Because I Couldn't Kill You (A Memoir)

Kelly Koopman brilliantly interrogates the complex beauty and brutality of the everyday as she struggles with the legacies of trauma in the homes and bones of ‘ordinary South African families’. She wades through the flotsam and jetsam of generations, among shipwrecks and sunken treasures in an attempt at familial and collective healing. Sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious, she faces up to herself as a brown, newly privileged ‘elder millennial’, caught between middle-class aspirations and social justice ideals. An artist, a daughter, a queer woman in love, she is in pursuit of healing, demanding justice while trying to lose that last five kilograms to the great disappointment of her feminist self.