Tissue by Madison Griffiths
Tissue (2023) is Madison Griffiths’ first nonfiction offering, a memoir detailing their experience of having an abortion during Melbourne’s long COVID-19 lockdown, and interrogating how abortion interacted with many tendrils of her life, relationships and the political landscape that shaped her experience.
At the risk of sounding indelicate, Griffiths breathes life into the subject matter in that she centres the lives of the people who have abortions – herself most notably. The word ‘life’ carries weight in this space, and I do not use it lightly. Griffiths offers an unguarded and sincere account of how her abortion played out, contextualising the spaces and relationships she inhabited before, during and after. They throw a wide net, speaking candidly about their relationship with their partners, their mother, their body, their pregnancy, and of course their abortion: the act of it and the concept. There is an extensive analysis of body politics and womanhood, and a tender insight into the topics of queerness and grief, a refined lens not typically afforded in the conversation around abortion. Tissue is full of life and Griffiths finds power in writing hers.
Each of the ten essays, bookended by a prologue and an epilogue, stand alone as strong pieces. However, they echo one another, creating a canon of work that strengthened as I read on. In ‘Abyzou’s Legacy,’ the third essay, Griffith’s writes about what makes a ‘self’, reflecting on the imperative to consider oneself in the decision of abortion, cutting through the noise that often surrounds the politics of the procedure. They write: “If the pregnant person wishes not to be pregnant then pregnancy is the betrayal of self.” Essays later in ‘I Want to Write about Love,’ Griffiths has turned the essence of this sentence from a statement to a poem, considering a love of oneself to be the antithesis of betrayal, rather an unwavering commitment to selfhood. The essays in between ask what it means to be a person who is pregnant, a person who is not and a person all your own. They write with a clear, sharp and focused lens turned inward, their writing piercing in the same way a beam of light from a magnifying glass in the sun is.
Griffiths acknowledges the controversy of abortion head-on. Their career until this point has prepared them for it: as a staunch advocate and activist against domestic abuse as chronicled in their co-production of the podcast Tender, as well as much of their nonfiction work. She achieves in Tissue what her opponents never can: a commitment to nuance that bathes in the multitudes. Griffiths is unwavering in her refusal to simplify. When they write about people who oppose access to abortion, who try to construct rigid morality traps, Griffiths breaks the binary they try to argue within. She introduces light and shade to the argument, the tool for her endurance in the fight against those critics.
“For those who insist abortion is murder, there is nothing more terrifying than a person who carves home out of the love she already knows, who does not care to fall in love again, at least not with the tiny, soft mass of tissue that will inevitably tear her insides, and outsides, and the world she has come to know, apart.”
Reading Tissue brings a humanity to abortion, and called me in close to the conversation. Of course, this was a topic I already felt strongly about, having held the hands of my friends as they navigated pregnancies they did or didn’t want, stood at picket lines and protests advocating for the right to choose. And yet, Griffiths hollowed out a space that I had not yet felt existed regarding the topic of abortion. In the essay ‘In Defence of the Great Unwomaning,’ she writes about queerness and gender with a tenderness rarely imparted in the discussion about abortion. This book, but this chapter specifically, allowed me to feel seen as a reader outside the bounds of womanhood. Further, Griffiths reveres her queerness; it is not viewed as added complexity to the topic, but as a facet of herself that helped her to metabolise her abortion.
“My womanhood didn’t give me the tools to overcome the designated sinfulness of my abortion, my queerness did.”
As a queer person, Griffiths had clear standing to introduce themselves as a leading voice at this intersection, and yet made room for many diverse voices in the chapter. This is the first piece of writing I have seen on abortion that addresses transness and transmasculinity overtly, and there is something special about Griffiths’ ability to survey the landscape of her topics so extensively.
Essays like these push the gates wide open, creating a collection of essays that feel whole in their considerations. I felt spoken to directly, a testament to how Griffiths writes with closeness built into her style. Tissue is a book about abortion, but it is a book about everyone because this is a story about people. It is about what it means to choose, and more pointedly, to choose yourself.
Em Readman is a queer writer from Perth, Australia. They have been published in Aniko Press, the Suburban Review, Swim Meet Lit Magazine, and Bowen St Press, amongst others. They are forthcoming in an anthology with Fremantle Press.