One of the easiest books to give a 5 star rating to.
I wasn't familiar with the work of Lally Katz before reading this (clearly I was living underground), but I certainly wasn't going to go past a book with this title. And wow did it live up to its name. I've never known a vagina to be cursed before but with my anxiety, I'll now be worried about my own forever more.
As noted above, I requested this book purely due to the title. I sat down with it and thought "I'll just read the first few pages, see what it's like". Well, cue a couple of hours later and it would seem I have read the whole book in one sitting. I just couldn't stop! This was like sitting down with an old friend for a natter. It's in parts sad but also joyous and just so damn funny and I'm pretty sure Lally and I are now best friends (albeit rather one-sided).
This book is for the Dolly Alderton fans, but it's also a book for just about anyone who wants to read an entertaining, brutally honest story of love, loss and adventure.
Really wished this was published in December so I give it to everyone I know for Christmas.

The title is sure to stop you in your tracks and so it should. Lally Katz is a fabulous playwright and her autobiographical book is equally good. Her style is arrestingly honest and by page two we’re swept along with her psychic advice, her love life and her wonderful family and friends. Switching between Australia and the USA and a few other countries were on the journey. Being half Jewish ( the wrong half) gives us a glimpse of into a life I wouldn’t necessarily believed possible until Lally laid it bare. We’re a best friend as well as an echo of the wonderful neighbour, Anna from Neighbourhood Watch. It’s so relatable in some aspects and so totally out of the world in others. A great combination. The perfect summer read. Thanks to @netgalley for the advance copy to read and to @Allenandunwin for the patience of publishers who waited eleven years for the book to come into its time.

Lally Katz, My Cursed Vagina A memoir, Allen & Unwin, February 2026.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

In her acknowledgements, Lally Katz expresses gratitude to three of her teachers for helping her recognise her potential as a writer. I was a colleague of one of those teachers. So, while I did not have Lally Katz in any of my classes, I heard a great deal about this vibrant writer who was seen as an honour to teach. The teachers’ accolades highlighted her notable talent and the enthusiasm she brought to her classes. Lally was a young woman with superb creative skills. It is no surprise that she has become an esteemed playwright, and now she has written this poignant, funny, sad, and raw memoir. It depicts an absorbing journey from which is difficult to disengage: one more page must be read, another anecdote considered, Lally must be given another chance to defy the curse, and one more story in which she does not. Success or not, what she does achieve lives in the memory. The writing is a joy, the story immense, and Lally Katz’s outlook one of courage, humour, and enthusiasm. Her memoir is a monument to a woman who loves her life, its despairing and happy moments, those which are life giving, and those that are so challenging that the potential for damage threatens.

Lally Katz moved from Miami, USA to Canberra, Australia as a child, spending her pioneering creative years in Australia, with successfully staged plays Australia wide and internationally. In 2010 she is thirty-two, and in America on a Churchill Fellowship, and it is with this memory she begins her memoir. However, the central theme is the impact of her visit to a psychic whose dire prediction provides the name for the memoir and much of its action. Her title and honesty with which she approaches her life takes the reader through love affairs; sexual encounters, successful and otherwise; herpes; miscarriages and birth. Some of the stories are humorous, some are transparently not. However, all are engaging and incredibly human. Many are exploits that can only be imagined - some of us do not have Katz’s courage and headlong approach to living.

This is a memoir to be read, cried over, laughed with, and admired. I am thrilled to have been able to meet this vibrant and courageous woman, who was once a student I passed in a school corridor and heard about in the staff room, if only once again second hand though her writing. Lally Katz’s memoir is one to be savoured.