the human dress: personal essays

In the human dress, the body is an archive: it folds trauma, threat, desire and chaos into itself. But it’s also a place where one has to go on living.

In her singular, astonishing prose, the award-winning Tracey Slaughter offers us the writing that has helped her know her past selves and keep her present self standing. Through scenes from a childhood in 1970s South Auckland, a mother’s hair salon, a stage where actors perform her work, hotel rooms, doctor’s offices, and the car crash that for a time made her life unrecognisable, she describes the desolation of losing faith in language and the joy of finding it again. Together, these fierce and intimate essays chart Slaughter’s return to herself.

‘These are words you feel bone-deep right where you live, in your first and last home, your body. Slaughter stares down the most difficult events in her life and does not turn away from the wreckage. It’s courageous, defiant. Sometimes funny. Often heartbreaking. Healing, too.’ —Grant Smithies

'Tracey Slaughter excavates pain and serves it up raw, on a dessert spoon, bittersweet and universal. This book is a spellbinding, unflinching look at the pain women carry and how it manifests in our bodies, invisible, often disbelieved; and how confronting it is its own kind of power. It is an unravelling of self by a master of the craft, in sentences that deserve to be eaten.' —Michelle Duff

Tracey Slaughter was born in South Auckland, and grew up in Waikato and on the Coromandel Peninsula. She is the author of three collections of short stories – Devil’s Trumpet (2021) deleted scenes for lovers (2016), and her body rises (2005) — and two collections of poetry – The Girls in the Red House are Singing (2024) and Conventional Weapons (2019). She has also acted in plays, including Liam Hinton’s Passionfruits, winner of the Adam NZ Play Award for 2026, and On Travelling Backwards to Punish Ourselves as Ghosts, and she was drummer and vocalist in Radiobaby. Her novella The Longest Drink in Town was adapted for the theatre in 2022, and she is currently collaborating with Liam Hinton on a feature-length film adaptation. Tracey is the editor of Poetry Aotearoa, and teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato. The human dress is her first work of non-fiction.

Cover collage: Sasha Francis
Cover design: Todd Atticus