A Little Give, the unsung, unseen, undone work of women

(Scribe UK)

‘Marina Benjamin can take the everyday….and transform it into deeply affecting prose’
Francesca Brown, in Stylist, ‘Can’t Miss Books of 2023’

Talking about A Little Give

With Sam Baker on The Shift

With Penny Wincer and Caro Giles on Not Too Busy to Write

With Amy Mullins on Uncommon Sense

Interview on writing memoir for Lily Dunn’s The Aesthetic Memoir

 A Little Give (2023) was birthed in the trenches of domestic life, amid the sweat and tears and exhaustions, a place where women are all too often consumed up by housework and caring, their creative energies sapped dry.

In a series of interlinked essay I examine the give and take negotiations that underpin women’s daily lives — juggling public and private commitments; the endless plate spinning; the defeats and rebellions; the impossible trade-offs; the political trade-offs; all the while searching for balance while living with contradiction. A Little Give asks what it means to be bogged down in immanence while longing for transcendence. I’m concerned with women’s real lives as they unfold on the home front, in detailed small moments, and how those same small moments can sometimes expand to hold women’s escapist yearnings. Thrumming between the lines of this book is the feminist urge to make space for freedom and self-actualisation that is so often thwarted under the weight of the systemic gendered injustice. But I also look beyond the feminist struggle to ask where our true humanity lies.

A Little Give is my most political book to date, and I can’t wait for it to find its readers.

ADVANCE PRAISE

‘Bold and tender, fierce and true — I loved it.’
(Rachel Seiffert, author of A Boy in Winter)

‘A small book with a big heart, A Little Give rehumanises those household chores that fall to women — cleaning, cooking, picking up after others, caring for elders, the constant emotional labour involved — and lights up the meaning of dailiness.’
(Beth Macy, author of Dopesick)

‘A wonderful, insightful, absorbing account of the work women do and the roles they inhabit (or which inhabit them). . .Benjamin is brilliant at evoking the everyday and the unspoken, those most intimate moments that are often left out of the public idea of a life — the time spent cleaning a floor, grooming a dog, lingering in the empty bedroom of a child who has departed for college. No one writes more movingly, or with more intellectual breadth and incisiveness, about the lived experiences of women.’
(Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens)

‘A Little Give is one of those books that reorients our sense of how society is ordered. Its interlinked pieces take another look at those human tasks traditionally designated as ‘women’s work’ and recasts them as profound and essential acts of labour and love.
(Geordie Williamson, The Australian)

‘Brave and curious, an examination of what it means to live and care.’
(Emilie Pine, author of Notes to Self)

With its unfailing attentiveness to the sensory and emotional textures of everyday life, Marina Benjamin’s beautiful writing feels like a model of good care. A wry, absorbing and very moving book.’
(Josh Cohen, author of How to Live. What to do)

‘Acerbic and tender all at once A Little Give voices the unspeakable tangle of feelings that assail women in middle age. I can think of few writers so astute and exact as Marina Benjamin.’
(Katherine May, author of Wintering)