Lonely Mouth

From the bestselling author of The Truth About Her comes Lonely Mouth, a delicious, clever, tender and vivid novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world.

Susan's Review

Best-selling Australian author Jacqueline Maley’s new novel takes its title from an evocative Japanese expression. Lonely mouth, roughly translated, means emotional eating; the consumption of food out of boredom or, more troublingly, to numb feelings of loneliness or self-abasement. While many of us have a theoretical knowledge of emotional eating and hyper-anxiety about body image, the book makes these physical and mental states seem both vividly real and deeply disturbing. It reminds us of the power of realist fiction – the creation of complex characters, the use of carefully chosen details and convincing dialogue – to help us understand that such illnesses are suffered by real people in the real world. Compounding the confronting nature of the narrative is its use of child sexual abuse to ‘explain’ these debilitating problems. All of this makes Lonely Mouth sound like an unremittingly grim read that should come with a trigger warning. But be assured that the novel’s treatment of such difficult material is respectful, compassionate and even at times lightened with humour, as well as offering fascinating insights into the world of seemingly glamorous work. 

The story centres on two half-sisters, Matilda and Lara. Although they are continents apart – Lara works in an upscale Sydney restaurant and Matilda as a model in France – they remain united by genuine concern for one another, and by having been abandoned as children by their mother. The opening scene of maternal abandonment is characteristic of Maley’s intelligent handling of traumatic experience: the detail of the mother leaving her young children under the Big Merino in Goulburn combines a sense of gravity with an edge of farcical humour: a combination that paradoxically adds to the pathos of the situation. Humour is elsewhere used to deflect emotional pain; here, for example, early in the novel, is Lara returning to her one-bedroom apartment that contains “just a bed, a couch, a rug, and a table, and a cactus that was impervious to me, like a housecat but less needy.” Such a moment of emotional stasis, in which rueful self-awareness does nothing to change a character’s situation, will be shattered by the arrival of Lara’s long-absent and ludicrously named father, Angus Dante (believe me, there’s nothing poetic about him). What happens next makes for a riveting, immersive story.

Lonely Mouths is both a serious exploration of current social problems that should concern us all and which show no signs of abating: loneliness, childhood trauma, and the self-destructive ways in which girls and women - and increasingly, boys and men – perceive and treat their bodies. It is also a great pleasure to read: stylistically poised, subtly symbolic and beautifully tender. I knew from reading its opening pages that I was in skilled writerly hands. 

Publisher's Review

From the bestselling author of The Truth About Her comes Lonely Mouth, a delicious, clever, tender and vivid novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world.

'Lonely mouth ... It's a Japanese expression. It means, like, you feel like you want to eat something, but you don't know what it is. You're looking for just the right thing. But maybe there is no right thing. Maybe you don't need anything at all.'

Matilda and Lara are half-sisters who share an unreliable mother and a chaotic past. In every other way, though, they are very different from each other. Lara, ten years younger than Matilda, is a model, living and working in Paris - for her, life is expansive, carefree, beautiful. Matilda's life, in contrast, is solitary, contained, ordered. She works in one of Sydney's buzziest restaurants, Bocca, with an unrequited crush on her boss, celebrity chef Colson. If she's careful - and she always is - she can keep everything in its proper place. Hold the balance between hunger and satiation.

But when Lara's father, the long-absent, erratic Angus Dante, comes back into the sisters' lives to amke amends for his past misdeeds, Matilda's compartmentalised life goes seriously awry. As everything blows apart, Matilda is forced to come to a reckoning with who she is, and how to satisfy the hunger she wants to deny.

From bestselling author Jacqueline Maley, Lonely Mouth is a tender, vivid and fiercely relatable novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world, about the loneliness of girls and women, and the way we believe ourselves to be worthy - or not - of love.

PRAISE FOR LONELY MOUTH

'Maley's writing is exquisite - lyrical, detailed and deeply immersive. Her ability to capture the smallest moments and intricate and character details make the world feel vivid and authentic ... Captivating.' Books+Publishing

'As a novelist, Maley turns her journalist's eye - sharp, steady - on the subcutaneous currents that pulse within women. Daughters, mothers, lovers, helpers, helped. She writes with such tenderness and care, it makes the heart ache, and her characters feel as touchable as skin. I loved this book.' Annabel Crabb

'Tender, acute, searing and funny, I devoured this novel. It's a coming-of-age novel and a Bildungsroman all at once - about the enormous effort of finding yourself when you start with bad odds - being abandoned as a child by your mother under the Big Merino at Goulburn. Maley's characters are so gloriously alive I felt I knew them. A beautifully structured novel about how desire - for food, for love, for meaning - can shape a life, if you can just be whole enough to tap into it.' Anna Funder