In the era of Ozempic, this feels like a necessary novel

Lonely Mouth is told from the perspective of Matilda, a 33-year-old woman whose life revolves around her place of work: a vibrant Sydney restaurant, Bocca.

Human tongue, vector background. Illustration contains transparency and blending effects, eps 10

In the era of Ozempic and appetite suppression, Jacqueline Maley’s Lonely Mouth feels like a necessary novel, told from the perspective of Matilda, a 33-year-old woman whose life revolves around her place of work: a vibrant Sydney restaurant, Bocca.

Central to Maley’s interest here is the idea of hunger. The book’s title, Lonely Mouth, is a translation of a Japanese expression, kuchisabishii, which loosely refers to a constant hunger that will never be sated or else a desire to eat something without knowing what it is you’re looking for.

This idea of hunger permeates every aspect of Matilda’s life – her relationship with her body; her relationship with the love interest, Colson; her reluctant consumption of the world around her. The restaurant in which she works becomes, in Maley’s hands, a microcosm of Matilda’s psyche.

Lonely Mouth by Jacqueline Maley

Matilda’s half-sister Lara, a model living in Paris, lives life differently and unreservedly, despite sharing the same difficult childhood with a capricious mother.

Matilda both envies and is in awe of the expansiveness of others, in particular the ways in which Colson seems so comfortable within himself. Maley contrasts this male certainty, and unburdened confidence, alongside a woman’s longing to inhabit life without apology.

Despite writing about disordered eating, there is an underlying appreciation of the beauty of food and the creative process behind it. The hunger is evocative and intimate, and at times becomes a character of its own throughout the novel.

Maley tackles difficult family dynamics in a manner both sharp and satirical. By writing through Matilda’s perspective, readers have access to the most private and unspoken aspects of the family’s fractured nature.

The female characters are treated with an innate kindness and the reader becomes aware of each character’s flaws, their vulnerabilities tenderly and subtly portrayed through small, intimate moments in which the reader can glimpse their humanity.

Matilda’s mother, Barbara, invokes in Matilda some empathy and admiration but also intense frustration. Maley is able to explore heavy issues such as addiction and coercive control without burdening the reader to the point of isolating them from the narrative. Maley’s gift here is her ability to offset emotional heft with wry humour, puncturing moments of Matilda’s despair with absurdity and warmth. It’s authentic, often funny and unflinching in its portrayal of motherhood.

Jacqueline Maley writes about hunger in all its forms.

Another strength of Lonely Mouth lies in Maley’s exploration of the often contradictory aspects of the female psyche. Matilda wants to be indispensable yet also has a solitary nature. She desires to be seen yet also to be overlooked. The result of these contradictions is a deeply human portrait of a coming of age in an unstable environment, and a raw account of what it means to live under the weight of familial obligation and love, with a gnawing sense of illegitimacy of one’s place in the world. Maley captures this without judgment, allowing readers to experience and reflect on this discomfort.

Maley’s prose is clean and rhythmic, she writes with a psychological precision that reveals more in what’s left unsaid. Her voice is distinctly Australian but never parochial – she balances cultural specificity with emotional universality. Her emotional register is dynamic – sliding effortlessly between satire, sorrow, drawing out universal truths of longing and shame without grounding them in cultural cliches. This is made compelling by the dry wit in the internal monologues that quietly catch the reader off-guard.

Lonely Mouth is a thought-provoking depiction of womanhood and a genuinely funny book that also is able to dissect family trauma, motherhood and female vulnerability. It is rare to find a book that authentically and honestly encapsulates a woman’s relationship with her own body, shame and desire.

It trusts readers with its complexity, never compartmentalising the contradictions of womanhood into neat resolutions. It is a book that encourages women, as Maley writes, to “tear through life with your teeth”. It is a call not only to desire but to carve out a space in the world and live in it unapologetically. Through its exploration of family breakdown, heartbreak, humour and healing, Lonely Mouth becomes a novel not only about womanhood but also about the desire to be loved despite all the ways we fail to live up to it – and the courage to keep wanting it anyway.

Indigo Devlin is a student at the Australian National University studying law and politics, philosophy and economics. She is passionate about contemporary fiction and the evolving landscape of Australian literature. This is her first piece for The Australian.

About the author

Jacqueline Maley is the bestselling author of The Truth About Her, shortlisted for the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year and the Matt Richell New Writer of the Year in 2022. She is a columnist and senior writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and she has worked for The Guardian in London and contributed to Gourmet Traveller and Marie Claire. In 2016 she won the Kennedy Award for Outstanding Columnist. She lives in Sydney with her daughter.