Geraldine Brooks

And I've had people actually come up to me and say, Actually, one writer who I was just with is won Pulitzer Prizes for her novels.

Geraldine Brooks said, you gave me the best advice when I was writing my first book.

You said, because I was wandering around Hampstead Heath, we were both living in London, thinking about my book and agonizing my book.

And you said, you're not going to have a book if all you do is walk around Hampstead Heath, put your ass in the chair and write the words.

Which Australian author wrote the novels March, Year of Wonders, People of the Book and Horse?

Oh, that would be the wonderful Geraldine Brooks.

It would be the wonderful Geraldine Brooks.

Year of Wonders was actually number 14 in Radio National's top 100 Australian

books.

And then for anyone who loved Hamnet, I read Year of Wonders, which is fiction.

It's Geraldine Brooks.

I guess you'd call it historical fiction.

But Hamnet,

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

This book by Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders, is also set in the plague time.

And it's about a woman who figures out how to treat people.

It's called Who is Government? The Untold Stories of Public Service by Michael Lewis.

And they're – like Geraldine Brooks wrote one of the essays.

Basically – You know, we all think of the typical jobs of government.

There are a lot of really niche, fascinating jobs.

So you really get a sense of groundedness and who you are and where you're listening to.

Like, I didn't even know Geraldine Brooks was Australian until I listened to her memoir.

I'd read two of her books before that.

My

But to achieve one of the goals I set myself in that book, to provide comfort, for example, to those two recently widowed women who introduced themselves in the Sydney Writers' Week a few days ago.

Just as I got comfort looking at, got some understanding of this, looking at C.S. Lewis, or Geraldine Brooks, Joyce Carol Oates, and Joan Didion.

And a very tough, a very gritty view of bereavement, a book written after his wife, very soon after his wife had gone, by Julian Barnes.

I mean, he's one who does something I'd never been drawn to, contemplate suicide.

Um, and so he's sort of grappling with this outsized presence in his life, but also coming to grips with some of the damage that, uh, that came from, from his dad's life.

Um, and, and then, uh, maybe on the flip side, there's a really touching memoir by the novelist G- Geraldine Brooks called Memorial Days.

Uh, and she's grappling with the sudden death of her husband, Tony Horwitz.

Um, and it's wonderful how it braids together her experience of that moment with also her reckoning of it, uh, a couple of years later on.