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Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating difficult women
Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002
ISBN: 0868404217
UNSW Press Ladies who Lunge page
Interview with Tara Brabazon (interviewer: Verity James, The Backyard, ABC Perth, 25 March 2002)
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How has this happened? This bloke is fifty-five years old — most men his age would give up their firstborn child to have dinner with a 30-year-old, upwardly mobile, blonde woman. Then again, maybe I am already past it. Men — seemingly — prefer a date they can burp and change. This situation is made even more embarrassing because during our first meeting, a brunch last Wednesday, this man enacted a monologue of monolithic proportions, informing me of his emotionally incestuous childhood, his father's infidelities and genital herpes. This father is blamed for his resultant, recurrent flatulence and numerous other "anal challenges".
Just what I need: a man who can't control his mouth or his asshole.
— extract from Ladies who Lunge
Shrew. Banshee. Witch. Slag. Broad. Tramp. Bitch. Ho. These labels — through time — have described women who transcend description. Women with overpainted faces, shrill laughter and short skirts — dropping shocking one-liners — have a zeal and passion for life that shakes with energy and enthusiasm, as well as honesty and humour. Ladies who Lunge: Celebrating difficult women dances through history with the unconventional woman. Witty and refreshing, the tone, texture and feeling of the words on the page are as unconventional as the plucky women who punctuate the prose. It is a tough, determined, moving, frank and funny review of difficult women: how they got there, how we can understand their actions, and how we can learn from them.