Lilian’s Story (1985)
Lilian
Una Singer starts life at the beginning of the twentieth century as the
daughter of a prosperous middle-class Australian family. She ends it as a
cheerfully eccentric bag-lady living on the streets, quoting Shakespeare
for a living. This book traces the progress of her life's journey, and why
she made the choices she did.
She's a person large in spirit as well as
body, who wants to invent her own story, rather than allow it to be
invented for her. Life presents her with obstacles:
the fact that she's a woman, and the sinister advances of her
father - but in spite of all this she succeeds. Triumphantly she makes her
life her own, savouring every moment with the reminder that
"everything matters."
Lilian's Story is a companion novel
to Dark Places (titled Albion's Story in the US), which
tells the story of her incestuous father, from his point of view.
Lilian's Story was filmed in 1997
starring Ruth Cracknell, Barry Otto and Toni Collette.
Lilian's
Story won the Vogel/Australian Award, Australia's richest
literary prize, in 1994.