Early in My Body Keeps Your Secrets, her second book, Osborne-Crowley is in her psychotherapist’s office in Sydney while on a publicity tour for I Choose Elena. She had experienced a panic attack the night before this meeting. ‘I should be better by now,’ she says to him. ‘I think your book will save lives,’ he replies. Both of these things are true: the generosity and bravery of sharing one’s trauma, and the impact such an act can have on the self.

My Body Keeps Your Secrets is a process of further discovery. ‘To have the body of a woman or a non-binary person is to be constantly punishing and reimagining it,’ Osborne-Crowley writes, speaking of a ‘false self’ that must be built to survive in the face of interpersonal and structural violence. She hypothesises that emotional responses are a product of structural oppression, and a failure to recognise this is an act of institutional gaslighting.

Extending the lens beyond herself, Osborne-Crowley interviewed more than one hundred women and non-binary people about their experiences: of abuse, both physical and emotional; of eating disorders; of identifying outside of a gendered norm; of the performance of emotional labour, primarily in heterosexual relationships. These disparate stories are unified by the driving force of shame, the control that patriarchy wields over marginalised bodies and minds – and the rising desire to push back.

In addressing the dilemma of trauma voyeurism, the author notes that she has only shared what her interview subjects have willingly divulged: ‘I know, from personal experience, how exposing it feels to offer your story to the public domain, and that feeling is only tempered by the knowledge that you did so from a place of agency and empowerment.’ This self-awareness and empathy form the backbone of the work; the reader, too, feels safe in the hands of the writer.

Osborne-Crowley’s commitment to intersectionality and inclusion shows through the range of interview subjects, traversing gender, sexuality, and race. She signposts that there are existences – for instance being non-binary or a person of colour – that she cannot understand firsthand. Indeed, there are many nuances – as in the story of Sunita, who shares her feelings of exclusion from her Malaysian-Pakistani community – that are unable to be wholly conveyed through an external proxy.

When Osborne-Crowley refers to non-binary people, she is almost always talking about those assigned female at birth. The distinction is respectful, but the grouping – ‘women and non-binary people’ – suggests that there is a sameness to these experiences that overlooks the rejection of femaleness declared by a non-binary identification. Yet it also speaks to the reality of non-normative genders being dismissed by power structures, and the harm enacted upon marginalised bodies that reinforces a patriarchal, binary framework. The violence Osborne-Crowley describes is undoubtedly skewed towards anyone who is not a cisgender man, but in attempting to communicate this, the limitation of language emerges.

Osborne-Crowley’s dual spheres – the professional (journalist, researcher) and the personal (someone sharing her individual story) – are effectively inhabited through her dexterous form. The book straddles memoir and reportage, balancing personal anecdotes with research to present a holistic view. The author has great flair, with highly stylised, novelistic writing that draws inspiration from the hallmarks of both literary fiction and narrative non-fiction. There are no quotation marks for dialogue; quotes are repeated and italicised for impact.

As previously mentioned, I Choose Elena presented literature as a major force in Osborne-Crowley’s recovery. A recurring feature of her previous work, both essayistic and journalistic, is the referencing of books that have helped her to recover. That continues here, with quotes from novels by the likes of Sally Rooney and Bernardine Evaristo, to non-fiction writers and memoirists such as Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson, to pop- and clinical-psychology writers such as Brené Brown and Bessel van der Kolk, from whose seminal work The Body Keeps the Score (2014) this book draws its title. Osborne-Crowley skilfully weaves these texts through her own, showing the myriad ways in which trauma can be experienced, interpreted, and retold.

One of the most poignant threads is the author’s description of her nascent queerness and how it brought her back into her body. Having often been used as a weapon or defence, sex is not enjoyable for her, but with women it is ‘genuinely positive’ – she makes a distinction here from pleasure – because it allows access to a ‘sacred space’, which is to say safety, nurturing, acceptance. Osborne-Crowley writes with candour of the impostor syndrome she experienced coming out as bisexual in her twenties, of being afraid of not having the ‘authority’ to write about it. The idea of queerness as salvation is one of the book’s most touching revelations – a statement of personhood and autonomy that reclaims what has been stolen by structures and institutions.

It is especially interesting reading this book in the context of Covid-19. ‘The structural impact of this pandemic will be gendered,’ Osborne-Crowley writes – an extension of the institutional dismissal of women’s experiences of pain and illness. The pandemic provides an apt backdrop for many stories shared here, highlighting the perpetual precarity of life for those in marginalised bodies. Osborne-Crowley beautifully and harrowingly illustrates the isolation of this time as she relates her experience of moving to London to write, only to be locked inside, alone with her trauma, as she prepares it for the world to read.

Because it is such an ambitious undertaking and such a patchwork of experiences, My Body Keeps Your Secrets does sometimes fall short of its high aspirations. Some of the work has been published as mid-length essays in publications such as Meanjin, and is only lightly edited here. Though the work is broken into loosely themed sections, it may have been structurally more sound as an essay collection rather than as a single work. Some arguments are less convincing than others – for instance, a chapter on social media and body image offers little that has not been theorised before – and the links between the stories and experiences can feel tenuous. But Osborne-Crowley’s lyrical writing ensures that even when the thesis is not airtight, the work is still readable and compelling.

Ultimately, My Body Keeps Your Secrets is a documentation of reclamation. It is not about victimhood, but about how survivors show up for themselves day after day. It is about seeing and being seen; about dispelling shame and secrets, disposing of false selves, and stepping, fractured but whole, into the light.