A Real Piece of Work: A Memoir in Essays

4.5 stars. Insightful and vulnerable, the fantastically titled “A Real Piece of Work” is a collection of short literary essays and memoir weaving together stories from the author's work as a social worker with their experiences of otherness, in particular navigating the internal and social processes involved in identifying beyond the gender binary, in queerness, and in neurodivergence. The writing blends the personal and the political, the familial and the professional, and invites comparisons to Maggie Nelson, whose work it explicitly references. But Riley's work is a very different animal to Nelson's, more earthy and Australian, less academic but no less cerebral, and with a healthy and unapologetic dose of self-affirmation.
While I chuckled at the occasional evocations of familiar, cliches (said affectionately) of oat-milk drinking, Aeropress-using white queer millenials of pre and post pandemic inner-city Australia, there was so much to love here, particularly in terms of providing a very accurate and relatable expression of the way in which millenials and genzers conceive of the personal as political, of identity as self determined and gender as socially constructed, the way in which this is not understood by older generations, and the psychological consequences of this lack of understanding. This is an important book and I thank Erin Riley for their vulnerability in writing it, both as a queer millenial and as a mental health professional, but also as a keen reader of Australian literature, queer literature, literary nonfiction, and memoir.
I particularly appreciated the exploration of family dyamics and their role in our relationship with our identity and sense of being in the world, and the integration of therapeutic models.