Unbreakable by Jelena Dokic: A Book Review

I don’t particularly enjoy autobiographies. They’re formulaic, often ghostwritten, and there’s usually a soul missing from the writing, even when the events themselves are remarkable. I was tempted to skip this one entirely and carry on with the Robin Hobb book I’m halfway through. But when a friend gave it five stars, I figured I’d give it a go. I read it in 2 days. Four stars.

Synopsis

Unbreakable was first published in 2017 and co-written with award-winning sports journalist Jessica Halloran. Jelena Dokic was born in Yugoslavia and arrived in Australia as a refugee at eleven years old. By sixteen she was in the Wimbledon quarter-finals. By eighteen she was in the world’s top ten. By nineteen she was ranked number four in the world, heralded as Australia’s greatest tennis hope since Evonne Goolagong. What the world saw was a prodigious talent with a volatile father on the sidelines. What the world didn’t know was the full extent of what was happening behind closed doors.

My review

Most autobiographies feel co-written. They have a particular flatness; events described without texture, emotions reported rather than felt, a sense that the subject sat in a room with a writer and talked, and what you are reading is the transcript polished to a shine. I find it hard to engage with, and it puts me off the genre generally.

Jessica Halloran, who co-wrote Unbreakable, is an award-winning senior sports journalist with News Corp who has covered Jelena Dokic for years. She was at the 2009 Australian Open comeback, and her first profile of Jelena won an Australian Sports Commission award for best sports feature writing.

Jelena herself has said writing the memoir was cathartic. In an Australian Story episode in October 2025, she described it simply: “My voice, my life.” The New York Times called it “a chilling account of the relentless physical, verbal and emotional abuse Dokic says she suffered from her father.”

The book inspired a documentary, Unbreakable: The Jelena Dokic Story, released in Australian cinemas in November 2024. It won Best Factual or Documentary Program at the 2025 TV Week Logie Awards and Best Editing in a Documentary at the 2026 AACTA Industry Awards.

I am not a tennis person. I don’t know all the rules, and most of the players aren’t familiar to me. It doesn’t matter. This is not really a tennis book. The tennis is the stage. The father is the story.

The writing is easy and fast-paced. Jelena’s trauma is extraordinary, and Halloran has the skill to convey it without tipping into either sentimentality or exploitation. There are moments that are genuinely difficult to read.

This is a real person and her real life. There were decisions made throughout her story that I found frustrating. I’m not going to offer an opinion on them here.

I picked this up during what had become a mild reading slump after a long holiday and lots of work to catch up on, plus kids’ school holidays in Melbourne, the kind of circumstances that make it easy to put a book down. I didn’t put this one down. That, for me, is the clearest measure of whether a book is working.

As for autobiographies generally: I don’t love them, with three exceptions.

Jessica Simpson’s Open Book: the level of tea she spills is worth a read.

Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me, for the same reason.

And I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, which stands apart because McCurdy wrote it herself and her writing is genuinely great.

Those three either break the mould of the formulaic autobiography or they dish enough to make the formula irrelevant.

I wouldn’t place Unbreakable amongst these top 3, but it’s a great read.

What I liked / what I didn’t

What I liked

The pacing is strong. Halloran’s journalism background shows: the writing has a forward momentum that keeps you reading. The story itself is remarkable, and told with enough honesty to feel real rather than managed.

What I didn’t

Not a lot, honestly. Four stars reflects genuine enjoyment rather than qualified praise. If I’m stretching: it is a sports memoir at heart, and there are passages where the tennis detail accumulates in ways that are less interesting to a non-tennis reader. But they pass quickly.

Final verdict

Unbreakable is the autobiography I didn’t expect to read and finished in 2-ish days. You don’t need to know tennis. You don’t need to follow sport. You need to be interested in people, in survival, and in what it looks like when someone refuses to let the worst things that happened to them be the last word. Recommended.

Where can I read it?