The Writer Laid Bare

Lee Kofman is a straight talker. When she told me – over a refreshing beverage in South Melbourne – that she felt I was too hard on myself as a memoirist, my inward response was to bristle. I’d just written …

My memoir, How to Dress a Dummy, began as a Creative Writing Master’s thesis – a feminist critique of the beauty industry. The creative component was a recounting of my experiences working as an international model.

A member of …

The second memoir I wrote was a romantic comedy about how my boyfriend and I finally decided we could live on the same continent. When I had an adequate draft, I sent it to a manuscript assessor. ‘It works’, she …

I think I got more lovers than useful writing advice from the various writers’ groups I tried in my younger years, even though those groups were often composed of intelligent people, and sometimes even acclaimed authors. Partly this must be …

It feels apt to round up the discussion of creative nonfiction that I’ve had here for the last two months by looking in-depth into one creative nonfiction book that in my view exemplifies this genre’s best virtues – its irreverent …

A Canadian novelist once said to me that the difference between a writer and an author is that a writer writes, but an author writes and represents her writing, when it’s done and edited. But when I started out writing, …