I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion
What she said.
Writing is also something I do for money, for fun, and because I decided when I was eight or nine years old that I wanted to be a writer, and never quite managed to let that go.
My big project at the moment is a family memoir, tentatively titled Family Business, about my mother’s family, the McWhirters, who once owned the Fortitude Valley department store of the same name. I’m writing it as a series of theme-based essays that (I hope will) interweave to form a narrative. It’s about a family business, specifically the business of selling women’s clothes and household goods in the first half of the twentieth century: a family rising to prominence, then falling from grace, as a result. It’s about marriage and divorce, wills and trusts, and the custody of children. It’s about middle class families, in particular my middle class family: how wealth and prestige is gained and lost and gained and lost again; how patterns are repeated through time and across generations.
I also write short stories, nonfiction in the form of reviews, feature articles and essays, and a whole lot of other stuff under the broad umbrella term, copywriting. Every day I fall a little more in love with the essay form.