Book Review – Shannon Burns. Childhood: A Memoir

[Extract] Upon reading Shannon Burns’s memoir, Childhood, I was immediately struck by the uncomfortable sensation that with this book Burns is breaking one of the unspoken mores of working-class academia—that people who have successfully insinuated themselves into the university system should avoid talking openly about the peculiarities of their upbringing. Academics from disadvantaged backgrounds should keep to the generalities at least, so as not to expose the social and intellectual shortcomings of youth. Even in the supposedly egalitarian halls of the modern Australian university, class remains a complicated web of performance and deceit, and Burns observes that it is often working-class colleagues who are most “dismayed to learn that I had a rougher beginning than them” (12). When the aim of the exercise is to blend in with the children of doctors, solicitors and professors, declaring that you are the son of a sex worker and pot dealer who worked in a recycling facility is at once showing off and giving the game away.