Jess Hill and Stephanie Wood at the Newtown Festival

Why do relationships between men and women form in the way they do? Why do they break down in mystifying and often violent ways? How can we protect women? And what do we have to do to fix toxic masculinity?  

Taken together, Jess Hill's See What You Made Me Do and Stephanie Wood's Fake form a powerful and timely investigation into the behaviour of men in relationships with women, the national emergency of domestic abuse and toxic masculinity, and the lies men use to justify bizarre and violent acts. 

Jess and Stephanie will be in-conversation with a special guest to be announced soon in this unmissable event, the third afternoon session at our Newtown Festival Writers' Space, located in the Newtown Church Hall adjacent to the festival grounds. 

Copies of See What You Made Me Do and Fake will be available for purchase and signing on the day.  

RSVPs essential. We will welcome donations on the door in support of the Newtown Festival's fundraising for the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre. 

About See What You Made Me Do by Jess HIll

Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four Australian women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with. But too often we ask the  wrong question: why didn’t she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it? 

Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators – and the systems that enable them – in the spotlight. See What You Made Me Do is a deep dive into the abuse so many women and children experience –  abuse that is often reinforced by the justice system they trust to protect them. Critically, it shows that we can drastically reduce domestic violence – not in generations to come, but today.

Combining forensic research with riveting storytelling, See What You Made Me Do radically rethinks how to confront the national crisis of fear and abuse in our homes.

About Fake by Stephanie Wood

Fake is a powerful, richly layered investigative story for our times, drawing on the personal stories of the author and other women who have been drawn into relationships based on duplicity and false hope. 

Women the world over are brought up to hope, even expect, to find the man of their dreams and live happily ever after. When Stephanie Wood meets a former architect turned farmer she embarks on an exhilarating romance with him. He seems compassionate, loving, truthful. They talk about the future. She falls in love. She also becomes increasingly beset by anxiety at his frequent cancellations, no-shows and bizarre excuses. She starts to wonder, who is this man? 

When she ends the relationship Stephanie reboots her journalism skills and embarks on a romantic investigation. She discovers a story of mind-boggling duplicity and manipulation. She learns that the man she thought she was in love with doesn’t exist. She also finds she is not alone; that the world is full of smart people who have suffered at the hands of liars, cheats, narcissists, fantasists and phonies, people enormously skilled in the art of deception. 

In this brilliantly acute and broad-ranging book, Wood, an award-winning writer and journalist, has written a riveting, important account of contemporary love, and the resilience of those who have witnessed its darkest sides.

About Jess Hill

Jess Hill is an investigative journalist who has been writing about  domestic violence since 2014. Prior to this, she was a producer for ABC  Radio, a Middle East correspondent for The Global Mail, and an investigative journalist for Background Briefing. She was listed in Foreign Policy's top 100 women to follow on Twitter, and her reporting on domestic violence has won two Walkley awards, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards. 

About Stephanie Wood 

Stephanie Wood is an award-winning long-form features writer, known for her rare ability to tell substantial, compelling stories across a range of subjects. She is a former senior staff writer at The Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend magazine.