Tom is a seventeen-year-old from a country town who moves into Cairo, a Melbourne apartment block full of eccentric characters. Carrying a heavy suspicion that he is adopted, Tom is desperate to find belonging and is thrilled to be invited to the house of his neighbours, Max and Sally Cheever. The couple are beautiful and…
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Fourteen-year-old Layla is a 21st century Lolita, and like her antecedent, she’s not one to shy away from a man’s attention. She knows that all it takes is a gesture, a look, and she can have almost any man she wants. It makes her feel powerful, like she matters. But what she really wants is…
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Playwright Michele Lee admitted in a recent interview that writing a memoir at such a young age could be interpreted as ‘self-absorbed.’ However, Banana Girl thrusts us into her twenty-somethings with such intimate realism that any self-indulgence on her part is completely excusable. In the lead up to a four month literary residency in her…
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Anjelica Huston was not a name I recognised before I started reading her memoir A Story Lately Told, although maybe I should have, given her fame and high profile career as a model and actress. To be fair, the highlights of her career took place before I was born, and more than anything I was…
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The Marriage Plot has a marriage plot and examines marriage plots. The types of novels that initially sprang to my mind as marriage plots were older English novels by Jane Austin, George Eliot or Louisa May Alcott. With these associations in mind, marriage plots seemed anachronistic. I then considered the standard genre conventions of a…
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“You and me, Reader – we’re in this together. I know more about you than you think. I know you’ve worn a scarlet letter (though it wasn’t necessarily an “A”). I know because we’ve all been the adulterer and the cuckold, the widowed and the one dearly departed; we’ve bared everything from crosses to…
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