Eggshell Skull

Bri Lee began her legal career as a bright, idealistic judge's associate, travelling Queensland's District Court circuit alongside a judge and watching case after case of sexual assault, abuse, and violence pass through the system. Day after day she saw how the law treats those who come to it for justice — the doubt, the delay, the way a victim's life is reopened and examined. And all the while she carried a secret of her own: a childhood sexual assault she had never reported.

Eggshell Skull is Lee's searing memoir of the year she decided to become a complainant in her own case, stepping into the same courtrooms she had worked in, this time as the person on the stand. Named for the legal doctrine that a defendant must take their victim as they find them, the book moves between her insider's account of the justice system and the intensely personal ordeal of pursuing her own abuser.

Unflinching and precisely observed, Eggshell Skull is at once true-crime reportage, a coming-of-age story, and an indictment of how institutions fail survivors. It became an award-winning bestseller in Australia and a landmark of the country's reckoning with sexual violence.