Scared Angry Laughing

or How to save the world

By: Margaret Merrilees

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Paperback | 24 February 2026

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16 x 22 x 1

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'I am opposed to lots of things: capitalism, misogyny, the manufacture of armaments. Nevertheless, I am essentially a good girl. My mother trained me to pay close attention.'

In Scared Angry Laughing, Margaret Merrilees shares a lifetime of attempts to heal the world. She turns up punctually for collective meetings and protests. She tries to explain sex to small giggling boys. She calculates how to get across the country with the least carbon emissions.

Merrilees has had to fight for her own rights. Having stared down homophobic doctors, trampled fences at Pine Gap and stripped off for climate change, she's well-versed in deliberate disobedience. And it turns out, good girls make good arrestees.

A joyously unruly collection of essays about civil dissent, saving the planet and losing your hearing, Scared Angry Laughing is a book for imperfect protesters and eternal optimists, young and old.

About the Author

Margaret Merrilees is the author of two novels, The First Week and Big Rough Stones, and two collections of Fables Queer & Familiar (with Chia Moan). The First Week won the Adelaide Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award and was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award and a NSW Premier's Literary Award. Her idiosyncratic essays, which combine memoir, history and social commentary, have appeared in Meanjin, Island, Wet Ink and Griffith Review and elsewhere. She lives in Adelaide, Kaurna Yerta.

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