in 1992, two years after hicks' controversial entry into singapore's literary scene, she published her second and last book, "discuss disgust." the novella, literarily more sophisticated but never as popular as her first book, portrays the world as seen through the eyes of a child whose mother is a prostitute. in it, hicks continued to openly discuss sexuality and in veiled terms even broached the taboo of sexual abuse, both subjects that were not normally spoken of openly in singapore during the time. adding fuel to the controversy surrounding hicks, a widely read local traditionalist columnist dubbed it "another one of those commercial publications which pack sleaze and sin into its hundred-oddpages" (sic). while public understanding was greater than let on, traditionalist social pressures meant that few people publicly accepted the novella for what it actually was: hicks' semi-autobiographical account of "her own" troubled childhood years, an only partially veiled yet immediately unsuccessful cry for the public to reinterpret her early adult years through the trauma-lens of her childhood.