AustLit

'Richly textured, combining memoir with literary criticism, in Second Half First Drusilla Modjeska looks back on the experiences of the past thirty years which have shaped her writing, her reading and the way she has lived. From a childhood in England, growing up with a father she admired deeply but felt she never really knew, to her time as a young newly-wed, living with her husband in Papua New Guinea; arriving as a single woman in Sydney in the 1970s and building close friendships with writers such as Helen Garner, with whom she lived in the bookish ‘house on the corner', and the lovers who would – sometimes briefly – derail her, this new book by Drusilla Modjeska is an intensely personal and moving account of a truly examined life.

'In asking the candid questions that many women face: about love, marriage, the death of parents, growing older, the bonds of friendship and family, Drusilla Modjeska reassesses parts of her life, her work, her reading, the importance to her of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, among many others, to give us a memoir that is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal, and the book that readers of Poppy, The Orchard and Stravinsky's Lunch have been waiting for.' (Publication summary)