The Writer Laid Bare

I grew up in a house without books. My parents loved TV, and occasionally listened to one of our two LPs — Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley — but they weren’t in the habit of reading.

One day, I heard …

I once had coffee with a fellow author – let’s call him Justin Heazlewood – and a few minutes in, of commiserating about the writer’s lot, I was bemoaning that I’d wasted an entire year on some aborted project or …

I was a backpacking 21-year-old when I got off a ferry from southern Spain to the port city of Tangier in Morocco with four Australian friends. Once on land, we had to run the gauntlet of what we called, simply, …

The wind is changing and I’m not even talking about the elections. This particular wind is breezing through my blog, which is now eight years old.

For eight years I’ve kept the same hybrid format, publishing my eclectic musings about …

I was boarding the plane in Paris on my way home from the annual memoir-writing workshop, when I had a sudden jolt of recognition. That magnificent head of swinging auburn hair several metres ahead could only belong to my ex-friend …

I was separated from three of my children, the first at the end of the 1960s when I was seventeen. A familiar story in those years. Unmarried mothers were often hidden away, and babies adopted shortly after birth. An agreement …