The Writer Laid Bare

My favorite writers are not so much writers as seducers, shamans, tricksters. Their works affect me on a gut level. Reading their books feels like being hypnotised or making love. I cannot explain my excitement about Marguerite Duras, for example, …

I wrote my first novel Dancing with the Hurricane from the perspective of a fifty-one year old man sitting at his comatose uncle’s hospital bed. The nursing staff had advised him to squeeze his uncle’s hand and talk to him …

I didn’t do a lot of research for my first novel, just_a_girl. Speaking from the point of view of a teenager, full of contradictions: I could do that. Speaking from the point of view of a mother, fretting about …

Sometime after my memoir The Dangerous Bride came out, I received an email from a woman who had read my book. Her name was Anna, she was of a Russian origin and lived in Melbourne. There was also a Russian …

As a writer who is also an editor, I’m often asked how it feels to be edited. In other words, how does it feel to be on the receiving end of criticism and someone else’s red pen, instead of being …

The German novelist Thomas Mann once suggested that writers are those people who find writing difficult, and I suspect the vast majority of writers would agree with him (I don’t really want to know about the few lucky ones who …