the dark guts of Hon – all turning cogs and flying sparks – trailing her skirts through black steel slicked with grease. This is the machine of adult dreams and desires. In Saint Phalle’s hands, the engine is not just a source of energy, a symbol of vitality; it is a hallucination motor, a site of psychoactive dysregulation.
Read more >>>
Hélène Bessette’s Lili is Crying | 2025
What makes a novel? Bessette’s crackles with disobedience, advancing waywardly across the page, her style compressed, fragmented, repetitious. Chronology is dropped, time scattered in the dust. The small unit of the sentence becomes a crucial marker of duration and simultaneity. What makes a day, a life? Lili has an abortion, war breaks out, her husband is interned in Dachau. These events are introduced lightly, jumbled asides that blanch the novel of any bourgeois cosiness. Formally, thematically, it is a book about submission and dominance – the tension between various plots, between mothers, daughters, husbands. “Show me a woman who’s chosen something,” says Lili. Bessette uses the tiret, or dash, to indicate both acts of speech and inward talk. In a feverish, choral narration that collects the voices of Lili, Charlotte and other village wives, we glimpse a world of secret thought, sneaky gossip and chatter that reforms and deforms social bonds and hierarchies.
Read more > > >
Delphine Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up! | 2025
Delphine Seyrig’s stardom was celestial. Cerebral, sculpted as marble, her face flamed screens the world over, her hair bright with the heavenly tones of dawn and dusk. Her celebrity rose as she worked with seminal filmmakers of the European art cinema including Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, and Luis Buñuel. Her initials – D. S. – became synonymous with déesse, French for goddess. Yet Seyrig’s second act, her later work as an activist and filmmaker, sought to unravel some of this mythology. “I’m not an apparition, I’m a woman,” she whispers to Jean-Pierre Léaud at the end of Truffaut’s Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968). Her famous “Medusa voice,” so “tender and ferocious,” would be used to refute and recalibrate how women were represented in cinema.
Read more >>>
Antigone Kefala’s Fiction | 2025
Kefala’s women are not dramatic. They are poised, observant, hungry in body and mind for freedom, beauty, authority. Restlessly they must remake themselves, constructing a sympathy between what they have abandoned and what they can now abide. Her sentences can be crisp and scrupulous, images sharpened to a point. At other times, her prose is like a riddle, closer to a sensuous dream-work, all photographic blur and spill. Reading across this collection one can recognise the shifts in Kefala’s style, her steady maintenance of a language that guards and gives generously. Her peculiar vision is both austere and lyrical, elegantly fluent in the secret ways of the self.
Read more >>>
Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait and Letters to Gwen John | 2024
Celia Paul is filmed painting in her studio. Standing with her narrow back to the camera, she drags a bristle brush loaded with smoke-coloured paint across a small canvas on an easel. A thin grey ground has already been applied to it. She then dips the brush in a pot of turps and cleans it with a stained towel draped around her shoulders. She spends a great deal of time doing this, and all the while continues to look at her painting. The side of her face is visible, and thin puce lips twist into either a grimace or a wry smile. The effect is like that of watching a dog burying a bone, lodging a secret underneath the earth. Aside from her outstretched arm, she is, however, almost totally still.
Read more >>>
Lauren Aimee Curtis’s Strangers at the Port | 2024
Strangers at the Port is suffused with a political consciousness—its interest lies in how one might go about telling, and how authority is inscribed at every level of explanation ... Curtis is conscious of how the conditions of outsiderliness are constructed—national borders, geographic boundaries, language, appearance, forms of dress, the thresholds between childhood and adulthood, the hard line between material comfort and deprivation. Her compositional approach intends to unsettle, her characters are marked by their sense of loss, and being lost.
Read more >>>
Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons | 2024
In her poems, plays, novels and memoirs, Levy favours scenes that stage the ambivalent relationship between surprise, annoyance, pleasure and pain. The Position of Spoons delivers such preoccupations in essays, letters and stories collected over the past two decades. As unkempt as a kitchen drawer, it contains finely polished introductions to writers such as Colette and Elizabeth Hardwick, as well as some miscellany: scrappy but charming meditations on topics as varied as electricity pylons, charisma and the death drive by way of famous car crashes. “It is sometimes agreeable to just lie in bed and think our own thoughts,” Levy writes. Many of the pieces, at just a few pages long, follow the laxity of this impulse. The collection is determined towards a wayward brevity, proceeding via affinity and whim.
Read more >>>
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow | 2024
Behind the camera, it is as if the narrator cannot be seen; it furnishes her with a place to hide. This mode of perception is an orchestrating one, whereby the narrator can exercise her control through the framing power of a lens. Yet this gesture is also replicated in the narrative style itself, as the impersonal texture of Au’s prose offers the narrator a form of protection. This is a text which renders language with a soft and smoothing touch, shyly and also slyly. For despite the narrator’s humble glance—always looking out, and around—she maintains a narrative voice that invites authority with one hand whilst seeming to give it away with the other. The narrator is also self-conscious of her manner of speech: as if “applying a kind of firm but gentle pressure”. She appears to abdicate the fictive pact that begins with the use of “I,” straying away from proximity, favoring distance. This is not quite a feint at narratorial impersonality, although Au seems enamored of the cooling effect of such a voice. Rather, this textural choice implicates a desire to hew something smooth from what was once rough or uneven. There is an understanding, then, that prose style is a careful mediator of personality. If the text exhibits the narrator’s toil, the deft but difficult work of saying something just so, it arrives at a style through a deliberating effort that conceals its own labor.
Read more >>>
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Un rêve plus long que la nuit | 2024
Saint Phalle appropriates her sculptures as stage props and scenery, and her illustrated letters and drawings are employed in title cards and animated sequences, each marked by her distinct, curvaceous scrawl. Rapturous, raucously joyful, childishly naive, yes. But these recurring figures of Saint Phalle’s dreamhouses also suggest despair, rage, shame, guilt: suited men slain with swords, the tempting serpent, the monster scaled in green, the many-tongued golem, the devouring mother split in two during birth. Enormous sculptures dominate the dream world ... It seems as if Camélia has entered the dark guts of Hon – all turning cogs and flying sparks – trailing her skirts through black steel slicked with grease. This is the machine of adult dreams and desires. In Saint Phalle’s hands, the engine is not just a source of energy, a symbol of vitality; it is a hallucination motor, a site of psychoactive dysregulation.
Read more >>>