Review: Woman Uninterrupted, by Brodie Kane

When TV personality and podcast host, Brodie Kane, set out to write her memoir, Woman Uninterrupted, she didn’t plan for the book to start with ‘shitting in the shower in Paris.’ Despite being warned there’d be gross parts in the preface and on the front cover, I wasn’t expecting that either.

But Kane assures readers ‘not all stories will be disgusting,’ and hopes her book feels like ‘a yarn shared with a friend at the end of the week, over a couple of gins and a few bowls of fries.’

Kane delivers on both promises: the gory stories are (thankfully) just a couple chapters at the start, and she does take us to surprising, amusing, and sometimes intense places.

Kane’s memoir reflects a life lived large, whether she’s spooning All Blacks’ Ritchie McCaw atop a mountain, shimmying to Tina Turner in the final round of Dancing with the Stars, or entrusting her passport to a Greek dentist while she works out how to pay for her emergency treatment.

What I also wasn’t expecting, but was pleasantly surprised by, was Kane’s growing vulnerability throughout the book. We get to see all sides of who she is – not just the public persona interviewing celebrities, but also the personal experiences that have shaped her, like being made redundant and ploughing through eleven bottles of hard liquor during the first lockdown. This memoir is definitely a collection of funny yarns, but some are also deeply affecting.

Kane takes a few pages to relax into her writing, but she gets there by chapter three, recounting her time spent in the New Zealand Army. She’s fresh out of high school and we follow her through a series of bootcamps and trials – brutal drills scaling mountains and sleeping in muddy ditches filled with raindrops and tears. We watch her learn to fire machine gun rounds and become violently ill while training in the jungles of Brunei (where we encounter the final gross moments of the book, but they are earned).

The last chapters of Woman, Uninterrupted are the most memorable. One emotional, politically-driven story recounts an abortion Kane had while the procedure was still criminalised in New Zealand. Reading about the hoops she had to jump through and the shame she felt along the way made me so furious, I wanted to join her as she counter-protested the protesters who were harassing patients outside an abortion clinic in Christchurch.

Another touching chapter is dedicated to her impressive mum, Jo, who’s swum the Cook Strait twice, completed nine Coast to Coasts, and ran multiple ultramarathons. Jo makes several appearances throughout the memoir, making it clear she’s a pillar in Kane’s life. When young Kane had no pet to take to her school’s Pet Day, most parents would have sent their child to school empty-handed. But Jo showed up in a gorilla costume and stayed in character all day – even grunting and screeching at the teachers.

Towards the end of most chapters, Kane reflects on the lessons she’s learned and offers takeaways. These pages could have been cut – Kane’s deft storytelling makes the meanings clear to the reader without having to rehash them. And some topics, like balancing high performance and achievement with self-care and downtime, are still a work in progress for Kane. Any memoir is a stake in the ground at a point in a person’s life, and Kane admits herself, ‘I don’t have all the answers, but I am trying my best.’

Overall, Brodie Kane shares a series of life experiences that are both impressive, entertaining and genuinely touching. She’s pushed to extreme places, her self-described ‘pit of despair’, and somehow finds her way back every single time – all while making a joke or two. So grab a gin, a bowl of fries and as Kane says, ‘have a crack.’ Becs Tetley is a nonfiction writer and editor based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her personal essays have appeared in The Spinoff, Turbine | Kapohau, Headland, Folly Journal, and elsewhere. She can be found on social media: @BecsTetley