Grace Tame's latest book touches on love, neurodivergence, abuse and family

In the two years since Tame accepted her 2021 Australian of the Year award, we have had a front row seat to her openness and vulnerability. It could be assumed Tame is someone we have already worked out. A quick Google search is all it takes to find a wealth of media appearances, all detailing her speeches on her childhood abuse and campaigns.

Yet the release of her memoir on Tuesday, The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner, reveals the intricacies and nuances of someone many think they already know. It's in the midst of its release that we're chatting over a video call. The sun's brightly shining behind Tame so she drags a hotel couch across the room for better lighting - for my sake not hers.

One could be nervous when meeting the 2021 Australian of the Year when meeting this Australian of the Year. That is, until Tame's ability to connect comes through. She's human and she's dealing with bad lighting during video calls just like the rest of us.

"When you see a person who's in the public eye, go on a talk show as themselves or do an interview as themselves, they are a version of themselves and that's not to say that's in-authenticity, it's just self-preservation," Tame says.

"As much as I have been really forthright and open and honest, I've also been careful to be protective of the people that I love, especially those closest to me."

Her book breaks down the social constructs held about trauma, survivors and Grace Tame as a person, through delving into extreme detail about those closest to her and memories she cherishes - the good and the bad.

"It's my voice, it's my work and I'm really proud of it," she says.

After witnessing the separation of her parents at aged two - both of who went on to find happy relationships when Tame was young - she finds her existence and the way she thinks as a neurodivergent person to be as much as "a participant in life", describing herself as a natural observer.

"By virtue of that kind of upbringing, I've been very clued into how the media operates and one of the things that they detest is nuance," she says.

It's worth noting that when it comes to the topics Tame fights for - trauma recognition, dis-empowering abusers and giving a voice to those who are vulnerable - nuance is key.

"My story is going to outlive these fleeting articles," she said.

The young activist describes herself as a deep empath, constantly putting herself in other people's shoes. It's a quality that is replicated in her memoir, as she makes the reader feel what she has experienced throughout her life.

She reveals what was going through her head in some of her most significant interviews or speeches, particularly on one of her first television panel appearances in February 2021 - just after receiving her Australian of the Year award a month prior.

"I was ... made to qualify myself through my trauma and it's a feeling that you can't really explain to anybody who hasn't been right there in the moment in the hot seat, live on national television," she says.

"Everyone else had their paper credentials, everyone else had their degree ... and me, I was reduced to the thing that happened to me, the abuse that was perpetrated against me and I was told that wouldn't happen."

Seeing from the eyes of Tame in these situations, where she isn't warned her trauma will be the feature, feels terrifying as the reader. There is a disappointment too - being reduced to one's trauma for a quick news grab is far from humanising.

"It's as good as traumatising an animal and I can put on a brave face but I can feel all the colour go in my face, I feel my body tense up and I feel like I'm back in the room with a man who's four times my age, plus twice my size," she says.

Tame's book is not only about her past, but also goes into her loved one's history. You are introduced to "The Matriarchy" in her family, which includes her mother and her four sisters, all with powerful traits. Tame credits them all for teaching her that "nothing [is] more important or more powerful than love and connection".

The difficult areas of her family are also included, such as her maternal grandfather Cliff, who treated Tame's grandmother and mother poorly.

Tame writes of a time her mother volunteered at a prison Cliff worked at, her mother chatted to a prisoner and then walked off.

"After Mum left, one of the prisoners said he fancied her. He was a convicted murderer. Cliff then gave him Mum's home phone number and address. Her own father," she writes.

It's one example of how poorly Cliff treated the family that Tame vows she will never attend his funeral.

Friends and past lovers, including her ex-husband from the United States, are described throughout the pages, each piecing together how Grace Tame came to be Grace Tame.

The struggles and benefits on how she perceives the world as a woman with autism is another area Tame, as an author, unpacks for her reader (and myself, during our interview).

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"My neurons in my neural pathways are so rigidly set ... to give you a visual image, have you ever seen that Olympic sport the luge?" she asks after seeing the mild confusion on my face. She turns her side to the screen, imitating an athlete riding a flat sled on a course of ice face up and feet first.

"They're basically like glorified sperms and they go really fast," she grins back at me, "I'm very tangential in my thinking".

Her way of thinking comes through with the style of her book.

Passages go deep into difficult and often horrifying topics, such as why defending any form of child abuse cannot be justified. As Tame tells the reader "it's convenient that you can't look a dead child in the face. Yet you can hear a child abuser's contrived confessions".

Just as you begin to process this intense topic, the next paragraph opens with "back to Nan" and you are sliding straight ahead like a luge athlete into the history of Tame's grandmother "who sits at the opposite end of the morality spectrum".

Tame's earth-shattering Australian of the Year speech was heavily praised for the power it represented. But while she was becoming a representative figure for Australia's #MeToo movement and power to women, she was still physically suffering.

"I was still so thin from being in a bout of anorexia that I wasn't menstruating," she says.

The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner takes the reader back with Tame, in the hours following that speech. It was there, in her hotel room, after the applause, after the pomp and circumstance of the awards night, and as her now-fiance, Max Heerey slept, that you start to feel the loneliness and pain set in for Tame.

"The one person who couldn't be there to share it with me, was me when I was a child," she writes.

"In those final moments of silence, I found myself. The 15-year-old girl in her uniform. And I sat with her. I held her. I cried."

While there was great pain for Tame to tell her story, she is confident in knowing it is a power that all survivors hold.

"We're seeing this remarkable thing at the moment, where people are seeing that simply by opening up and sharing their story that they're reclaiming their power," she says.

"What we've been conditioned falsely to believe is this shame, it's actually a shame at the people who perpetrated this thing against us."

In writing about her own abuser's dark, repulsive and horrifying actions, Tame sees it to "disallow perpetrators from having an opportunity to keep going and operating".

As more stories are shared, Tame sees it as an opportunity for other survivors to find their voice, and aims to hear more in her work as an activist, particularly from those in marginalised groups.

"Those stories are marked by added layers of systemic disadvantage that means ... their paths to justice are even harder, if not impossible, because of those added layers," she says.

"They're going to have key differences that will shed light in the dark corners about their perpetrators, that will contribute to demystifying this veil of secrecy and silence."

For Tame, she says with complete certainty "I will write more books," going beyond her abuse, beyond the daily politics and beyond this part of her life.

"This is how I say goodbye to that time, but not for him. For me. And for every other boy and girl whose shame should never have been, because no one ever deserves to be treated this way," she writes.

The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner, by Grace Tame. Macmillan Australia. $49.99.