Renowned author, speaker and educational consultant Prof Erica McWilliam is pleased to release her latest book, Saving Grace.
Brisbane members are invited to attend the launch event to hear Erica explore this powerful family tale.
Date: 28 August 2019, 6.30pm
Venue: Riverbend Books, 193 Oxford St, Bulimba QLD
Cost: FREE
Book here
About the book
Saving Grace explores a century-old mystery about shame and madness in one Queensland family. Told with prim reluctance that her great aunty, Grace Baynes, went insane when her fiancé married her younger sister, the author seeks to know the truth. What really happened to Grace and why? Dramatically told just as Erica discovered it piece by piece, the family story she reconstructs is as engrossing as it is edifying. The narrative blends evidence taken from historical and medical records with contemporary psychiatric opinion to produce a compelling account of vulnerability and unconditional love in the life of Grace Clement Baynes. A woman lost to her family. A woman lost to herself.
“I am a strong advocate for girls’ education within and beyond the family. This involves, among other things, my numerous expressions of ambivalence about the value of pop-psychology and mindless optimism in addressing anxiety and vulnerability in the current generation of young women. As many teachers in girls’ schools would attest, I have spoken often in national forums about the need for young women to understand their own history as a much more complex one, so that they learn the history of the treatments offered to vulnerable young women, and that they come wrapped in barbed wire. The story I uncovered about my Great Aunt reveals both a dark side—the tyrannies of ‘treatment’—and a positive side—the irrepressible nature of sisters’ unconditional love.” —Erica McWilliam