Viking/ Penguin Books

I was excited to find this, during a post-Christmas Melbourne bookshop crawl. I'd wanted to go to one of the live Women of Letters events when they were on, but it was never possible. This is a project of Marieke Hardy (who I've followed since the days of her blog, Reasons You Will Hate Me and through her time as a presenter on Triple J breakfast radio) and Michaela McGuire. Even better, the Women of Letters project supports a charity I'm very fond of: Edgar's Mission.

I enjoyed this read. A collection of letters written on given topics by Australians of note, generally in the arts field, and organised into sections by those topics. Because of its letters format, it's easy to pick up and read a letter or two, then put down and let that process.

As is to be expected when 60 different contributors are involved, I enjoyed some letters much more than others.

The topics ranged widely, and with varying numbers of responses to each one. The first section, "To the night I'd rather forget", sets up a common thread. Because the letters were originally written to be performed at the stage events, and because many of the contributors have a background in comedy (and Australian comedy does so love the mocking of the self), many of the letters are written as if they might be material for a stand up routine. Many of the contributions in the book hold the writer's failings up for ridicule, which is very well done in some cases, but is not something I enjoy very much of. I preferred the contibutions from women with different backgrounds, particuarly Noni Hazelhurst ("To my ghosts" and "To my first boss"), Megan Washington ("To the best present I ever received") and Joan Kirner ("To my turning point").

Certainly, some of the topics were more intruiging than others. "A love letter" was the most responded-to prompt, with seven contributors, and together with "To my twelve-year-old self" seemed the most overdone of the topics - which is not to say the letters were of a lower quality, just that the topics have been done so many times before.

I loved the sections for "To my first pin-up", "My first boss" and "The moment it all fell apart".

I thought that the collection could have done without the two sections for men, "To the song I wish I'd written", and "To the woman who changed my life". Two of the six letters in the "Changed my life" section are beautiful, true celebrations of a treasured woman in the writer's life - one a sister and one a wife, from Ben Salter and Eddie Perfect respectively. The other four are male-centred dreck, and the first one is for some reason written to Desdemona as if from Othello, by way of Paul Kelly. Why is a letter from a fictional man to the fictional woman he betrayed and murdered in here? Other highlights are the one to woman-as-monolith (No, really, the whole thing is addressed to "Woman"), the one about my-wife-is-awesome-because-otherwise-I'd-be-dead-of-my-own-stupidity-but-I-wish-we-had-more-kids (hi, Bob Ellis, you misogynist old asshat), the childish offering from John Saffran (parody song about thinking his girlfriend's mother is hot), and the self-indulgent plea to be forgiven by an ex courtesy of Tim Rogers.

I would have loved to have seen women's responses to the "To the woman who changed my life" topic.

Still, I very much liked this taste of so many different women's voices, some whose work I knew of, and others who were new to me. It's an engaging, funny, honest, shocking and beautiful collection of works. ( )