AustLit

'In Childhood, Shannon Burns quickly turns to speculation about why he, ‘a child of the welfare class’, managed, after his tumultuous early years, to find an exit route into the educated middle class, especially where many of his family members have not. I know for a fact that this is a question that plagues many people who grew up in similar circumstances to Burns, and it’s a question that I have posed and attempted to answer myself. It is precisely this analytical bent that drives us to have written these kinds of books, often clumsily dubbed trauma memoirs, in the first place.' (Introduction)