OR Books

The Man Who Gave Me A Biscuit - Penny Woolcock

A coming-of-age memoir of love, rebellion, and political awakening, set amid Argentina’s buried history of Indigenous genocide, military coups, and disappearing women. When setting out to write a memoir about growing up in in the little-known British Community of Buenos Aires, Penny Woolcock anticipated recounting her escape from a sheltered childhood where girls like her were trained for marriage and polite society. But she soon discovered that behind a genteel façade of afternoon tea and games of hockey lay a much darker story, one of mass killings and amnesia. The Man Who Gave Me a Biscuit braids together memories of a tumultuous adolescence, which saw Woolcock join a radical theatre group and fall in love with the most unsuitable man she could find, and reflections on the legacy of violence and authoritarianism that to this day permeates her country of birth. In these pages we learn of the “Conquest of the Desert”, a genocide that took place fifteen years after her great grandparents’ arrival from Europe; a succession of military coups, including the murderous Junta of the 1970’s; the surreal idiosyncrasies of Peronism; and the madness of today’s President Javier Milei, whose key advisor is his dead mastiff, Conan. In turns funny, painful, entertaining and downright terrifying, this story in chiaroscuro superbly contrasts the excitement of a teenager’s world opening up, and the brutality of a society shut down by repression and fear.

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