Shy: a memoir (Text Publishing)
‘Frank, provocative, remarkable in its clarity and beautifully written – Shy is a book you will be thinking about long after you read the final page.’
Sian’s first book was published in 2014. It’s a chronicle of her quest to understand the excruciating shyness that has dogged her since childhood. It’s also a book about grief, intimacy, loss and longing. Sian unearths information about the differences between shyness and introversion; the links between shyness and social anxiety; and the positive attributes of those of us born with a shy temperament. And she describes the devastating end of a ten-year love affair, an event which forced her to confront her deepest fears.
The Age described Shy as a ‘beautiful… brave…. confessional memoir’ in which the words ‘shimmer on the page’.
Shy: a memoir was published in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. It’s available in local libraries and you can order it from all good bookshops.
Interviews with Sian about Shy: a memoiR
Reviews of ‘Shy: a memoir’
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‘It is a category-defying work of intellectual agility, jumping from mode to mode with playful interruptions and bold asides: lists, interviews, elegiac remembrances, painful confessionals, detached professional interviews. Woven together these elements create an intriguing patchwork: each square contributing to an overall understanding of what it means to be shy, and how Prior has navigated her own social anxiety in various public and private roles.’
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‘Shy is… part memoir, part journalistic investigation, part cri de coeur. Reading it, you are immersed in the interior life of an intelligent and sensitive woman. The experience is unsettling, almost voyeuristic. You wonder whether you should be sharing such an intense and honest self-scrutiny, and often feel as if you were breaching the sanctity of the confessional. But discomfort is Sian Prior’s aim: she wants the reader to feel the unease and embarrassment she has had to cope with all her life.’
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‘Prior’s memoir is about acknowledging the slippage between the public and private: what is hidden, what we don’t reveal… This creative multiplicity is best put to use when Prior splits herself into ‘Shy Sian’ and ‘Professional Sian’… Shy is a fascinating and engaging read.’
— Readings
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‘Sian Prior’s beautiful and confessional memoir, Shy, starts with her dismantling a bedroom mirror and removing it from her sight – not for the truth it tells, but the illusion it feeds… Has there been catharsis or understanding from this book for her? I hope so. There will be for readers, shy or not, who will see bits of themselves in the research and stories Prior skilfully threads together. Brave is such a hackneyed word. This could have been indulgent. But brave is what it is.’
— The Age
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‘The book is lively and not full of self pity, and Prior has too much taste to present her story simple-mindedly as a triumph over adversity. However, she makes it obvious that if shyness is not too extreme it can be overcome by other motivations – conscientiousness, or its cousins politeness and altruism, or the will to succeed.’
Childless: a story of freedom and longing (Text Publishing)
‘‘An acutely observed, beautifully written and moving account of the pain – and consolations – of childlessness. Childless is shot through with life, joy and the willingness to face the present with a powerful and unflinching gaze. A wonderful book’
– Lucy Treloar.
Sian’s second book was published in 2022. It was Book of the Month at Readings Bookstore and was short-listed for The Age Book of the Year award. Childless is an account of Sian’s long, complex and ultimately unsuccessful quest to become a mother. It also documents the author’s attempts to understand the emotional impacts of her father’s drowning when she was an infant.
Artshub said Childless ‘will lift the lid on an invisible wound many women carry with the for their entire lives… the book is filled with love and moments of beauty’.
Childless: A story of freedom and longing was published in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. It’s available in local libraries and you can order it from all good bookshops.
Interviews with Sian about Childless
Reviews of ‘Childless’
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‘The fluidity of Prior’s prose matches her description of grief as treading water… her unashamed portrayal of her fierce motherly desire demonstrates that such longing cannot be justified or rationalised away by any one explanation, and this stance is her riposte to both the feminists who deride motherhood and the conservatives who weaponise it.’
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‘Prior uses short chapters which jump through narrative time to tell her story of being childless not by choice but by circumstance. They are rich with evocative detail and cover a broad spectrum of subjects and spaces.'
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‘This is a generously intimate and insightful book. Prior is porous and vulnerable with her story as she describes the rollercoaster of relationships, miscarriages, IVF cycles, love, lust, loss and loneliness that comes with trying to conceive over many years. This is also a book alive with questions and a subterranean depth as Prior takes us backwards and forwards across the timeline of her life and interrogates her intense pull toward motherhood.’
— The Age
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‘When I think about this book, I am overwhelmed by the courage that it must have taken to write it, and then set it free into the world. It’s such an intimate story that exposes its writer in so many ways, and covers myriad topics that are rarely discussed openly, and are on the verge of taboo.’
— Readings
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‘Sian Prior’s second memoir, Childless: a story of freedom and longing is a heartbreaking and honest deep dive into the drawn-out experience of trying – and failing – to have a child. For anyone who has ridden the waves of longing, loss, hope, despondency and trauma of miscarriages, IVF and partners who say, ‘it’s just not the right time’, this book will echo your experiences. If fertility issues have not been part of your experience, this book will lift the lid on an invisible wound many women carry with them for their entire lives.’
— Arts Hub