Book review: What Women Want by Nelly Thomas

WHAT Women Want is pleasantly surprising. It is funny, to be expected from a comedian-turned-writer, but it is also sage, well researched and deeply interesting.

POST-feminist Australia is a funny old landscape, full of liberties and anachronisms, untruths and information.

Such is the smorgasbord of choice that many are left paralysed and confused about how to find their place within it.

This is the world Nelly Thomas writes about, a place she knows intimately.

With the structure of several well researched opinion pieces, Thomas explores the landscape through sharing her own life journey from uni student to telemarketer, health advocate to fatty boombah (her words) and pretty well every nook and cranny in between.

Well structured, What Women Want's appeal lies partly in its currency, its references to recent news and events and its searing insight into the confusion that goes with having First World choices and a sharpened sense of self.

Thomas offers observations informed by experience and research on sexuality, education, children, relationships, work and health.

While informed and written in a contemporary style using language that is unabashedly salty in places, it never becomes heavy going.

What Women Want is pleasantly surprising. It is funny, to be expected from a comedian-turned-writer, but it is also sage, well researched and deeply interesting.

This writer is no intellectual slouch. Overwhelmingly, she cuts deep and directly into the funny bone. This is a great book for people living in contemporary Australia.

What Women Want
Nelly Thomas
Ebury Press, $34.95