Shy is a strange beast – part memoir, part journalistic investigation, part cri de coeur. Reading it, you are immersed in the interior life of an intelligent and sensitive woman. The experience is unsettling, almost voyeuristic. You wonder whether you should be sharing such an intense and honest self-scrutiny, and often feel as if you were breaching the sanctity of the confessional. But discomfort is Sian Prior’s aim: she wants the reader to feel the unease and embarrassment she has had to cope with all her life. For Prior suffers from a common but crippling social anxiety: she is painfully shy.

Prior is a well-known media personality. She has written opinion columns for the broadsheets, covered arts for ABC radio, hosted literary forums, taught creative writing at RMIT. She appears, on the surface, to be cool, calm, collected; one colleague described her as a ‘sphinx’. But that, Prior tells us, is the calculated façade of a professional woman determined to show that she is completely in control.