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Unfinished Woman: A Memoir
"Searching, captivating and miraculously honest. Davidson has a voice we want to travel with, and to know."--Lisa Brennan-Jobs, New York Times bestselling author of Small Fry
A spellbinding memoir exploring time and memory, home and belonging, from the internationally bestselling author of Tracks , “an unforgettably powerful book” (Cheryl Strayed).
In 1977, while she was in her twenties, Robyn Davidson set off with a dog and four camels to cross 1,700 miles of Australian desert to the sea.
A life of almost constant travelling followed-from the Outback to Sydney's underworld; from sixties street life, to the London literary scene; from migrating with nomads in India and Tibet, to marrying an Indian prince. The only territory she avoided was the past. In Unfinished Woman , she ventures into that unknown, unearthing an ache for a lost but barely remembered mother and an unmet desire to feel at home in her freedom.
Adventurous but guarded, fearless yet broken, Davidson how can we live with pain and uncertainty, to find beauty in the strangeness of being? Unfinished Woman is a stunning literary achievement, inviting readers in as a world-famous wandering spirit is, for the first time, laid truly bare.
A spellbinding memoir exploring time and memory, home and belonging, from the internationally bestselling author of Tracks , “an unforgettably powerful book” (Cheryl Strayed).
In 1977, while she was in her twenties, Robyn Davidson set off with a dog and four camels to cross 1,700 miles of Australian desert to the sea.
A life of almost constant travelling followed-from the Outback to Sydney's underworld; from sixties street life, to the London literary scene; from migrating with nomads in India and Tibet, to marrying an Indian prince. The only territory she avoided was the past. In Unfinished Woman , she ventures into that unknown, unearthing an ache for a lost but barely remembered mother and an unmet desire to feel at home in her freedom.
Adventurous but guarded, fearless yet broken, Davidson how can we live with pain and uncertainty, to find beauty in the strangeness of being? Unfinished Woman is a stunning literary achievement, inviting readers in as a world-famous wandering spirit is, for the first time, laid truly bare.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published December 5, 2023
58 people are currently reading
2274 people want to read
About the author
Robyn Davidson
32 books300 followersRobyn Davidson was born on a cattle property in Queensland, Australia. She went to Sydney in the late sixties, then spent time studying in Brisbane before moving to Alice Springs, where the events of this book begin. Since then, she has traveled extensively, living in London, New York, and India. In the early 1990s, she migrated with and wrote about nomads in northwestern India. She is now based in Melbourne, but spends several months a year in the Indian Himalayas.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews
January 20, 2024
I know we can’t be totally consistent, inconsistencies are human, but there’s something about Davidson that irks me. Her claim to be seeking more than “buying stuff”, yet she travels between homes across continents for decades, and there’s often a mention of a grand piano. And a renovated house for her older years. It’s easy for someone with possessions to decry them. Perhaps her seeking was just for selfish fun and adventure, not something deeper, and hence the jump from one escapade to the next. Not everyone seeks a prosaic suburban life, but the alternative is not necessarily deeper. And yet deep connections and love often need time and consistent presence. I’d love to hear her sister’s view!
January 22, 2024
This is an exceptional book
Robyn Davidson's recollections of mid century Australia were visceral and thought provoking. Being of the same age demographic I was dislodged from the 2020's and transported back into those times with such clarity that it was breathtaking. A book I couldn't put down til the wee hours of the morning and couldn't stop thinking about long afterwards. I highly recommend this memoir for those of us of a 'certain age' who have had their fair share of trauma and experience
Robyn Davidson's recollections of mid century Australia were visceral and thought provoking. Being of the same age demographic I was dislodged from the 2020's and transported back into those times with such clarity that it was breathtaking. A book I couldn't put down til the wee hours of the morning and couldn't stop thinking about long afterwards. I highly recommend this memoir for those of us of a 'certain age' who have had their fair share of trauma and experience
July 6, 2024
I am trying to choose my words carefully; this is a memoir -- someone's life. I've read hundreds and this is the first time where I am not connecting. I read words and see complete sentences that on there own work, and some are beautifully strung. But in paragraph and page formats I read blah blah blah.
I found the audio on Libby. My goal was to read along with the narration to enhance my comprehension. It didn't work.
The words are not developing into a story for me.
The synopsis and the Cover are inviting; perhaps you will have a better experience with Davidson's work.
This is a GoodReads Giveaway Physical Book win and I am donating the book.
I found the audio on Libby. My goal was to read along with the narration to enhance my comprehension. It didn't work.
The words are not developing into a story for me.
The synopsis and the Cover are inviting; perhaps you will have a better experience with Davidson's work.
This is a GoodReads Giveaway Physical Book win and I am donating the book.
April 7, 2025
Such an amazing life. I found it a bit frustrating, I wanted it to be chronological. Davidson style here is almost a ramble as she remembers key moment in her life. It was a great book club book - good for discussion.
Read
February 5, 2024Unfinished Woman tells the story of a woman’s unquenchable curiosity about other ways of seeing and understanding the world. The time has come for the author to delve into her childhood, and youth in the hopes she will at long last be able to uncover the forces that set her on this path in the first place and at long last have the courage to confront the tragedy that marked her earlier years.
Read the full review on the blog
https://hundredacreofbooks.com/index....
Read the full review on the blog
https://hundredacreofbooks.com/index....
October 1, 2025
I was a bit surprised at how there were so many ways I identified with Robyn Davidson, or maybe she just has a way of speaking what most women feel. Perhaps we are all unfinished women.
October 20, 2023
From the very first pages of her new memoir, Robyn Davidson grapples with how to recollect the past.
“The way memory plays in the mind is not factual,” she writes. “It is sketchy, mythical, misremembered, contradictory. It is flickers of light on unfathomable darkness. We go back over and over the past, watching it change with each take, not thinking of it as what happened so much as, what does it mean?”
If you read my blog or listen to my podcast, you’ve probably read her wonderful book Tracks.
Davidson was 27 years old when she walked across Australia with four camels and a dog. “It was a deeply private act,” she writes, “which I assumed would hold no interest for others. I had no intention of writing about it afterwards, nor of recording the journey as it was happening. It was the doing of something just for myself.”
By the time she reached the Indian Ocean, she was front page news in Australia and on the cover of hundreds of international magazines, thanks in part to the National Geographic photographer who had come out to meet her on her walk.
The experience changed her in unexpected ways. “It rerouted my fate and recast my prospects,” she writes, “and it would affect others, intimates as well as strangers, in ways that were baffling to me at the time.”
The act of writing also raised questions around how memory itself reconstructs past experience.
“I noticed that, as I wrote, the memories were being subsumed into the book, such that I no longer had ready access to them. They seemed to blur and fade as the writing progressed, as if the book was cannibalizing the reality it described.”
Her travels continued in the years after Tracks. She divided her time between a flat in London, visits to Australia, and journeys with Indian camel herders and to far flung corners of the globe.
Her fascination with nomads endured, but her reasons for moving changed over time. “Previously, living in other places meant an overhaul of comprehension itself, testing whether what had seemed self-evident was really only prejudice,” she writes. “But the geographical displacements left me with no sense of ground. As if bits of myself were being flung all over the globe.”
Adapting constantly to the new can conceal as well as enrich, and for Davidson, the pressure of those hidden layers was building towards eruption into conscious awareness.
“Like anything, upheaval can become a habit. Leaving a place, you have the illusion that constraints are left behind. You feel lighter, fresh. But eventually the comet tail catches up with you, and the heaviness returns. You begin to miss, not so much the other places themselves, but the self brought into being by those places.”
As she oscillated between the push of the nomadic versus the pull of a settled life, Davidson came to understand that “there is one thing a residence can give you, that the road cannot […] the privacy to dream in peace.”
By the time she reached her mid-forties — the same age at which her mother committed suicide — those dreams took on a new urgency. They focused on the deepest well of her past.
“I had few memories of my childhood and none of my mother,” she writes. “Or perhaps it is more correct to say that I contained a stockpile but I had never bothered to haul them up.”
She knew she had to write about those years, but in a life spent lighting out for new frontiers, the act of looking backward held little appeal: “I had used a kind of scorched-earth policy in regard to my past: I threw bombs over my shoulder, and seeds ahead of me, into the future, on the assumption that when I arrived there, something would be growing.”
Uncovering her childhood would not be easy. As she scraped away at layer after layer, she also interrogated the act of remembering.
“I know the gold sandals were real” she writes when telling the story of the day her mother died, “that I wore them on a particular day and this led to an altercation with my mother on the stairs” but “the other details in the picture […] have been furnished by my imagination.”
This struggle to recapture a lost — or deliberately buried — childhood also leads her to question who is doing the remembering:
“When I remember my mother gardening, I remember it from inside my body; that is to say, I don’t see myself in the scene, I am myself. But in another scene I am slightly to the left of, and slightly behind, myself. And that is the position from which I recall most of the things that have happened to me. What is that trick of memory? Do we all remember ourselves as actors in our own lives?”
Towards the last third of the book, in one of her most beautifully written passages, Davidson accepts that she will never really understand her mother, or remember her:
“I came to terms with the fact that my mother could not, could never, be found, that the only wisps remaining of her tiny moment on earth were encoded in me — those tail ends of thoughts which rose in her mind like fish surfacing into the light, thoughts of which I am in some degree a continuation. We take our mothers into us; that is where they live.
In order to write about her and her time, to honour that nanoscopic existence, I had to write about myself and my own time, even though ‘I’ would not be the same ‘I’ of my multitudinous past selves. Not a narrative, nor a reconstruction, but rather a searching through the mysterious residue left by time and events.”
Alternating between her own story and the story of her mother leads Davidson to what I think is her most interesting question: How much of our lives are the result of deliberate choices, and how much is governed by fate?
What if she hadn’t set out on her long camel journey? What if she hadn’t met that key person at an airport in India? What if she’d gone to university and taken a job? What if her mother had lived?
“I seem to have had an unusually fateful life, not in the supernatural sense, but more mundanely,” she writes, where “odd and unlikely events, coincidences, have produced enormous effects, fanning out into future time, and seemingly outside my control. Perhaps a strong fate is nothing more than a reckless disregard for consequences, which can look like courage, but is really something else — a curiosity greater than fear.”
It took me a long time to read Unfinished Woman. I found myself stopping every couple pages as memories of my own childhood bubbled into conscious awareness.
Some were events or encounters I’d long forgotten, and some were familiar memories that Davidson prompted me to think about from new angles. Did it really happen the way I remembered? And how could I possibly have understood what it meant?
More than anything, I stopped to think about how our lives take us in some directions and not others, and how little control we have over it.
“The way memory plays in the mind is not factual,” she writes. “It is sketchy, mythical, misremembered, contradictory. It is flickers of light on unfathomable darkness. We go back over and over the past, watching it change with each take, not thinking of it as what happened so much as, what does it mean?”
If you read my blog or listen to my podcast, you’ve probably read her wonderful book Tracks.
Davidson was 27 years old when she walked across Australia with four camels and a dog. “It was a deeply private act,” she writes, “which I assumed would hold no interest for others. I had no intention of writing about it afterwards, nor of recording the journey as it was happening. It was the doing of something just for myself.”
By the time she reached the Indian Ocean, she was front page news in Australia and on the cover of hundreds of international magazines, thanks in part to the National Geographic photographer who had come out to meet her on her walk.
The experience changed her in unexpected ways. “It rerouted my fate and recast my prospects,” she writes, “and it would affect others, intimates as well as strangers, in ways that were baffling to me at the time.”
The act of writing also raised questions around how memory itself reconstructs past experience.
“I noticed that, as I wrote, the memories were being subsumed into the book, such that I no longer had ready access to them. They seemed to blur and fade as the writing progressed, as if the book was cannibalizing the reality it described.”
Her travels continued in the years after Tracks. She divided her time between a flat in London, visits to Australia, and journeys with Indian camel herders and to far flung corners of the globe.
Her fascination with nomads endured, but her reasons for moving changed over time. “Previously, living in other places meant an overhaul of comprehension itself, testing whether what had seemed self-evident was really only prejudice,” she writes. “But the geographical displacements left me with no sense of ground. As if bits of myself were being flung all over the globe.”
Adapting constantly to the new can conceal as well as enrich, and for Davidson, the pressure of those hidden layers was building towards eruption into conscious awareness.
“Like anything, upheaval can become a habit. Leaving a place, you have the illusion that constraints are left behind. You feel lighter, fresh. But eventually the comet tail catches up with you, and the heaviness returns. You begin to miss, not so much the other places themselves, but the self brought into being by those places.”
As she oscillated between the push of the nomadic versus the pull of a settled life, Davidson came to understand that “there is one thing a residence can give you, that the road cannot […] the privacy to dream in peace.”
By the time she reached her mid-forties — the same age at which her mother committed suicide — those dreams took on a new urgency. They focused on the deepest well of her past.
“I had few memories of my childhood and none of my mother,” she writes. “Or perhaps it is more correct to say that I contained a stockpile but I had never bothered to haul them up.”
She knew she had to write about those years, but in a life spent lighting out for new frontiers, the act of looking backward held little appeal: “I had used a kind of scorched-earth policy in regard to my past: I threw bombs over my shoulder, and seeds ahead of me, into the future, on the assumption that when I arrived there, something would be growing.”
Uncovering her childhood would not be easy. As she scraped away at layer after layer, she also interrogated the act of remembering.
“I know the gold sandals were real” she writes when telling the story of the day her mother died, “that I wore them on a particular day and this led to an altercation with my mother on the stairs” but “the other details in the picture […] have been furnished by my imagination.”
This struggle to recapture a lost — or deliberately buried — childhood also leads her to question who is doing the remembering:
“When I remember my mother gardening, I remember it from inside my body; that is to say, I don’t see myself in the scene, I am myself. But in another scene I am slightly to the left of, and slightly behind, myself. And that is the position from which I recall most of the things that have happened to me. What is that trick of memory? Do we all remember ourselves as actors in our own lives?”
Towards the last third of the book, in one of her most beautifully written passages, Davidson accepts that she will never really understand her mother, or remember her:
“I came to terms with the fact that my mother could not, could never, be found, that the only wisps remaining of her tiny moment on earth were encoded in me — those tail ends of thoughts which rose in her mind like fish surfacing into the light, thoughts of which I am in some degree a continuation. We take our mothers into us; that is where they live.
In order to write about her and her time, to honour that nanoscopic existence, I had to write about myself and my own time, even though ‘I’ would not be the same ‘I’ of my multitudinous past selves. Not a narrative, nor a reconstruction, but rather a searching through the mysterious residue left by time and events.”
Alternating between her own story and the story of her mother leads Davidson to what I think is her most interesting question: How much of our lives are the result of deliberate choices, and how much is governed by fate?
What if she hadn’t set out on her long camel journey? What if she hadn’t met that key person at an airport in India? What if she’d gone to university and taken a job? What if her mother had lived?
“I seem to have had an unusually fateful life, not in the supernatural sense, but more mundanely,” she writes, where “odd and unlikely events, coincidences, have produced enormous effects, fanning out into future time, and seemingly outside my control. Perhaps a strong fate is nothing more than a reckless disregard for consequences, which can look like courage, but is really something else — a curiosity greater than fear.”
It took me a long time to read Unfinished Woman. I found myself stopping every couple pages as memories of my own childhood bubbled into conscious awareness.
Some were events or encounters I’d long forgotten, and some were familiar memories that Davidson prompted me to think about from new angles. Did it really happen the way I remembered? And how could I possibly have understood what it meant?
More than anything, I stopped to think about how our lives take us in some directions and not others, and how little control we have over it.
September 22, 2024
It’s very hard to review memoirs. This is really 2 1/2 stars for mine. This is a meandering, ponderous read. It jumps around in time a lot. I blew very hot and cold while reading this.
February 11, 2024
Ten years ago, Robyn Davidson told a Sydney Morning Herald reporter in her native Australia that she had been struggling for several years with a memoir prompted mainly by complex childhood recollections of her mother, who died by suicide at 46.
During the mid-1990s, as Davidson’s fast-paced life approached the same age, it seemed as if her “absorbed” (a word she has used) mother demanded some difficult attention. After much soul-searching, changes of direction, emotional backtracking, second-guessing, and numerous other complications that happen when suppressed memories run headlong into the here and now, UNFINISHED WOMAN was, well, finished --- the book that is.
Sometimes, long gestations pay off. This is a memoir that stands both proudly and imperfectly (gloriously so) as a testament to human ingenuity, uncertainty and raw courage.
Rather than being the continuous story of her relationship with both a living and remembered person, UNFINISHED WOMAN is often a crazy quilt of emotions, fragmented experiences, back-and-forth chronologies, and unanswered questions. Middle-aged Robyn openly struggles with preteen Robyn, whose life on a struggling outback homestead was by then a universe away from her incredibly migratory adulthood (Davidson has lived at more than 50 addresses all over the world).
Davidson’s book turns out to be not primarily about her mother, at least not in a conventional autobiographical sense. She works hard to build relatable portraits of her distant father, who seems to have had more big ideas than income, and of an older sister whose affections blew hot or cold depending on their mother’s current favorite. She draws together the few remembered images and artifacts of the family’s isolated life (likely a contributor to her mother’s fatal depression) and connects them --- though often vaguely --- with the bohemian existence she embarked on as a teenager. She had no immediate goal but to leave home.
In 1977, having already gathered enough colorful and risky experiences for a book, Davidson embarked on the epic adventure for which she’d become world-famous for several years afterwards. Accompanied only by a dog and four pack camels, she set out alone to cross 1,700 miles of Australian desert on foot, all the way to the ocean. Without having made any formal notes about her trek, she poured her vast memories of it first to the prestigious National Geographic magazine, then into the bestselling book TRACKS, which years later became a movie.
How does anyone follow an act like that? Davidson’s response was to simply keep traveling, away from old memories, always looking for new ones. Never resting in one place or job for very long, she found herself becoming a writer without ever intending it as a career. And along the way, she experienced multiple found-and-lost relationships (of which the most significant was her long quasi-marriage to the Indian aristocrat Narendra Singh Bhati, until his death in 2011).
To describe Davidson as complicated, mercurial, brilliant, exotic or any of those mixed blessings that percolate into an artistic temperament still would be missing the mark. She is definitely her own brand, one in which fierce vulnerability is the norm.
Perhaps the big question, rhetorical as it may seem, is: Exactly who is “unfinished”? Is it the author, her mother, the reader, all of us? Maybe the core idea is in the asking, not the answer. All I know is that the more one reads in UNFINISHED WOMAN, the more apt its title becomes.
Reviewed by Pauline Finch
During the mid-1990s, as Davidson’s fast-paced life approached the same age, it seemed as if her “absorbed” (a word she has used) mother demanded some difficult attention. After much soul-searching, changes of direction, emotional backtracking, second-guessing, and numerous other complications that happen when suppressed memories run headlong into the here and now, UNFINISHED WOMAN was, well, finished --- the book that is.
Sometimes, long gestations pay off. This is a memoir that stands both proudly and imperfectly (gloriously so) as a testament to human ingenuity, uncertainty and raw courage.
Rather than being the continuous story of her relationship with both a living and remembered person, UNFINISHED WOMAN is often a crazy quilt of emotions, fragmented experiences, back-and-forth chronologies, and unanswered questions. Middle-aged Robyn openly struggles with preteen Robyn, whose life on a struggling outback homestead was by then a universe away from her incredibly migratory adulthood (Davidson has lived at more than 50 addresses all over the world).
Davidson’s book turns out to be not primarily about her mother, at least not in a conventional autobiographical sense. She works hard to build relatable portraits of her distant father, who seems to have had more big ideas than income, and of an older sister whose affections blew hot or cold depending on their mother’s current favorite. She draws together the few remembered images and artifacts of the family’s isolated life (likely a contributor to her mother’s fatal depression) and connects them --- though often vaguely --- with the bohemian existence she embarked on as a teenager. She had no immediate goal but to leave home.
In 1977, having already gathered enough colorful and risky experiences for a book, Davidson embarked on the epic adventure for which she’d become world-famous for several years afterwards. Accompanied only by a dog and four pack camels, she set out alone to cross 1,700 miles of Australian desert on foot, all the way to the ocean. Without having made any formal notes about her trek, she poured her vast memories of it first to the prestigious National Geographic magazine, then into the bestselling book TRACKS, which years later became a movie.
How does anyone follow an act like that? Davidson’s response was to simply keep traveling, away from old memories, always looking for new ones. Never resting in one place or job for very long, she found herself becoming a writer without ever intending it as a career. And along the way, she experienced multiple found-and-lost relationships (of which the most significant was her long quasi-marriage to the Indian aristocrat Narendra Singh Bhati, until his death in 2011).
To describe Davidson as complicated, mercurial, brilliant, exotic or any of those mixed blessings that percolate into an artistic temperament still would be missing the mark. She is definitely her own brand, one in which fierce vulnerability is the norm.
Perhaps the big question, rhetorical as it may seem, is: Exactly who is “unfinished”? Is it the author, her mother, the reader, all of us? Maybe the core idea is in the asking, not the answer. All I know is that the more one reads in UNFINISHED WOMAN, the more apt its title becomes.
Reviewed by Pauline Finch
October 13, 2023
Memoir set around the WORLD
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The UK cover of this memoir caught my eye. The author stares – smiles slightly in a knowing way – at the potential reader and you can almost feel a wink coming down the line,
This a memoir of the author’s life, spanning several decades. There is a solid opening about the author’s early years’ experiences in Queensland back in the mid 20th Century. The family moves across The Great Dividing Range (which brought back memories of geography lessons at school) in order to kickstart their lives. The narrative has hardly got going and there is an early mention of the momentous event, the suicide of the author’s mother – and that the author remembers to this day their very last interchange before she herself set off for school.
It was clearly, at many levels, a tricky childhood, she cannot remember her parents playing with her, although she describes times together that felt warm and harmonious. Music was part of the family dynamic, especially for her mother. Her sister was six years older and theirs was a fraught relationship at times. I guess there is a sense that it was quite an emotionally arid childhood, devoid of ‘connection’ perhaps. “Useless ugly stupid” was the refrain that embedded itself in her psyche, accompanying her throughout childhood. Where did she find her tremendous courage to travel as she did? “No doubt it had something to do with the games I played as a child – a female isolate in an imaginary and fantastical universe, battling the elements alone”, she says.
There is thought given to the siblings’ mother and her maternal intentions – perhaps she was a narcissist in some ways, but the author asserts that she and her sister were loved. I was left wondering how they knew they were loved because many of the interactions described were in fact quite unloving….
At 27 the author crossed Australia with dogs and camels carrying her luggage, something to do, to get away, to achieve. That adventure garnered publicity and accolades that she hadn’t anticipated. India lured her and still she continues to return there to this day; London provided a base for a while; other places provided respite and interest. When she gets to the age of forty-six she is only too aware that she has reached the point at which her mother chose to take her own life. In interim periods she has relationships that are marked by attachment and abandonment.
This is, in so many ways, a brave memoir, with a great level of detail, describing the feats she has undertaken so far against so much adversity. I feel that many of the experiences in the early years inhibit her sharing her own self, and although this is beautifully written, it can feel a little emotionally dry. I don’t feel I ever really – really – got to know the author who clearly has so much life experience to share with her readers.
[image error]
The UK cover of this memoir caught my eye. The author stares – smiles slightly in a knowing way – at the potential reader and you can almost feel a wink coming down the line,
This a memoir of the author’s life, spanning several decades. There is a solid opening about the author’s early years’ experiences in Queensland back in the mid 20th Century. The family moves across The Great Dividing Range (which brought back memories of geography lessons at school) in order to kickstart their lives. The narrative has hardly got going and there is an early mention of the momentous event, the suicide of the author’s mother – and that the author remembers to this day their very last interchange before she herself set off for school.
It was clearly, at many levels, a tricky childhood, she cannot remember her parents playing with her, although she describes times together that felt warm and harmonious. Music was part of the family dynamic, especially for her mother. Her sister was six years older and theirs was a fraught relationship at times. I guess there is a sense that it was quite an emotionally arid childhood, devoid of ‘connection’ perhaps. “Useless ugly stupid” was the refrain that embedded itself in her psyche, accompanying her throughout childhood. Where did she find her tremendous courage to travel as she did? “No doubt it had something to do with the games I played as a child – a female isolate in an imaginary and fantastical universe, battling the elements alone”, she says.
There is thought given to the siblings’ mother and her maternal intentions – perhaps she was a narcissist in some ways, but the author asserts that she and her sister were loved. I was left wondering how they knew they were loved because many of the interactions described were in fact quite unloving….
At 27 the author crossed Australia with dogs and camels carrying her luggage, something to do, to get away, to achieve. That adventure garnered publicity and accolades that she hadn’t anticipated. India lured her and still she continues to return there to this day; London provided a base for a while; other places provided respite and interest. When she gets to the age of forty-six she is only too aware that she has reached the point at which her mother chose to take her own life. In interim periods she has relationships that are marked by attachment and abandonment.
This is, in so many ways, a brave memoir, with a great level of detail, describing the feats she has undertaken so far against so much adversity. I feel that many of the experiences in the early years inhibit her sharing her own self, and although this is beautifully written, it can feel a little emotionally dry. I don’t feel I ever really – really – got to know the author who clearly has so much life experience to share with her readers.
July 29, 2024
Robyn Davidson is an Australian writer and adventurer known for her fearless spirit and introspective nature. She gained international fame with her book Tracks, which chronicles her solo trek across the Australian desert with a group of camels. Davidson has a keen eye for detail and a deep understanding of human nature, which she explores through her writing. Her life and works often delve into themes of identity, belonging, and the complexities of human relationships.
In her memoir Unfinished Woman, Davidson takes readers on a journey through her life's most intimate moments and reflections. The book explores her experiences across different cultures and landscapes, her relationships, and her ongoing quest for self-discovery. The memoir's central theme revolves around the idea of being "unfinished," as Davidson candidly discusses her struggles with self-doubt, incomplete projects, and the ever-changing nature of her identity. This introspective work offers a raw and honest look at the challenges of finding one's place in the world.
Davidson's writing style is both lyrical and straightforward, capturing the essence of her emotions and thoughts with clarity and depth. She uses her experiences to explore broader themes that resonate with readers, such as the search for meaning and the acceptance of one's vulnerabilities. The memoir serves as a reminder that life is a continuous journey of growth and understanding and that embracing our "unfinished" selves can lead to profound personal insights. Through her honest storytelling, Davidson encourages readers to reflect on their paths and the ongoing process of becoming.
In her memoir Unfinished Woman, Davidson takes readers on a journey through her life's most intimate moments and reflections. The book explores her experiences across different cultures and landscapes, her relationships, and her ongoing quest for self-discovery. The memoir's central theme revolves around the idea of being "unfinished," as Davidson candidly discusses her struggles with self-doubt, incomplete projects, and the ever-changing nature of her identity. This introspective work offers a raw and honest look at the challenges of finding one's place in the world.
Davidson's writing style is both lyrical and straightforward, capturing the essence of her emotions and thoughts with clarity and depth. She uses her experiences to explore broader themes that resonate with readers, such as the search for meaning and the acceptance of one's vulnerabilities. The memoir serves as a reminder that life is a continuous journey of growth and understanding and that embracing our "unfinished" selves can lead to profound personal insights. Through her honest storytelling, Davidson encourages readers to reflect on their paths and the ongoing process of becoming.
November 28, 2023
"Unfinished Woman" by Robyn Davidson is a compelling memoir that takes readers on an introspective journey through the author's unconventional life. Davidson, known for her remarkable solo trek across the Australian desert depicted in "Tracks," opens up about her personal struggles, relationships, and the challenges of forging her own path.
The narrative is a poignant exploration of identity and the constant evolution of self. Davidson's writing is raw, honest, and beautifully introspective, allowing readers to connect with her vulnerability. The memoir delves into themes of solitude, resilience, and the pursuit of authenticity.
While "Tracks" showcased Davidson's physical endurance, "Unfinished Woman" delves into the emotional and psychological terrain she navigates. Her reflections on love, loss, and the quest for meaning make this memoir a deeply human and relatable read.
With a lyrical prose that captures the essence of the Australian landscape and the complexities of the human spirit, "Unfinished Woman" is a testament to Davidson's storytelling prowess. This memoir offers not only a glimpse into the life of a remarkable adventurer but also serves as an inspiring exploration of what it means to be an unfinished, ever-evolving woman.
The narrative is a poignant exploration of identity and the constant evolution of self. Davidson's writing is raw, honest, and beautifully introspective, allowing readers to connect with her vulnerability. The memoir delves into themes of solitude, resilience, and the pursuit of authenticity.
While "Tracks" showcased Davidson's physical endurance, "Unfinished Woman" delves into the emotional and psychological terrain she navigates. Her reflections on love, loss, and the quest for meaning make this memoir a deeply human and relatable read.
With a lyrical prose that captures the essence of the Australian landscape and the complexities of the human spirit, "Unfinished Woman" is a testament to Davidson's storytelling prowess. This memoir offers not only a glimpse into the life of a remarkable adventurer but also serves as an inspiring exploration of what it means to be an unfinished, ever-evolving woman.
December 30, 2023
I sought out this book after hearing Robyn interviewed on national radio where I felt drawn to her and wanted to learn more about the various turns her life has taken. Her early fame, told in 'Tracks', the story of her crossing the Australian desert solo (well sort of, there were camels and ...but not to take away from the extraordinary accomplishment) totally passing me by some years back. Robyn is a most beautiful writer. Some of her sentences and phrases made me sigh or exclaim with delight.
As with so many books, memoirs such as this included, the sight of page numbers rapidly running out while there seems considerably more story to tell, can signal a rushed ending, and unfortunately I felt that happened here.
However I savoured every page, finding many instances of Robyn's childhood provoking memories of my own childhood. And for me that is the very best feeling that a memoir can deliver.
As with so many books, memoirs such as this included, the sight of page numbers rapidly running out while there seems considerably more story to tell, can signal a rushed ending, and unfortunately I felt that happened here.
However I savoured every page, finding many instances of Robyn's childhood provoking memories of my own childhood. And for me that is the very best feeling that a memoir can deliver.
December 14, 2023
Strange and charming book although difficult to say what it is about.
The solid ground should be autobiographical facts but they are not.
Robyn starts with spelling out doubts about credibility of our memory and memory of people who knew or met her.
Even the bare facts which could be verified, are not quite clear.
Of course I was curious what is her memory of time spent in London with Salman Rushdie. From other sources I know that she was his partner in London, I found a quite clear reference to Robyn in Satanic Verses.
In this case, Robyn in her book, makes a very sensible jink - she just mentions that she fell in love with a wonderful man and they spent 2 years together.
Also Robyn's Wikipedia page is extremely dry.
We have to rely on the book and I found it quite rewarding. Difficult to explain, I just felt charmed.
The solid ground should be autobiographical facts but they are not.
Robyn starts with spelling out doubts about credibility of our memory and memory of people who knew or met her.
Even the bare facts which could be verified, are not quite clear.
Of course I was curious what is her memory of time spent in London with Salman Rushdie. From other sources I know that she was his partner in London, I found a quite clear reference to Robyn in Satanic Verses.
In this case, Robyn in her book, makes a very sensible jink - she just mentions that she fell in love with a wonderful man and they spent 2 years together.
Also Robyn's Wikipedia page is extremely dry.
We have to rely on the book and I found it quite rewarding. Difficult to explain, I just felt charmed.
April 4, 2024
I will read this again - it's a psychologically complex story of a child bereaved, who grows into an adult bereaved. I listened on Audible (a very good reading) but as it's not a linear narrative, I need to go back over several sections where I slightly lost the thread.
Davidson's mother committed suicide when she was 12, and this is a book about all she has not been able to say or feel or explore about the impact of this loss until now. I admire the honesty of the account, the way Davidson makes explicit her place as the unreliable narrator of her own life, and her lack of self-pity: all of which adds up to what feels like a very reliable, compassionate, sometimes excruciatingly austere, account. At times, I wanted to give Davidson a hug, but I sense that there is nothing she would like less from her reader.
Davidson's mother committed suicide when she was 12, and this is a book about all she has not been able to say or feel or explore about the impact of this loss until now. I admire the honesty of the account, the way Davidson makes explicit her place as the unreliable narrator of her own life, and her lack of self-pity: all of which adds up to what feels like a very reliable, compassionate, sometimes excruciatingly austere, account. At times, I wanted to give Davidson a hug, but I sense that there is nothing she would like less from her reader.
December 13, 2024
A bit self indulgent. And I don’t like the way it jumps around time wise.
Obsessing about her mother and father
I enjoyed the descriptions of her time in the Himalayas with or without Narendrea. Descriptions of people, way of life and natural landscape.
Wanted to read more about her experiences with the desert nomads. Keeps saying how disastrous it was, but no details. Maybe it will come later, or maybe she wants us to buy and read the book about it.
Her time in the cottage. Foraging, reading - interesting
Mentions Igor (Frenchman) in Armidale - Grotowski theatre Could it have been Igor and Joey from La Boheme cafe in Bellingen
Did Performance of Oedipus Rex on the banks of the Bellingen River
I got bored in the end by her wallowing introspection
Wikipedia mentions a 3 year relationship with Salman Rushdie in the 1980’s. Was this the relationship she mentions early in the book? Can’t give his name as he may still be under a fatwa?? No mention of Narendra in Wikipedia. And what happened to him in the novel?
Awarded OAM in June this year in King’s birthday honours.
She was born a year after me and 2 days before my birthday. We lived through similar times and had SOME similar experiences.
Obsessing about her mother and father
I enjoyed the descriptions of her time in the Himalayas with or without Narendrea. Descriptions of people, way of life and natural landscape.
Wanted to read more about her experiences with the desert nomads. Keeps saying how disastrous it was, but no details. Maybe it will come later, or maybe she wants us to buy and read the book about it.
Her time in the cottage. Foraging, reading - interesting
Mentions Igor (Frenchman) in Armidale - Grotowski theatre Could it have been Igor and Joey from La Boheme cafe in Bellingen
Did Performance of Oedipus Rex on the banks of the Bellingen River
I got bored in the end by her wallowing introspection
Wikipedia mentions a 3 year relationship with Salman Rushdie in the 1980’s. Was this the relationship she mentions early in the book? Can’t give his name as he may still be under a fatwa?? No mention of Narendra in Wikipedia. And what happened to him in the novel?
Awarded OAM in June this year in King’s birthday honours.
She was born a year after me and 2 days before my birthday. We lived through similar times and had SOME similar experiences.
September 12, 2025
I would like to give this book more than five stars. I am so glad to hear someone say that, although time is linear, memories and self-building are not. No, they aren't! And, yes, the present moment is all that exists and the planet and universe do not notice or care about individual humans. The universe is vibrating with energy and totally not relying on me.
Davidson's unfocused, not goal-oriented life is relatable. Most people are doing their best in planning and reacting to what comes to them.
All of this doesn't mean life isn't worth living. It just nudges us toward not taking things too seriously.
I enjoyed both the format and the content of this memoir.
Davidson's unfocused, not goal-oriented life is relatable. Most people are doing their best in planning and reacting to what comes to them.
All of this doesn't mean life isn't worth living. It just nudges us toward not taking things too seriously.
I enjoyed both the format and the content of this memoir.
January 6, 2026
Unfinished Woman is not merely a memoir; it is an excavation of a life lived in defiance of certainty. Robyn Davidson writes with a rare blend of intellectual rigor, emotional restraint, and luminous honesty. Rather than romanticizing adventure, she interrogates the inner cost of freedom, grief, and self-invention. Her reflections on loss, especially the long shadow cast by her mother’s death, are quietly devastating. This is a book about movement across deserts and continents, but more profoundly, across memory and time. Wise, searching, and exquisitely written, Unfinished Woman lingers long after the final page.
January 26, 2024
I read Tracks and Desert Places many years ago and loved them both, and I suppose I was thinking there'd be some added info in this one, some behind-the-scenes details about those journeys. Not really. Still, much of interest - Davidson's gutsy, self-effacing coverage of her mental health issues, the details of her childhood, the fallout from her mother's suicide, her long but fraught relationship with an Indian prince/politician, and her constant search for somewhere to belong, still make for enthralling reading. And her writing, again, is beautiful.
October 18, 2024
Once I put my mind in sync with the free flowing stream of consciousness I absolutely loved this memoir.
It was a refreshing way to read a memoir with admission of the fact that some memories are fuzzy and our memories do not work in straight lines.
What an extraordinary woman. What a life well lived. A woman not of her age, but also of her age. Her description of her depression was so accurate. She is right, depression is such an inadequate word.
I felt a connection with her scientific mind and yearning for journey and adventure.
It was a refreshing way to read a memoir with admission of the fact that some memories are fuzzy and our memories do not work in straight lines.
What an extraordinary woman. What a life well lived. A woman not of her age, but also of her age. Her description of her depression was so accurate. She is right, depression is such an inadequate word.
I felt a connection with her scientific mind and yearning for journey and adventure.
October 24, 2023
After hearing an interview with Robyn on radio I was captivated by y her voice and the melodic way she spoke. I found the same tone in this book - beautifully put together in my very amateur view. That said I did find it hard going at times and of course it was written so she could try to make some sense of her mother’s death. Not the memorable story I was hoping for but just the same a heart rending read.
January 6, 2024
Stunningly good writing. A moving, intensely engaging memoir of the author's childhood, young adulthood and especially of her mother, who suicided when she was a young girl, the loss of whom irrevocably marked her fate, for better or worse she's unprepared to admit, although she does concede it otherwise may have been far more conventional. Which would have been our loss, as to share in her richly unconventional experiences is a delight.
January 28, 2024
Reading and re-reading the book Tracks was my reason to want to know more about the life of- and the person Robyn Davidson.
My romanticised idea of Robyns life before and after her desert trip was shattered by this memoir. It describes an adventurous but tough life, sharpened by the roughness of 'modern' Australia. Her way of thinking is often deeply familiar for those who can get puzzled by human kind; their everyday interactions and their systems of society.
Robyn writes beautifully and I do hope she is happy. Although her memoir shows us there are (maybe too) many values, goals and personality traits she ranks above happiness.
My romanticised idea of Robyns life before and after her desert trip was shattered by this memoir. It describes an adventurous but tough life, sharpened by the roughness of 'modern' Australia. Her way of thinking is often deeply familiar for those who can get puzzled by human kind; their everyday interactions and their systems of society.
Robyn writes beautifully and I do hope she is happy. Although her memoir shows us there are (maybe too) many values, goals and personality traits she ranks above happiness.
January 30, 2024
Davidson recollects memories of her past as she navigates her way through life - her happy childhood, growing up in country Australia; the destabilising effect of her mother’s suicide; a nomadic, carefree life as she matures and wanders the world, searching for her place in it. Some of the transitions from different time periods were difficult to follow, and, at times, I found the story a bit self-deprecating.
March 17, 2024
Philosophical, thought provoking, tragic but at the same time inspiring. At times I had to remind myself it was memoir as Robyn’s life involved a long list of interesting experiences. Interesting doesn’t sound strong enough – perhaps extraordinary. The book isn’t chronological, so it sometimes feels like you are in Robyn’s head as she’s remembering random events. Her writing is intellectual and I admit I had to look up a few words.
August 17, 2024
It’s a fascinating story and describes an incredible life but the jumping around between memories and the attempt to present memories in a stream of consciousness style, lets it down. Ultimately it’s the quality of the writing that made me skim right through it, too many mangled sentences and words that actually don’t mean anything. The author even says at one point she is not sure if she can write and I can’t say I entirely disagreed with her.
September 12, 2024
I loved Robyn Davidson's books Tracks and Desert Places so I was looking forward to reading this one. However I found it a bit of a disappointment because while the writing was beautiful, the chronology was confusing in the way in which it skipped backwards and forwards throughout the narrative. That I listened to the audio book probably didn't help as it would've been too difficult to refer back to earlier passages for a reference to what was happening.
May 27, 2025
This is a remarkable book. By a remarkable woman.
It takes me back in many ways, to the decades of my youth: so many shared ideas, values, and perceptions. Her life, though is one of deeper exploration and more intense change.
Some aspects of the story are frustrating : how did she earn money, how was she able to move around the world so easily? I guess the answers would make for a more prosaic read.
It takes me back in many ways, to the decades of my youth: so many shared ideas, values, and perceptions. Her life, though is one of deeper exploration and more intense change.
Some aspects of the story are frustrating : how did she earn money, how was she able to move around the world so easily? I guess the answers would make for a more prosaic read.
January 17, 2024
I'm not sure what to think about this book, it wasn't what I expected. The memoir harks back to her childhood, teenage and life memories, emphasis on the parents than Robyn herself. Her 7 year relationship with Salman Rushdie was not mentioned at all, one assumes that "a catastrophic relationship of 7 years" was this one.
July 3, 2024
Memoirs are an enticing genre and this one made more pleasurable by exquisite writing. That said, the book wandered between, back and forth trying to both gain traction and understanding of her life making it hard to follow and, at times, hard to rationalize. Your life is not your own and the circumstances of your life continue to have hold.
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