Caitlin McGregor

Caitlin McGregor is an essayist based in regional Victoria. Her work has appeared in a range of magazines and literary journals, including Going Down Swinging, Overland, The Big Issue, Kill Your Darlings and Voiceworks. In 2018 she was a judge for the John Marsden & Hachette Australia Prize for Young Writers, and has worked as an editor, submission reader and creative writing tutor. In 2019, she received the inaugural Kat Muscat Highly Commended Award, and was a writer-in-residence at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Caitlin is currently working on an essay collection that explores and interrogates ideas about ‘care’.

Caitlin McGregor reviews 'Everybody: A book about freedom' by Olivia Laing

October 2021, no. 436 • 22 September 2021

Olivia Laing describes her latest book, Everybody: A book about freedom, as one about ‘bodies in peril and bodies as a force for change’. I would describe Everybody as a biographical project, about people whose work engaged with the ideas of bodies and freedom in the twentieth century. This might seem like a subtle difference, but it’s an important one: had Laing conceptualised and framed th ... (read more)

Caitlin McGregor reviews 'Women of a Certain Rage' edited by Liz Byrski

March 2021, no. 429 • 15 February 2021

Liz Byrski’s introduction to Women of a Certain Rage is, among other things, a homage to second-wave feminism and a lament that feminism, ‘originally a radical countercultural movement’, has been ‘distorted into a tool of neoliberalism’. While there is no doubt that strains of feminism have been co-opted by neoliberalism to debilitating effect, this narrative – that feminism has become ... (read more)

Caitlin McGregor reviews 'Inferno' by Catherine Cho

August 2020, no. 423 • 19 June 2020

Catherine Cho’s Inferno is the first ‘motherhood memoir’ I have read since reading Maria Tumarkin’s essay ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ in Dangerous Ideas About Mothers (2018). The topic of motherhood has been ‘overly melded’ to memoiristic writing, Tumarkin argues; it feels ‘too much like a foregone conclusion’. This tendency to squeeze stories about motherhood into a pre-exis ... (read more)

Caitlin McGregor reviews 'Blueberries' by Ellena Savage

April 2020, no. 420 • 20 March 2020

The writerly ‘I’ is notoriously fraught and political in non-fiction writing. What are the implications of writing from a biased and limited perspective (as all of us inevitably do)? How to get around – or work within – the constraints of the personal? These questions are ethical ones but also ones of craft. Many memoirists and essayists have grappled explicitly with them on the page. In ... (read more)