Category: Uncategorized

The bedside bookstack – September 2025

Too soon by Betty Shamieh, Avid Reader Press, 2025

This book tells the story of three generations of Palestinian/American women. In 2012 Arabella wants to be known more for her art than her cultural heritage, almost at any cost. In 1975, her mother Naya, never wanted to marry and struggled with the motherhood that came with it and in 1963 her mother Zoya had to leave her homeland and an old love story behind. These women, fallible and flawed, and their lives tell the personal cost and inheritance of dispossession more than any historical or political commentary could and that was even before the current occupation of Gaza.

Labour of Love by Oceane Campbell, Pantera Press, 2025

Oceane was my guest for the September Books at the Bowlo and it was such a pleasure to complement the book with even more background and detail from our chat. This is a memoir of both her midwife and motherhood journey. We follow her as a student midwife through to the experienced practitioner she is today, concurrent with her IVF experiences.

She is a passionate advocate for respect and consent in the birthing space and shares stories of love and loss from her time in the birthing suite. I loved hearing about hospitals and the system from the inside. Lot’s of tears from me reading this one – happy and sad.

Frog – the Secret Diary of a Paramedic by Sally Gould, Simon & Schuster, 2025

Another health system memoir – completely by chance. This book also charts the journey from student paramedic through to experienced professional. Sally Gould’s father was a paramedic, so she grew up with all his stories. For her, being a paramedic is a calling but not everyone welcomes a young female who has come through the university system. She loves what she does but there’s a balance that needs to be struck between what she witnesses on-the-job and how to process it.

This was also compulsive reading for me. I just swallowed up the insider insight of her stories and it was interesting to reflect on my ambo interactions, having more detailed knowledge and context of the system.

Thanks for Having Me by Emma Darragh, Joan, 2024

I’m always up for short stories that can stand alone or work as a connected narrative. I also spend so much time reading British, Irish and American authors that it’s such a pleasure to read an Australian story which also has such a specific and detailed sense of place – in this case suburban Wollongong. Then you’ve got mothers, daughters and sisters. Yes, yes and yes. Coming of age, the darker corners of motherhood and the quotidian – all right in my sweet spot.

Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan, Hutchinson, 2024

Anyone who’s read the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy will be familiar with Kevin Kwan’s work – established money, new money and humble money try to get the balance right amidst the generational and cultural pull of those around them.

Rufus Leung Gresham is set to be the next Earl of Greshamsbury but the estate is bankrupt. His mother, a former Hong Kong model, wants him to make it right by marrying money but Rufus has just realised he’s in love with his best friend and neighbour, Eden Tong.

This looks big at 435 pages but was great fun and completely compulsive reading. I also have no interest or knowledge in fashion/designers, so just skipped all the bits where he lists what everyone is wearing.

The Matchmaker by Saman Shad, Viking, 2023

Saima is a Matchmaker. It’s her job. Despite being young and single, business has been good but some in the Desi community think her methods are too modern. Her cash flow is low when Kal’s wealthy parents offer her a slightly different job. She needs to convince him to use her services without knowing it’s his parents who set it up.

You don’t see Sydney much in novels and I loved seeing it on the page here from Bexley to Harris Park, along the Parramatta trainline, then dropping in to Ultimo or Gordon. Kal and Saima had great chemistry and this was a great insight into to the cultural complexity of being a third culture kid with home simultaneously in many places and none.

Signs of Damage by Diana Reid, Ultimo Press, 2025

When Cass is 13, she joins the Kelly family for a holiday in the south of France. In a dual narrative of that time and the present, we work towards an incident which some think shaped events in the present while others have a more complete picture. 

I heard an interview with Diana Reid when she’d just started writing this and she talked about wanting to examine the over-use of the trauma trope in fiction. If I hadn’t heard that, I would’ve thought maybe it was more just using trauma rather than examining it as part of the narrative.

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The bedside bookstack –August 2025

For Life by Ailsa Piper, Allen & Unwin, 2024

This is a memoir of grief and loss. Ailsa Piper loses both her husband and father and you’ll be left to wonder how so much loss and the life which follows, can read so beautifully.

After recently losing my mum, I’m not sure why I picked this up, if it was pressing a bruise or permission to feel and find common ground with others who are mourning. Reading it, there was the realisation again that life and loss co-exist, neither one of them stopping to respectfully give way to the other.

The Spare Room by Helen Garner, Text Publishing, 2008

Another memoir about dying. I wasn’t deliberately picking them up, I promise, but just like the parent-dying movies which came my way, I didn’t avoid them either. This is Helen Garner’s account of her terminally ill friend coming to live with her to do a series of dubious Vitamin C treatments which promise to heal her.

It’s Garner, so we know that no one will be spared from the truth of ungenerous feelings, how slow death can be, how caring for the sick can be maddening and how even in the face of mortality we can bicker and be our own human selves.

Fine just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx, 4th Estate, 2008

Apart from two satires about the devil which didn’t really land with me, this is typical Annie Proulx short story territory – the landscape is always there, never a bit player, constantly bending characters into and out of their own shape, the lives are small and often short and the writing is of course, sublime.

An Academic Affair by Jodi McAlister, Allen & Unwin, 2025

Sadie and Jonah have been at uni together for 15 years. There’s always been a rivalry between them intensified by his little rich boy status and her battler background. This amps up as their academic careers progress and they compete for the same few positions. Then a partner-hire position comes up in Tasmania and they could both have it if they can make people believe that they’re a couple.

This was as much about the current precarious state of universities as it was an academic romance. It was also a break from everything being so big and hard and assured like in the Ali Hazelwood STEM romances I’ve been reading – nothing wrong with that. It’s just nice to know that enemies can find their way to lovers even when they’re not an Alpha male with Adam Driver proportions.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, 4th Estate, 2024

Rika is a journalist for a men’s magazine. She works hard and is determined to get an interview with Manako Kajii, the infamous murderer who is accused of seducing three men with her cooking and killing them. The pair initially start writing letters, discussing food and recipes. Then Rika starts to visit and have a gastronomic awakening.

As with a few of the other Japanese books I’ve read over the past few years, there is the constant and suffocating expectations and lack of opportunity around what kind of woman you can be. I wanted to love this. I wanted to support its critique of societal expectations for women and of course I wanted to join all the millions of international readers who turned it into a best seller but I kept falling asleep when I picked it up and never finished.

Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, Serpent’s Tail, 2017

A collection of short stories, some almost from a dreamscape. The back cover bestows a lot of adjectives – unique, original, genre-demolishing, sensual and wild. There was a particularly prescient story of a modern plague society which would’ve been written and published before we’d even heard of COVID 19.

I didn’t read them all. There was a bleakness and darkness that was too much for me right now. It seems I can do memoirs about death but not general societal sadness.

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The bedside bookstack – November 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, Sceptre, 2024

I just loved this book to bits n pieces and back again. Sooooooo good! It’s the unlikely but somehow perfect mix of literary, sci-fi and romance touching on ethics, race, identity and your place and actions within a system and society. It’s also incredibly clever and funny. I know! That’s a lot to pack in but you’ll want to read it, even if you’re tired!

Hmm, how to offer the premise and do it any justice? Time travel is possible. It’s just that they don’t know a lot about it’s effects on the human body and mind, so people who are going to die in the past are brought to the present for observation. They’re assigned a ‘bridge’. This person will live with them and help them assimilate into the 21st Century – enter our unnamed female narrator and Commander Graham Gore, a Royal Navy Commander from the failed Franklin Arctic Mission.

All Fours by Miranda July, Canongate, 2024

This is like reading popping candy. It weaves here and there, narrating familiar terrain but in a completely unique way. Our narrator is a semi-famous artist in LA. She’s 45 and it’s all starting to happen, the mood swings, the insomnia, anger, despair, a sudden realisation that desire might be running out, or at least her role in it. So, she doubles down on everything and instead of driving from LA to New York like she planned to do, she stops off and holes up at a roadside motel for 2 weeks after paying $20000 to get it decorated. She’s a total original and this one just needs to be read cos none of this is doing it any justice.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, Corsair, 2022

You might remember from the September Bookstack how blown away I was by Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. Well, she’s at it again, being brilliant and writing another story-cycle using some of the cameo characters from A Visit From the Goon Squad.

She explodes it out into the near future where memories and consciousness can be uploaded and shared. It’s another one that you just need to read, cos my words can’t do justice to all the craft and cleverness she gets up to in this one.

Love, Death & Other Scenes by Nova Weetman, UQP, 2024

Nova Weetman is usually known for her YA novels but this beautiful and generous memoir is about loss and grief in all facets of her life as a partner, parent, child and creative.

Anyone who has nursed a loved one to the end will recognise the sickbed vigils, the last days, the doorstep dinner drop-offs and the strange space of post funeral days.

And then this, “So much of parenting young children is waiting for them to grow. And so much of parenting older children is wishing they hadn’t.” Oof. That one left me reeling. Again and again, she hits on the universal in such an eloquent way.

All You Took From Me by Lisa Kenway, Transit Lounge, 2024

Lisa was my November Books at the Bowlo guest with this, her debut psychological thriller. It was great to talk to her about content and craft getting into memory and consciousness, emotional isolation, atmospheric settings and the writing (and re-writing) process.

Clare Carpenter has just woken up in a hospital bed after a serious car crash which killed her husband. There’s a strange man watching her in the ICU ward but her amnesia means she doesn’t know who he is. Clare is also an anaesthetist and as her journey to recover her memory gets more frantic, she considers what risks she would take to find out what happened.

First Year by Kristina Ross, Allen & Unwin, 2024

This one is an intense but compelling ride travelling alongside 17-year-old Maeve in her first year at a prestigious drama school. It’s all there, the leading lady and rising stars, the student-faculty liaisons and power dynamics, the rivalry, the chemistry, the new family created by proximity and shared experience, the vulnerability of young hungry creatives and the very fine line between breakdown and breakthrough when learning a craft. Some of the questions it brought up were like those I had when I watched Miles Teller in the movie Whiplash. How much pushing is OK before it becomes harmful and more an exercise in power and domination than teaching?

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Newcastle for Writers Festival Visitors

What to eat, drink and do while you’re here

Merewether Baths

Coming to Newy for the Newcastle Writers Festival? Here are my 5 favourites for where to go and what to do if you’re between sessions or have a little time to spare.

Well, that sounds lovely but I need suggestions for things REALLY close to the festival.

Of course, you’re here for the festival and have back-to-back sessions. You don’t have time for my weekender tips. It would be a shame to leave without seeing any of the beaches….but I understand. What you want is a coffee, somewhere to eat and maybe have a nice drink. See the list under my 5 favourites.

  1. Have a swim

It doesn’t matter where. If you’re in town and don’t have transport then Newcastle Beach, Newcastle Baths and Nobby’s Beach or breakwater are easy options – take the tram straight there. If you have a car, then get thineself to Merewether Baths or Bar Beach. Busy day you say? Back-to-back sessions you say? An early morning swim at the Baths is one of the greatest ways to start a day. That’s all I’m saying.

2. Do a coastal walk

Perhaps ‘the’ coastal walk? The Bather’s Way, takes you along the cliffs from Newcastle Beach all the way down to Merewether. Anything from Newcastle Beach in the other direction to Nobby’s Beach or the breakwater or looping back along the harbour is also gorgeous.

3. Visit East Newcastle

Catch the tram to the end of the line and keep going one more block (the same as going to Newcastle Beach). You’ll find the best fish n’ chips in Newy at Scotties (36 Scott St). Order takeaway and sit on the grass with one their rugs or walk the one block to eat at Newcastle Beach. This little part of East Newcastle is so cute and if you keep walking you’ll reach the gorgeous deco Newcastle Baths. Unfortunately, they’re closed for an upgrade at the moment but you can go left and walk along the coast to Nobby’s Beach, lighthouse and breakwater or head right and have a swim at Newcastle Beach. While you’re down this end of town, you can check out The Falcon (10 Pacific St), The Great Northern (83-89 Scott St), The Basement (2/2 Market St) , Neighbours (2 Market St) and Saints Bar (31 King St) for a drink (or bite to eat).

4. Poke around a book shop

Macleans is the official festival bookshop. If you want to check out their storefront, they’re at 69 Beaumont St but they’re fully stocked on site at the festival. There are also plenty of secondhand bookshops to poke around. Betty Loves Books has new releases as well as secondhand ones and makes for great browsing if you’re down near Newcastle Baths or Beach (Shop 1 The Station Corner of Scott and Watt Streets). Close to festival venues there’s also Cooks Hill Books (72 Darby St).

5. Hang in Hamilton

Who says you need a festival gala to buy something nice to wear? The Retro Wardrobe (133 Beaumont St) stocks vintage and pre-loved delights. There is also a Vinnies a few shops down. If you need coffee or a snack down this end of town then go to Mockingbird (131 Beaumont St) or Lords (148B Beaumont St). If your thirst is more likely to be slaked at a pub, head to my local, the Bennett (146 Denison St), one block across. They also do great food.

Head down Beaumont in the direction of the station and you’ll pass the Red Cross (63B Beaumont St) and Samaritans (19 Beaumont St) op shops. Keep going up Beaumont St and turn left into Hudson St just before the station for a huge Salvos (3/24 Hudson St) or continue on to the intersection of Beaumont St and Maitland Rd. You’re in Islington now and this nook has vintage and pre-loved aplenty. Check out the Vinnies (125 Maitland Rd), The Conscious Exchange (86 Maitland Rd), Stoned Saint Moon and Planet Islington (80 Maitland Rd).

While you’re there, get a coffee or a bag of my favourite beans, Peaberry’s (81 Maitland Rd). If they’re closed (close at 1pm on Sat & not open Sunday) sorry, but Suspension Espresso (3 Beaumont St) also comes recommended.

OK, I promised suggestions close to the Civic precinct. Here they are:

  • Crystalbrook Kingsley (282 King St) Five-star hotel with unrivalled views. Try Romberg’s on level 9 for drinks and bar bites, or Roundhouse on the rooftop for the restaurant experience.
  • Rascal Burgers (1/266 King St) Fully stacked burgers, diner style.
  • Goldbergs (137 Darby St) A Newcastle favourite for over 25 years. Great coffee and a cosy café hang out, also wine and dinners.
  • Autumn Rooms (127 Darby St) Coffee, high tea and café food.
  • Light Years (7 Darby Street) A chic new diner with modern Asian cuisine.
  • MEET (9 Darby Street) Brazilian fare. Began as a humble food truck and now hosts a beautiful bar with a share plate menu, and a restaurant serving Churrasco.
  • Napoli Centrale (173 King St) Authentic, delicious, simple Neapolitan pizzas. Say. No. More.
  • Foghorn Brewery (218 King St) Famous local brew house with diner style eating.
  • Clarendon Hotel (347 Hunter St) Art Deco style bar, with solid pub dining.
  • Coal & Cedar (380 Hunter Street) Cocktails and share plates.
  • The Press Coffee and Book House (462 Hunter St) Practically across the road. Perfect daytime destination for books and coffee.
  • Banh Mi 233 (233 Hunter St) all the deliciousness you expect from this Vietnamese favourite.
  • The Signal Box (155 Wharf Rd) Historic Newcastle building with upmarket bistro style dining and modern Australian cuisine. Breakfast through to dinner.

And finally, not near the festival but close to the beach there’s Modus (20 Merewether St) a slick new brewery and Merewether Surfhouse (5 Henderson Pde) which covers all budgets and inclinations with a café, bar, restaurant, pizza and take away. Yes, this one is right on the beach.

Just one more thing, the Olive Tree Markets will also be on in Civic Park, about 5 minutes away from most festival venues.

OK, as you were, enjoy your sessions and your weekend up here. Maybe I’ll see you round.

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Images: Brendan Wallis

The Bedside Bookstack – March 2022

What’s teetering on the bookstack this month.

The Keepers by Al Campbell, UQP 2022

Jay is a full-time carer to her two high needs teenage sons who are in the bureaucratic and medical too-hard basket. She has a husband who lives upstairs but not in their life and an aged mother whose loveless legacy, she’s trying to undo.

This book is clever, funny and full of heart. It shows us at our best and absolute worst. Just read it. Read it. Read it.

the namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, Houghton Mifflin Books, 2003

Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli leave Calcutta for America. They name their first child Gogol, after the famous Russian writer. He is a favourite of Ashoke’s father and the book saves Ashoke’s own life in a train accident.

This is a beautiful story of family, belonging and identity. We follow the Gangulis for 40 years and witness as each of them feels the push and pull of being in one place with influences and expectations from somewhere else.

Travels with Charley in search of America by John Steinbeck, Heinemann, 1962

It’s 1960 and John Steinbeck feels like he’s lost touch with his country and the people in it. Kitting out a truck as a mobile home, he takes a road trip around the country with his poodle Charley. By this time, he’s a well-known author, so this trip is a chance to be anonymous and move at his own pace. As he goes, he mediates on modern America, what is familiar to him, what’s been lost and what he doesn’t understand.

It’s Steinbeck. It’s always going to be well written and a pleasure to read but it was interesting to read him as a person and not a narrator and find that there’s a romanticising of ‘old’ masculinity (drinkin’ and brawlin’) that doesn’t sit well with me at all.

It was a good read though and gave me plenty to think about.

The Breaking by Irma Gold, Midnight Sun, 2021

Hannah is away from home for the first time. She’s backpacking in Thailand and loving the thrill of freedom. She meets Deven in her hostel and joins her to volunteer at an elephant sanctuary. But Deven needs to do more for the animals and wherever she goes, Hannah will follow.

This book offered the same nostalgia and familiarity for backpacking through Asia as Love & Virtue did for being at uni. She recreates the intense bond you can have with strangers when travelling and the familiarity you can find in a foreign culture. There is also the murky territory of trying to ‘save’ a situation you don’t fully understand and thinking you’re a ‘traveller’ when really, we’re all tourists because we’re not from there.

The Furies by Mandy Beaumont, Hachette, 2022

There is anger, silence, violence and fury in this book from women past and present who were told they didn’t belong, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, who were feared and misunderstood, told to keep quiet, stay still and taught to feel shame.

Cynthia inherits this legacy like so many girls before her. It comes with loss and isolation but when she hears the muffled voices of wronged women rise around her, it gives her strength that she didn’t know she had.

Night boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry, Canongate, 2019

Maurice and Charlie are ageing Irish gangsters. They pace the Algeciras Port waiting for the Night Boat from Tangier to come in. They hold posters of Dilly Hearne, Maurice’s daughter and ask if anyone has seen her. They haven’t seen her in 3 years and there are whispers that she’s expected tonight.

Kevin Barry is a master! Just let yourself go and the poetry of his prose will catch you. The narrative is almost a hallucination as Maurice and Charlie recall their past in Spain, Ireland and Morocco and the love and loss of Dilly’s mum Cynthia, for both men.

The language is sublime and there’s something Brechtian in Maurice and Charlie’s restless wait and recollections as if Dilly is their Godot who may never show.

All Hands By Megan McGrath, Spineless Wonders 2019

This collection is a wee A5 pocket size. It was put out as part for Spineless Wonders’ 10th Anniversary and I’m always a lover of lovers of short fiction.

This is a coastal collection. Salt water and a briney breeze infuses the stories. The water offers redemption, distraction, protection, temptation and always familiarity. These characters wash in and out leaving and returning like the tide. The stories aren’t linked but I read it all in one sitting because of that familiar ocean thread that pulls through all of them and now I feel like I have traces of salt, crusted on my skin.

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson, Text, 2019

 I’ve only just started this one and actually thought I was reading one of his short story collections, which come highly recommended. I have no idea where it’s going but that’s a good thing, I think. The back cover certainly declares his ‘New York Times best-seller’ status.

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Living History

Getting my COVID vaccination was a lot more emotional and momentous than I thought it would be.

Warning, no reading or writing, just life in this post.

Some days you feel like you’re living history more than others.

We’re alive and events are happening all around us, so of course we’re part of history. But the fact that things are always happening can also make life feel very unhistoric and just….normal.

You go about your days in much the same way with history happening elsewhere but I feel like the pandemic has changed that. It’s pretty clear that this is historic. However, there’s so much that feels normal now about the pandemic, even it doesn’t always feel significant, unless you’re in lockdown, of course.

I live in Newcastle and when I got my first Pfizer shot a couple of weeks ago, it really felt like I was part of history.

Walking in to the John Hunter Hospital had a definite dystopian movie vibe with people in PPE, queues and questions, masks on all faces and marks on the ground. Thermometers glowed and clicked and people were waved onwards.

It felt almost war like, with people moving forward en-masse in the same direction, as if we were all looking for an escape – which we were, I guess. We’re looking for a way to keep ourselves and loved ones safe and to somehow get things back to ‘normal’.

In a movie the line would end in a cavernous hangar. There’d be people running in and out, and probably the noise of choppers landing in the background to add to the general sense of action and crisis.

Where I was, things were moving pretty fast. It wasn’t in a hangar but by the time I got to the administrative check-in, it did feel like we were at the front line. People were bustling around in high-vis with iPads and clipboards. The post-vaccinated sat in rows waiting to go home. The rest of us were in lines waiting to be sent in to see nurses along an ad hoc extension of tables and counters which really was the front line.

The whole thing made me feel quite emotional. I really did feel a sense of this being the small thing that I could contribute to something much bigger. I felt like we were all in it together and doing our bit and I desperately wanted to hug my nurse and tell her she was doing something amazing.

Of course, you’re supposed to keep a good distance, so instead I just said ‘thanks’ and turned away because of the tears in my eyes.

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The bedside bookstack – April 2021

What I’m reading and what’s gathering dust on the bedside bookstack this month.

Lucky ticket by Joey Bui, Text Publishing, 2019

This collection of short stories was one of my favourite picks of the month. I was totally absorbed by the stories and binged on them more than I usually do with an anthology. I often go in and out of anthologies reading a few at a time in between novels. This collection however, made me want to move on to the next one and then the next..

The stories move from Vietnam to Australia to America to Abu Dhabi where we meet Vietnamese locals, migrants and expats as well as a Pakistani-American professional and a Zanzabari guest worker.

Bui writes in first and third person and skips from the distant past to a familiar present. One of my favourites was Mekong Love. Set in a more traditional Vietnam, it proves that lasting love can start in many different ways.

Both ways is the only way I want it by Maile Meloy, Text Publishing 2009

Thanks to @zbradley’s tweet about how long it had taken her to discover Maile Meloy. I wouldn’t have found my way to her either and what a loss that would’ve been.

There are 11 stories in this collection and they’re all achingly beautiful. I use that word deliberately. She’s doing something and I don’t know how she’s doing it. I go into a story as one person and come out slightly changed. I had to sit for a moment after some of these and just savour that feeling before jumping straight into the next one. I also had to reread paragraphs and flip back a page or two to see if I could trace her tricks and trap what it was she did to write such a good story. That in itself is the magic, I guess.

Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed, Tinder Press, 2017

God bless Kinokuniya bookshop in Sydney which had a booklet printed around the time of the March for Justice about kickass women’s reads. This was on that list.

If you’re not into island-bound traditions of women forced into submission and condoned abuses of power by the patriarchy, then this may not be for you. However, for every state of slavery there is a seed of revolution and the girls of this island are starting to question just why everything has to be the way it always has been.

Kept on the island by fear of the Wastelands on the horizon, girls adhere first to their father’s will and then their husbands. This is like a Handmaid’s Tale for pre-teens. Sometimes, when adults write kids, the voice is too laboured, but these girls are nothing but themselves and I never doubted their narrations.

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, Granta, 2020

Whoa. This one is unlike anything I’ve ever read. “Out of this world” was one of the cover quotes and it’s right on because Natsuki and her cousin believe they are from another planet. They don’t understand the rules adults make for them and earthlings are confusing.

Kids trying to makes sense of adult behaviour and rules isn’t easy. They internalise who adults say they are and make leaps of deduction in doing so. Feeling like aliens because they don’t conform is a fair-enough link for children to make. As adults, life is no less confusing as they grapple with taboos and their place in the world.

The legacy of abuse and societal expectation make for a totally original but pretty heart-breaking read. It’s uncomfortable reading and won’t be for everyone because taboo is taboo and examining them from another angle doesn’t make them any less uncomfortable.

Sayaka Murata is best known for her book Convenience Store Woman which I haven’t read yet.

The Trespassers by Meg Mundell, University of Queensland Press, 2019

How was this book not on every pandemic reading list last year? This is the plague book that came out a year before COVID and its epidemiologic jargon became part of the vernacular.

The worst scenario of a pandemic future is already playing out in this book. The UK is a disaster zone and pandemic hotspot. There are no jobs, no supplies or stability and the death rate is constantly climbing. To get away, people are willing to take a ship to Australia where they are essentially indentured labour but unlikely to get sick.

On board are Billie, a Scottish singer who has experience of the death wards in Glasgow, Cleary, a deaf boy whose mum wants to give them a chance at a better future and Tom, a teacher from a wealthy family who now has no money to his name.

Three weeks into the journey a crewman is found murdered and people start getting sick. There are rumours and dissent and no way off the boat.

This book is a great read and a timely reminder that not every harbour offers safe haven and that it isn’t a crime to seek a better life.

Skylarking by Kate Mildenhall, Black Inc. Books, 2016

Set in the 1880s on an isolated cape in Australia, this book is about best friends Kate and Harriet. Their fathers are lighthouse keepers and the girls live with their families and workers in a small settlement. Things change for them when a fisherman arrives.

This book is a great read for elemental coastlines, intense female friendships, burgeoning desire, envy and the jumble of growing up.  

There is a foreshadowing from the very first page and as Kate continues her narration, she tells of regret and final moments and times before and after everything changes. As a reader you should get to enjoy all that anticipation and tension, so I’ll say no more.

The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey, Text Publishing, 2020

Erica’s son has been given a life-sentence. Locked in her guilt and grief she moves to a small coastal cottage to be closer to his prison. She is a woman alone and doesn’t want company but she does want to build a labyrinth in her backyard and to do that, she needs people.

I liked the pace of this book, the wash of days into each other and the gradual revealing and healing of Erica. I also happened to walk the labyrinth at Cenntenial Park in Sydney a few weeks ago, and now understand the meditative appeal of Erica’s project more.

One of my pet peeves in novels is the description of dreams. This book had way too many. But, all good, I just skimmed forward until we got back to the narrative.

Family Life by Akhil Sharma, Faber, 2014

Ajay moves from India to America with his parents and older brother. It’s the 70s and the Indian community in New York is small. A few months after their arrival, Birju, the older brother has a swimming accident that leaves him with brain damage. He is bedbound, unable to communicate and in need of constant care.

Family Life changes to accommodate this. First, he’s in a nursing home and Ajay and his mum live close while his dad commutes. Later they move to New Jersey and bring Birju home for his care.

For a long time, Ajay feels like life is happening around but not to him. There are family friends who think they can heal Birju, the women who think his mum is a saint and the fact that his dad is drunk all the time. But time passes and as nothing changes with Birju, things slowly do for Ajay and his parents.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Head of Zeus, 2017

Still in the pile. Still haven’t started it yet. Next month I say.

This tome was my only Christmas book (and it actually arrived in January). Anything over 500 pages seems to sink further down the book stack for sheer stability of the pile.

Billed as a generational family saga about Koreans in Japan, I missed the hype of this book when it came out but put it on my wish list after listening to this interview with Min Jin Lee on Conversations.

Sounds like once I get stuck in, I won’t be coming up for air for a while.

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Games you shouldn’t play

A few tips for your next game of ‘How old were they when they published their first book?’

Before we start, a disclaimer. There is a small chance that playing How old were they when they published their first book? will make you feel better but a much bigger chance that it’ll make you feel worse. The older you get, the worse the odds are. Young players have a much higher likelihood of coming out satisfied.

Tip – Even young players might want to avoid the Romantic poets who have both early publication and death.

Here are a few authors you may want to try for a more reassuring outcome of how old they were when their first books were published:

Elizabeth Strout –42 years old

Marcel Proust – 43 years old

Julia Donaldson – 45 years old

J. R. R. Tolkien – 45 years old

Raymond Chandler – 51 years old

Daniel Defoe – 59 years old

Laura Ingalls Wilder – 65 years old

I usually only play this when I shouldn’t, when I’m already at a low ebb about where I’m at with my writing and publication possibilities. And of course, it usually makes me feel worse, which means I start avoiding the type of books I normally like to read because otherwise I’ll just do the maths and feel shitty again.

This week, I played a few rounds and got so disheartened that most of my reading pile became off-limits. When that happens, I usually head to the classics. They seem too out of my world for a direct comparison. I picked up Silas Marner and yet somehow, I found some things to envy in George Eliot’s literary trajectory.

My solution was to get out of fiction altogether. I headed over to Jonathon Driori’s Around the World in 80 trees where there is always solace and beauty to be found no matter how low my spirits.

Here are the rules but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Step 1

Read a book that you like written by an author who is a similar match to your own demographic (age, gender, genre….).

Step 2

Read the bio/blurb to find out exactly when the author was born.

Step 3

Read the bio/blurb to find out what their first book was.

Step 4

Read the bio/blurb to find out exactly when their first book was published.

Step 5

Head to Wikipedia for the above information if you can’t find it in the book.

Step 6

Do a detailed Google search to find any information that is not in the book or Wikipedia.

Step 7

Do some simple maths.

year of first book publication – year born = age that first book was published

Step 8

Compare their age to your age and react accordingly.

Final note – This game isn’t exclusive to writers. You can play by changing the author for any person in your chosen field and by changing a book to any achievement that you’re aiming for.

Have you got any more later-life debut authors that I can add to my list of reassurance?

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Subscription conniptions

It’s time to reassess the prescription when the anxiety of all your unread subscriptions overtakes the pleasure of actually reading them.

I’m way over-subscribed. There are so many great magazines, journals and newspapers whose writing I love and who need readers and subscribers. But for the past few years, and this year in particular, they’ve just piled up next to my bed. They don’t get mentioned in my monthly bedside bookstacks, because they don’t get read.

There’s a novel, whose title I can’t remember, about the editor of an English-language newspaper on the continent. My recall of exact plot details is as uncertain as my memory of the title (but that’s for another post and apparently something that Helen Garner and I have in common) but I think the owner of the paper is dead. His widow is still alive and here’s the part I do remember; she has a copy of every issue stacked up in her house and is slowly working her way through and reading them.

She’s years behind but just keeps ploughing on through them. It’s the only part of the book which has stayed with me, because sometimes I feel like that. My pile is more varied but the slog of ever getting through it, once it’s so big, just feels like a chore and obligation.

I have an early association about newspapers which still shadows how I treat these subscriptions. I seem to think that you have to read everything. Yes, that’s every article in order of the pages, regardless of whether it engages you or not. No one told me I had to do it like that but I was definitely shocked when I found out that most people were skipping around the pages based on what interested them.

This year all I wanted was fiction. I think my news capacity was filled with COVID-19 updates and all the ensuing fallout.

I’ve subscribed to the Monthly for around 20 years because I think it’s got some of Australia’s best journalism in it. After this year’s issues slowly stacked higher, I finally went through them two weeks ago. And the only way to get through the backlog is to pick and choose what you read. It still feels like a novel concept. I stopped my previous subscriptions to The Saturday Paper and Harpers after a couple of years because I hadn’t caught onto the skip and select method yet.

I got a gift subscription to Audrey Daybook (now Mindful Puzzles). It has the most gorgeous graphics and a mix of articles and puzzles but until my time has more realistic slots for a cup of tea and some time out, I won’t be renewing it.

I also have a subscription to Australian Book Review and Island because I think at any time, a writer should support at least one of the publications they submit to. I usually share my literary journal subscriptions around and over the years have had subscriptions to Westerly, the Lifted Brow, Overland, Meanjin, the Griffith Review and Granta. All of these are great journals with some great writing that are worth checking out, but my rule now is, one at a time.

I still love a subscription arriving in the mail. I love the flick of the pages and the tease of a front cover. I also think it’s important to support writing, especially in local publications. But the anxiety I get as my unread pile grows and the sense of obligation I then associate with getting through it, doesn’t make a lot of sense. It also hasn’t been a year of financial bounty.

So, I’m going to keep it simple for next year and stick to two subscriptions; one newsy and one creative. And if one of them is quarterly rather than monthly and I remember that it’s OK to skip or skim, then I won’t get buried in the backlog.

…..and if anyone knows the name of the novel I can’t remember, please let me know.

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The comfort of shared writing experiences

You’re not the only one who used to write limp internal characters that did nothing.

When I heard Australian author Charlotte Wood read an extract recently, I felt as though she’d taken it straight from my life. But this wasn’t fiction, hers or mine. She was talking about our younger writing-selves and how our uncertainty as women and as writers stopped our characters from actually doing anything.

I’ve never read a novel and thought, ‘This is me. This is my life!’ But last week, as I was coming back from the day care drop-off and listening to the First Time Podcast, Charlotte Wood’s answer to an Agony Aunt question made me stop. I leant against someone’s front fence to let her finish and delay the busy road that would’ve drowned her out. As she continued, she articulated everything I’d never been able to fully connect about the way I used to write.

I am a self-taught writer. I’ve never been a protégé, had a mentor, done a writing course or had a group to bounce things off. And it’s a slow apprenticeship when you do it that way around (I don’t recommend it).

My writing was good but it was muffled. It was as if any action happened in the shadows and any discussion was turned down low. I didn’t want to offend or get things wrong and so it was all slow-motion interiors and nicely phrased details. It was more like a written still life.

Charlotte Wood talked about how her younger writing-self believed that beautiful sentences and a good eye for detail should be enough to sustain a book and a reader’s interest. That was definitely me. Quoting from a speech explaining what Kate Jennings book Save Me, Joe Louis had taught her she said:

“My characters were invariably Sensitive Young Women. Inexplicably, men treated them callously. My young women observed their worlds closely – they noticed things… like dust motes floating in the air, or the dropped flower of a frangipani on a wet footpath…….

They arranged themselves in picturesque domestic scenes and, by keeping very still, themselves became decorative. They watched, and felt things, and ‘said nothing and turned away’.

The one thing my characters never, ever did back then was act – because to act would be to show yourself, to take a risk. And I was not ready for that.”

It was so comforting to be in good company and know that I wasn’t the only young female writer who had muzzled herself with self-doubt and didn’t trust herself to ask questions and take risks. I was looking for approval and to be liked.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still looking for approval. But one thing that passing time and an output of words does is liberate you. Charlotte Wood mentioned that fiction can lack a certain type of energy when you don’t take risks. It’s true. You’re clipping your own wings if you spend all your time needing to be liked, so it’s lucky that you eventually get bored of your characters being so passive and listless.

It’s a reminder though, that putting your name to words is no small thing. But with curiosity and a bit of courage comes liberation.

You can find the transcript of Charlotte Wood’s complete speech here. And if you’re going to listen to the First Time Podcast episode (which I recommend, I got a lot from her advice to the writer of a ‘quiet novel’) she reads the extract at 23 minutes and 20 seconds in.

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