I mean, I thought of it more as a formative experience. It provided a lifetime’s material for reflection I went to an all-boys school for two years, and the atmosphere of sexism and misogyny was eye-opening. Was your experience at high school also part of your ‘construction’? Her mother, Anne Manne, is a journalist and social philosopher. In 2005, he was voted Australia’s leading public intellectual in a survey conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald. He was a professor in politics and culture until his retirement in 2012. 2 Her father, Robert Manne, was born in Melbourne to parents who were refugees from Europe. Issues of social justice, and racism in particular, were always very salient to me growing up. That was a frequent topic of conversation around the dinner table. There was a real awareness within our household of the reality of racism – and that encompassed an increasing awareness of the plight of indigenous Australians. He has a keen interest in the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust, and that was something I was very conscious of growing up. Did that help to form you at all?Ībsolutely. I had an extremely happy childhood, in a wonderful, nurturing environment. They gave me what a lot of girls don’t have, which is a sense that my mind mattered. I wrote a lot of terrible, childish poetry with my mother. I think my parents gave me a great gift, really, in treating me like a budding intellectual from a very young age. For example, car rides with my dad would often be him giving me mini-lectures on Russian history, or we would have really in-depth philosophical conversations. You grew up outside Melbourne and recently said: ‘I was very much constructed to be what I am.’ 1 What did you mean by that? That kind of individualism in highlighting one person at the expense of others is just not how I think. I’m very flattered, but I would never think of myself in those terms. Allowing for hyperbole, is that how you see yourself?
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The Guardian has called you ‘a once-in-a-generation mind’, and the feminist writer Amanda Marcotte has hailed you as ‘the Simone de Beauvoir of the 21st century’.