The Thinking Woman

Reviews / Votes

"Towards the end of van Loon's journey through her interviews with these impressive women, she asks: where are you at? It is a question she says we should all be asking each other, not so much for our physical whereabouts - though that can be crucial when a friend is in trouble - but to enquire about our own journey of becoming in the precarious world we inhabit... The Thinking Woman does a lot to help us think about how we can, how we could, even how we should, deal with our own feelings, and find the fluidity of imagination to live thoughtfully and fully.. I await volume two."- Drusjilla Modjeska, Inside Story
"The Thinking Woman displays the myriad of ways we strive to maintain our freedom and to survive and flourish brilliantly."- GALE Newsletter
"A fascinating book that will have us all thinking, whether or not we are women."- Anne Summers, author of Damned Whores and God's Police
"The Thinking Woman is also much more than a thematically organised collection of essays that bring the dense theories of living feminist and female philosophers to a general readership. In many ways the book is also a revelation, as it marks van Loon as an extraordinary memoirist, able to draw convincing parallels between her own life and the academic arguments of her philosopher subjects without descending into cant or mawkishness. Van Loon manages to move confidently and convincingly between discussing her early love of trees and her first job working at a Dagwood Dog truck, to Julia Kristeva's theory of subjective horror and Rosi Braidotti's concept of bios/zoe."- Johanna Leggatt, The Australian Book Review
"There is so much life in these conversations. Words and ideas feel hot, propulsive, uncontained in their implications. Above all else, this feeling of thinking-of thinking out loud, of thinking together, of thinking with and alongside-it's a very special kind of high."- Maria Tumarkin, author of Axiomatic and winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2018
"A compelling portrait of the relationship between thinking and feeling."- Amanda Lohrey, winner of the Patrick White Award
"Here is an absolutely original work that may upend the certainties governing your days and nights. Reader beware."- Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood
"It's heartening to read a book that encourages us to challenge our assumptions. To think expansively, and to look at those who do, and how that may be relevant to our everyday. An invitation to a thoughtful life. Julienne van Loon's The Thinking Woman is that kind of book."- Melissa Cronenburg, Feminist Writers Festival
"The Thinking Woman, the first work of non-fiction by acclaimed novelist Julienne van Loon (whose career began with a Vogel win for her first novel, Road Story, in 2004) is a knotty, charismatic exploration of the intersection between ideas and lived experience, through six central themes...a surprising and resonant work that cements van Loon's status as a thinking woman well worth reading and following."

- Jo Case, The Sydney Morning Herald
"Show[s] us why and how philosophy matters in achingly personal, human terms...The quiet delight of this book is not just in watching its women think but understanding how and why they slice the world the way they do; locating their ideas in a biographical context, as the unique product of a life. A woman's life."- Beejay Silcox, The Australian