On Writing Women I Know
I wrote the short story ‘Women I Know’, then looked back at the stories I’d been writing over the past half a decade or so and realised I had a theme I kept coming back to. It was women who were trapped, predominately by gender. Sometimes this was because they were sexualised or discarded – because they were victims, sure – but more often, they were women in positions of privilege who had, in conscious, but more so in subconscious ways, used their womanhood to get ahead in life, and in doing so become complicit in acts of violence against other women, minorities, and the planet. So from then on I wrote very deliberately to theme, trying to fill in gaps between ideas, ways of embodying that.
There were two very influential books I read after I knew what I was doing that developed these ideas: White Tears/Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad, which really had me think about weaponised white feminism, and The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh, whose idea about making familiar landscapes uncanny as a way of writing about climate change really resonated with me. I think you can see the influence both of these books had on this collection.
So there’s that, and there’s also this idea in the titular story I kept coming back to: the grandmother keeps talking to her granddaughter about these ‘women I know’. She makes these sweeping generalisations about women she ostensibly does not know. So I kind of ran with that. I don’t really know these women, of course, but I think I understand them. Which is a different kind of knowing. I think I understand how they have come to their place in life, and I was interested in understanding that – how these often very flawed women come to be the way they are.
Unpicking the stitches of gender and genre, the stories in this searing, funny, haunting debut explore how our ideas of womanhood shape us, and what they cost us.
Winner of the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Award, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing
SMH Best Young Australian Novelist of 2023
Highly commended, 2024 Barbara Jefferis Award
A young woman tries to cheat her algorithm, creating a wholesome online persona while her ‘real’ life dissipates. A grandmother speaks to her granddaughter through the fog of generations. Two lovers divide over alternative meat options. A factory worker fits eyes in companion dolls until she is called on to install her own.
The women I know are sharp, absurd, sly, wrong, wry, repressed, hungry, horny, bold, envious, dominating, uncertain, overdetermined, underpaid, bored, smart, crystalizing, themselves.
A burning talent with growing international recognition, Katerina Gibson’s work has appeared in Granta, Kill Your Darlings, Overland and elsewhere. She is the Pacific regional winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and recipient of the Felix Meyer Scholarship.
‘Smart, gleeful, savage, funny and genuinely brilliant. I kept wanting to cry out with joy! Katerina Gibson is a superstar.’ Miles Allinson, author of In Moonland and Fever of Animals
‘[These stories] demonstrate an intellectual and imaginative power in their fearless probing into corners of the human world we didn’t even think existed until now. ... an author prepared to question and disrupt everything. This is an assured collection, audacious, dark, comic, and full of surprises – it demands to be reread, several times.’ Debra Adelaide, ABR
'Women I Know is a rich, contemporary blend of inventive and entertaining writing. Dark and funny, Katerina Gibson’s stories are sparkling with ideas – it’s thrilling that the future of Australian fiction is held in such talented hands.' Ben Walter, author of What Fear Was
'Come for the bold conceits, stay for the savage disaffection. These mind-bending stories startle, surprise, beguile and devastate. Gibson’s talent, in striking out from the shores of realism, is to bring us closer to the truths of contemporary life.' Jo Lennan, author of In the Time of Foxes
‘[T]he pieces in Gibson’s fiction debut create an elegant and subtle whole, with delicate prose that moves the reader as expertly as it disturbs them.’ Georgia Brough, Books+Publishing
‘Katerina Gibson is a serious writer whose talent is going to envelop the whole world--you heard it here first. Reading this book made me genuinely excited and genuinely appalled by the depth of Gibson's promise.' Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries