Non-fiction

Ten Steps to Nanette Hannah Gadsby: Allen & Unwin, $50

Gadsby shares her experiences and views on the world with incisive humour, blistering honesty and heartbreaking vulnerability. Her explosive 2018 show Nanette was the culmination of a loving but difficult childhood and adolescence as a queer person in Tasmania, where homosexuality was illegal until 1997. Those traumatic “wilderness years” – grappling with identity, purpose and comedy, late-life diagnoses of autism and ADHD, are all detailed in this brilliant debut. Tinderbox conditions all, they led to Gadsby’s renouncement of selfdeprecation, spurning of expectations of artistic suffering and relinquishment of taboos around mental health, to embrace truth-telling, vulnerability and self-love. LEANNE EDMISTONE hhhhk