Eggshell Skull

Image credit: Allen & Unwin

The primary draw of reading is the voyeurism that the experience promises. It’s a delectable, exciting, and a little naughty feeling that comes with looking over the fence at a world that you’re not a part of, just sneaking a peek. Of course these experiences offer readers excitement, drama, and ethical conundrums to work through, stimulating their brains every which way but loose. Then sometimes there are those books that hit too close to home, that immerse you in such a way that the anxieties and drama and horrors feel as though they are actually happening to you, making the feelings of depression, panic, and anger hells real. I had this experience this week, reading Eggshell Skull.

A memoir by Bri Lee about living with trauma, coming to terms with its severity, and then mustering the courage to stand up and fight back against it, Eggshell Skull is brutal, searing, and quite remarkable. The last time that I felt this emotionally affected by the central character was The Girl on the Train. Lee’s story of battling against a one-sided legal system, seeing the heartbreaking repetitiveness of rape and assault cases as a judge’s associate, and fighting against her own depression and post traumatic stress, is one that provides readers with an inspiring reading experience as well as a wholly depressing one.

Being a memoir, the book holds this beautiful bare-all tone as Lee writes in an everyday vocabulary and manages to put highly personal and emotional feelings and scenarios into words that an audience can fathom. We all know it’s near impossible to voice how we’re feeling (especially if we’re depressed or irrationally terrified), but Lee does a wonderful job, and it’s her voice and her words that immerse the reader and give her book the incredibly moving reading experience it does to its audience.

Every step of the way, I went through the feelings that Lee was describing; the empathic part of my brain whirring on overdrive. I was angry and having loud rants to myself when she described the absurdity and incompetence of the system, I could see myself drinking as she does, and feel those feelings of insecurity and hopelessness. One might argue that this is not the reading experience that people want, but right here and right now, I’m telling you it’s the one that we deserve!

Image credit: Courier Mail

Despite a lot of its content, Lee’s book is not about taking down the system, or necessarily being an angry feminist pointing out the inconsistencies, lurches, and harsh imbalances between gender representations in the legal system. What Lee’s book did for me was openly say that you can talk about your feelings because it’s guaranteed that someone out there feels just like you. Yes we’re all different, but on a number of levels we are all the same, therefore the bad feelings that we feel have been felt by someone before and can be spoken about: people will understand.

I want to thank you, Bri, for your wonderful book.

Eggshell Skull is a memoir by Bri Lee chronicling her year in the legal system as a judge’s associate, and then three years as a complainant. It was written in 2018 and published by Allen & Unwin.