Home

Lilian’s Story: Readers’ Notes

Where did the idea come from?

  Lilian’s story is very loosely based on a famous Sydney eccentric, Bea Miles.  She was an old woman when I was a university student and I often saw her (from the safe distance of a bus) sprawled massively on the church steps at Railway Square in army greatcoat, tennis visor, and split sandshoes.

Like everyone else who grew up in Sydney at that time, I know a few things about her: that she was from a respectable middle-class family and had gone to one of Sydney’s top school; that she had briefly gone to university and dropped out under mysterious circumstances; that she had been institutionalised as insane; and that on her release from the asylum had made money by offering recitations from Shakespeare ( sixpence for a sonnet, a shilling for a scene from a play).

What was it about her that interested you?

  There were enough contradictions in these stories about her to be intriguing.  A nicely-brought-up university student with a love of Sakespearehad somehow turned into a huge, loud, uninhibited eccentric bag-lady, with no fear of what people thought, and no sense of what she “should” be.  What story could make sense of that shift?

I wasn’t terribly interested in the real person of Bea Miles, but the few things I knew about her seemed to provide a framework through which I could explore other issues, such as:  

What was it like to be a clever woman born at a time when women were not even supposed to go to high school, much less university?  What effect would that limitation have on you?

Once you step outside society’s norms and aims, what alternative structure can give your life a sense of purpose? What might you put in place of motherhood, comfort, the trappings of a pleasant middle-class life?

Did you do a lot of research?

  I didn’t do any research about Bea Miles before I wrote the book because I felt I didn’t want to know too much about her – I was only using her story as a catalyst.  I was afraid that if I knew too much about the real person, I wouldn’t be free to explore the issues I wanted to, and to invent whatever I needed for that exploration.

How long did it take to write?

  About two years,  part-time, around a part-time job.  It wasn’t quite finished when I submitted it to the Australia/Vogel prize, but the prize has an age limit which I was just about to exceed, so while the judges were deliberating I finished it.

When I won, I could hardly believe it.  I’d written several other unpublished novels, and published a collection of short stories – Bearded Ladies – but this was the first time I’d written a book “just for me” – without any thought of pleasing a readership.

How was the book received?

  It’s done very well.  It’s still taught in universities – as far away as Italy, from where I often receive student letters about it.  When the film was made it had a good run, partly because of its three great stars – Toni Collette, Ruth Cracknell and Barry Otto.

  Did you just start at the beginning of the story and write from there?

  With earlier books I’d made a plan in advance, and found that although a plan is reassuring it can also stifle your imagination.  With this book I decided to write in a much more unstructured way and see what happened.  I used the few facts I knew about Bea Miles like navigations points – peaks of known events – and I’d invent a scenario that would make the journey between them convincing.  I didn’t start at the beginning.  Each day I’d write another “fragment”  based on whatever trigger I had found that day – a photo of Sydney at her time, my personal memories of the places she’d frequented, stories people told me about her.  I also found I could use some details from my own life and give them to her – for example her schoolyard has a lot in common with the playground of my own primary school. I discovered the great freedom of writing about things I knew about without having to write about myself.

You suggest that something her father did might have sent her off on the course she followed …

  As I wrote, I had to make sense of those few things I knew about Bea Miles.  One thing that seemed to make sense of them was some kind of power struggle between her and her father, culminating in some form of sexual abuse.  I hadn’t really planned that, but it brought into the open a lot of issues about the power relationships between men and women – and of course led to the “sequel”, Dark Place (aka Albion's Story), which is her father’s story.

(for more on the writing of Lilian’s Story, see the link to "Interviews" on the home page. There you'll find an interview with Sue Woolfe about the writing of Lilian’s Story.)