Sydney event: Better Read Than Dead, 17 August, 2026
Date
6:30pm, Monday 17 August, 2026
Location
Better Read Than Dead
265 King St, Newtown NSW 2042, Australia
Join us for a conversation between Maggie Walters, Cynthia Banham and Anna Featherstone as they discuss family, identity and motherhood. The talk will be in celebration of Maggie's new book Fractured Motherhood and Cynthia's book Mother Shadow
About The Books:
Mother Shadow is a meditation on what it means to be a 'good mother' where two women — separated by continents and time but connected by blood — each find themselves enchained by social and personal forces that seek to limit them. The book blends a reimagining of the life of a 19th century unmarried peasant woman from Bologna who abandons her daughter to a foundling home —institutions known as slaughterhouses for the babies who died there — with present day reflection on the challenges of mothering with a disability.
Fractured Motherhood is a raw and lyrical memoir of fear and resilience, love and repair—a story of inherited wounds, and of how family can be both the wound and the cure.
About The Authors:
Cynthia Banham is a writer, journalist and lawyer. She is the author of three non-fiction books. Liberal Democracies and the Torture of their Citizens was based on her PhD. A Certain Light: A Memoir of Family, Loss and Hope, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Her most recent book is Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance, published by Upswell.
Cynthia has twice been awarded a Varuna fellowship, most recently the Varuna Climate Fellowship. She has a Certificate II in Horticulture and believes in the power of wilder gardens to inspire hope and agency in the face of the planet’s climate and biodiversity crisis. You can find her most recent writing about this in the Guardian.
Maggie Walters is an award-winning author and mental health advocate. She is the author of SPLIT: a life shared, living with Multiple Personality Disorder and Fractured Motherhood. A mother of three children adopted from the Philippines, Maggie writes with raw honesty about trauma, dissociation, adoption, motherhood, and intergenerational healing. Through her memoirs, public speaking, and advocacy work, she opens compassionate conversations about resilience, identity, family, and the ways love and connection can help repair even the deepest wounds.
