Unfettered and Alive: A Memoir by Anne Summers: book review

Unfettered and Alive (2018) is the memoir of an Australian woman, from Adelaide, born in 1945, making a name for herself.

Anne Summers (nee Cooper) skips the early formative years and gets straight into her professional career.

Inspired by the works of French author, Simone de Beavoir – who used the phrase ‘unfettered and alive’ – Summers studies to be a journalist.

Starting with the familiar – scenes around Sydney where she worked – she writes of how she moved up the career ladder and into experimental journalism in a time when women in journalism were not taken seriously, professionally. She writes of her successful articles, and the times she got it wrong.

She has opinions about tabloid journalism and discusses the rising journalists in Australia and internationally, including pioneer women in the media. She writes of pen and paper, typewriter journalism, telex, digitalization, and the evolving nature of her profession.

She writes too of her editorship of the Msmagazine, and her involvement in the literary scene. I enjoyed her recollections of her 11-month employment with the Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating’s office.

This is mainly a professional memoir, but there is a slight touch of the personal too, although too often lacking until halfway into the book except for a couple of lines about her brother’s death. Here she writes of her second husband, Chip Rolley, briefly. And the last chapters are more personal and more poignant.

In 2011, Vogue magazine names Summers as one of the world’s wisest women, and Good Weekend magazine names her as one of the world’s most influential women.

Growing up in Adelaide, and living in Canberra, Summers writes of people I knew and worked for and with. In addition to that, I enjoyed reading about her career evolution, the ‘reinventions’ of herself, and her changing expectations and aspirations.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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