authors event: jacinta parsons

friday 16 september  ||  6.30pm

In store
Tickets $10
Bookings essential
Jacinta Parsons will be in conversation about her new book, A Question of Age – how do we adjust our perceptions of getting older? What does it mean to age as a woman? How do we adjust our thinking about being in the world?

Bookings are essential as space is limited. We will be operating according to COVID-safe guidelines so all attendees are asked to wear face masks for the duration of the event. Please do not attend if you are unwell

A Question of Age – Jacinta Parsons

Release date: 7 September 2022

Grappling with ageing is one of the most confronting elements of being a woman. When we become invisible, when we lose our sexual currency, when we lose that elasticity in our skin, when our bodies soften and change, when our perceived ‘value’ to society dramatically falls, when our notion of self-worth takes a radical shift.

What do we do when our outside self doesn’t match our inside self? That old woman staring back at her reflection in the mirror doesn’t understand why she feels so young. So how do we adjust our perceptions of getting older? What does it mean to age as a woman? How do we adjust our thinking about being in the world? What is our currency now?

Jacinta believes that midlife is a crucial reckoning with despair and hope, a time when you are naked in the centre of the world and no-one notices or perhaps cares to look. Midlife is a time when you take stock – to look back and understand how you were made as a woman, and to look forward into the future, to see how you might unmake yourself to live the life that perhaps you should be living.

A Question of Age is incendiary, raging and raw, but also compassionate, insightful and powerfully energising. It is a book for every woman looking in the mirror thinking she no longer recognises herself. It is a book for our times.

Unseen: The Secret World of Chronic Illness
Available now – Jacinta Parsons

Jacinta Parsons was in her twenties when she first began to feel unwell – the kind of unwell that didn’t go away. Doctors couldn’t explain why, and Jacinta wondered if it might be in her head. But she could barely function, was frequently unable to eat or get out of bed for days, and gradually turned into a shadow of herself.

Eventually she got a diagnosis, but knowing she had Crohn’s disease wouldn’t stop her life from spiralling into a big mess of doctors, hospitals and medical disasters. With chronic illness her constant companion, she had to learn how to function in a world set up for the well.

What’s most extraordinary about Jacinta’s story is how common it is. Nearly half of Australians live with a chronic illness, but most of these conditions are not obvious, often endured in secrecy and little understood. They are unseen.

With compelling candour, Jacinta trains a microscope on the unique challenges of living with an invisible condition. She lays bare the struggles with shame, loss of identity, the threat of mortality, and the profoundly complex relationships between the chronically ill and their own bodies, as well as with those around them. It’s a story of trying to fix an unfixable illness, getting beaten down then clawing back up, and how that experience can shape a life.

About the Author

Jacinta Parsons is a broadcaster, writer, speaker and author of memoir Unseen: The secret life of chronic illness. She currently hosts Afternoons on ABC Melbourne, delivering a popular mix of art, culture and ideas.