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Start giftingThings That Helped
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Learn moreThings That Helped is a memoir in essays, detailing the Australian writer Jessica Friedmann's recovery from postpartum depression. In each essay she focuses on a separate totemic object—from pho to red lips to the musician Anohni—to tell a story that is both deeply personal and culturally resonant. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and her own experience, Friedmann's wide-ranging essays touch on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood, creativity, and mental illness. Occasionally confrontational, but always powerfully moving and beautifully observed, Things That Helped charts her return into the world: a slow and complex process of reassembling what depression fractured, and sometimes broke.
Jessica Friedmann is a writer and editor living in Canberra, Australia, with her husband and small son. A graduate of the University of Melbourne with an honors thesis in creative writing, for which she won an R. G. Wilson Scholarship, her work has appeared in the Rumpus, the Lifted Brow, Smith Journal, Dumbo Feather, ArtsHub, the Age, and other publications.
A native of London, UK, Shiromi Arserio is a stage actor and AudioFile Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator. She holds a BA in theater from Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. In addition to narrating over 150 audiobooks in British English, American, and Australian accents, her voice can be heard in video games such as Nancy Drew: The Shattered Medallion. A self-proclaimed geek, Shiromi currently resides in Seattle with her husband and two furbabies.