Author Talk: Skin Deep with Phillipa McGuinness 2022

Content from UpNext.com.au. Please don't scrape website.

Skin, the strange wonderfulness of our bodily covering. What happens to it when something goes wrong. How the world responds to imperfection and difference. It's about how skin makes us who we are.

Join Phillipa McGuinness, as she discusses her new fascinating and well-researched book, Skin Deep: the inside story of our outer selves.

In order to write her book, Phillipa spoke to plastic surgeons, dermatologists, public health experts, beauticians, people with melanoma, burn survivors, tattoo artists, victims of racism, and all kinds of people comfortable in their skin, and those who are not.

Skin Deep explores beauty, ageing, imperfection, health and illness, all of which are closely related to skin, and interrogates whiteness, both historically, and structurally and through current notions of white fragility and victimhood. Paradoxically, skin is a barrier and a point of contact. It is miraculous, our biggest organ. It heals itself! It's wafer-thin! Skin cells remake themselves!

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at Gertrude and Alice Booksellers on the night.

Phillipa McGuinness is the author of The Year Everything Changed-2001 (Vintage 2018), shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and the editor of Copyfight (NewSouth 2015). She has written for The Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Inside Story and The Weekend Australian Magazine. A former book publisher, she is currently editor of the State Library of NSW's magazine Openbook.