West Girls by Laura Elizabeth Woollett
“I had a talent back then for dancing to anything and saying things my parents didn’t want to hear. I had other talents. Going where I was told to go. Not complaining too much. Looking good in stupid outfits. Looking ethereal when I was merely hungry and tired. Wandering around drunk and high in unknown places without getting murdered or even assaulted.”
West Girls (2023) is the fourth work of fiction from literary fave Laura Elizabeth Woollett. It centres around Luna Lewis, an Australian-Maltese teenager growing up in Western Australia to divorced parents and an Indonesian stepmother. Although we follow Luna’s journey through most of the book, there are alternating chapters exploring the perspectives of other connected characters.
A chubby child and early adolescent, we dive deeper into Luna’s world as she reaches her late teenage years and is blooming into quite the young beauty, garnering the attention of everyone around her – including the popular girls, “called ‘the Barbies,’ sometimes ‘the Aryan Sisterhood,’ sometimes just ‘the Blondes.’”
This transformation and the power it provides her is something Luna begins to hunger for. Acutely and egotistically aware of her looks, she knows her beauty offers her a ticket out of her hometown, opening a doorway to something more expansive:
“Before I was beautiful, I cared about grades. Now, every time I shut myself in my room to study, I ended up taking my clothes off and flirting with my reflection for hours – running my fingers over the xylophone of my ribs, the skullhorns of my hips, until my body thrummed with lust.”
Through a budding friendship with one of the Blondes – Caitlyn B, CB for short – Luna gains access to a modelling agency where her dark hair and ambiguous ethnic background guarantee the founder's interest in her. Encouraged to claim the label of ‘Eurasian’ and to change her name to Luna Lu, Luna knows she’s on the cusp of what she’s been craving: an international modelling career. Unaware at best and uncaring at worst about what this appropriation means for her, Luna’s Indonesian step family find her new moniker hilarious:
“‘Luna Luuuuu!’ Indah shouted across the room, and all the tantes cracked up. They couldn’t get over the hilarity of me taking a Chinese name to move up in the world.”
As Luna’s career peaks, she comes to realise that her beauty is short-lived, and she starts to reflect on the sacrifices she’s made to pursue modelling and beauty, including failing school and enduring the rampant exploitation of the industry:
“I was so golden, I could do things like work for almost no money and tell myself I wasn’t exploited because the drugs were free and there was always somewhere to sleep and hunger was part of the magic. I could fuck gross old men and tell myself beauty needs a beast to get off, though I always preferred beauty-on-beauty.”
Privilege – alongside ideas of who gets to be considered beautiful, powerful and worthy –is explored throughout as Luna traverses the globe, coming into contact with a range of other characters. Katie, a German traveller who is introduced briefly during the earlier chapters, gets a chapter to herself as she finds work in a down-and-out WA mining town. Rikki, a white South African, obsessively falls for an Indigenous boy in her Law class and rallies against her father’s mining wealth. Although Woollett continuously brings us back to Luna, this isn’t always coherent, and sometimes new characters are dropped in as though we already know who they are.
The blurb gives the impression that we are exploring Luna’s story. While this is the case for about a third of the book, these other chapters sometimes felt crammed in, and Woollett switches between first and third-person narration. Woollett has explained that West Girls stems from a short story collection idea she had while on an artist residency in Jakarta that never fully came to fruition, so there’s perhaps some explanation there. Some readers may also recognise one of the early chapters from a short story Woollett had published in Kill Your Darlings New Australian Voices anthology 2019 (another small thing that threw me out of the overall narrative a little bit, as I had that niggling ‘I’m sure I’ve read this before’ feeling). I just couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be a novel, a short story collection or some other hybrid thing.
Nevertheless, West Girls is a biting read that gives us everything we have come to expect from Woollett’s incredible creative talents and razor-sharp wit. Luna and CB, in particular, are fantastically developed characters, and the focus on Perth with descriptions of the surrounding areas are done exceptionally well.
There’s much to be relished in these pages, and my only wish is that we could have spent more time with Luna and CB across their experiences over the ambitious range of other voices Woollett brings in.
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com
