Reading Like a Mother Recently, I gave birth. To be more specific: recently, I almost gave birth in a carpark, because when I telephoned the midwives at the hospital to let them know I needed to come in, they didn’t believe I was in labour. ‘If you were really in labour,’ the first one said, ‘you wouldn’t be able to have this conversation.’ I hung up, wondered about the reality of my own existence for a moment, and tried to sit quietly with my heat pack and watch a re-run of Frasier. I called back twenty minutes later, when the […]

Reading Literary Blockbusters on Ngannawal Country On Ngunnawal country, the Canberra bubble continues to expand, with its brutalist architecture, national institutions, consulates, and blue-tinged gums from which the Telstra Tower on Black Mountain (aka the Syringe aka the Spaceship Docking Station) emerges. It is not a place well-known for literary production or for the celebration of literature. The roads with their infernal on and off ramps, circuits and curves, are arrayed in patterns to facilitate communication with aliens, or for devil worship. Canberra/Ngambri manages to be the nation’s capital, and remote—provincial—estranged from the artistic and literary metropolitan centres of Australia […]

Just before restrictions came into effect in late June, I converted my dining room into a new art studio, pushing the table into one corner and setting up my writing space in the other. ‘We’ll just eat at the coffee table from now on,’ I announced to my husband and the kids, as I placed art supplies, stationery and pot plants on the dining table. I was anticipating a new phase of creativity. My first book The Mother Wound was about to be published and I had promised myself that I would spend the second half of the year developing […]

My eyes are painfully sore from lying in bed till 3am while holding a phone above my face and tapping it with my finger—I mean, scrolling. Oh yes, the phone was displaying environmentally unfriendly content best described as a spectacular ‘cancel campaign’ that exploded across Twitter and Instagram (never mind that I had work the next day). The drama was not even unfolding live; most of the Tweets happened ‘5hrs ago,’ but I needed updates on this cyber inquisition. If I had woken up to the news that Mark Zuckerberg made it to space, I would have felt incredibly proud, […]

Writers are often asked what they’re reading: a question that always makes me squirm. After all, reading is personal and intimate, and literary folk can be so judgey. Do I really need to show you mine, even though you haven’t shown me yours? There’s a temptation to dodge the whole question—in a creative way, of course. For example, I could skip over books altogether, reflecting instead on how I was recently engrossed by the old Coles shopping receipts I found in my elderly mother’s kitchen drawer. Seemingly prosaic, yet seeing that she paid $1.95 for a pack of Iced VoVos […]

In June of this year I moved back, temporarily, to Sydney. I say moved ‘back’ because I lived in Sydney as a teenager and in my early twenties: 12 of my 38 years, with the remainder spent in regional Victoria and Melbourne. But Sydney marked me formatively. It’s brutal and beautiful. I feel nostalgic for it but I also remember how it felt to struggle here. I remember why I left. I haven’t moved back to the Sydney I remember. In some ways that would be impossible; more than 15 years have passed and cities, particularly ones you have nostalgia […]

Anne Enright hides her books in the basement. ‘Books are like knives,’ Enright says as she sits on her couch in County Wicklow, swatting away questions about her reading habits. ‘I don’t like people picking up my books and saying “what’s this like?” … People do nothing but boast about their books, nonstop … But I can’t. They are too personal. They are too much part of my machine.’ It is the only time in the interview that she turns away from the camera, her profile firm and still. The image of books stowed below ground loops in my mind. […]

This is one of those columns that I read semi-regularly especially when friends and colleagues are giving their response, but it’s not one I ever thought I’d be asked to do. It’s uncool to admit you’re excited to be asked, isn’t it? I’ve never been cool: am absolutely thrilled! Truthfully, since developing chronic c-PTSD symptoms in 2019, my reading isn’t as voracious as it used to be: do people with PTSD in disciplines where they are expected to consume a lot of information in various media talk about the brain fog? I’ve cut down from reading maybe 1.5 books a […]

I find it hard to concentrate. I repeat myself more often than I’d like. It’s the internet; it’s the pandemic; it’s the doom clouds above in another Victorian winter. I wonder how scatterbrained we would seem to my grandparents, their parents. In another decade I read Don Quixote in Berlin. I was by myself and staying in a quiet hostel that had once been a hotel. It was far too nice for a hostel and it was empty and I didn’t know why. Suspicious elderly East Germans glared at me and my long grey hair when I walked past. I […]

When Covid-19 emerged, my reading choices veered sharply to factual. I trained as an epidemiologist. Now, here was the disaster I’d been taught was inevitable. I pored over scientific papers about the new virus, trying to understand what was happening, as did my friend Peter whom I met at graduate school in Seattle, 30-something years ago. We began emailing each other critiques of public health responses to the pandemic, Peter from California where he’d retired, me from the Central Victorian bush. Peter approached the task with rigour, reviewing the modelling and preparing a summary ‘memo’ for me and his many […]

It might sound morbid, but I’ve been reading a lot of epitaphs lately. It’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time in a cemetery. Melbourne General Cemetery, to be precise. I go there most days, via the Macpherson Street gates. On entering, the road is flanked with contemporary graves. Many of these are Italian. Their epitaphs are mostly brief, though flush with sentiment. Beyond that stretch, the road diverts. I head right and curve toward the Princes Park side to one of many Roman Catholic sections. On the way, by the road, an especially eye-catching memorial. A bronze head […]

I’m always a little hesitant to speak about the books I’ve read. And that’s because there are so many books I haven’t read. Compared to a lot of authors I know, I get through an embarrassingly small number of books. The reason is that I read painfully slowly. Sentence by sentence, word by word. And I go back and re-read sentences just to make sure I’ve really understood and appreciated them. When I’m sure there’s no one listening, I like to read out loud, rolling each word around my mouth. And when I can’t read out loud, I read just […]