This is the warm up.

Look, I think the truest answer that I can give you without starting from sort of the day I was born is to say that I probably became aware of creativity, joy and belonging in a way that is probably really universal and human, which is that I was lacking them.

So I came to them because I became aware of what was missing and I needed something to help me recover those senses, that sense of belonging in my life when I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere or to myself or to my own life.

And I became aware that there was a deep and vast absence of joy in my life.

And the combination of the awareness of those two things, joy and belonging, brought me back to look at where I found those things in my life when I was much younger.

So to give this some framing in time, in my life, we're talking about I was kind of 29.

If I can pinpoint this for you to launch in to chit chat, I was 29.

How did you connect joy with a house and what type of house is joy building?

Who is this girl?

I think Maggie probably is an amalgamation of, um, me and lots of people my age I knew in the '90s.

I was 15 in '95, and so it's the decade that I came of age in.

And so Maggie, uh, at 15 in '95 also is struggling to understand how to deal with her feelings around, uh, her, I suppose you'd say, broken family and around feeling like she doesn't quite belong anywhere.

In the opening scene when we meet her, she is in the car with her mum on a stinking hot Queensland summer's day, uh, hurtling inland to the hinterland behind the coast in Southeast Queensland to go and see the beloved uncle from her childhood that, for reasons unknown to her, she hasn't seen for many years.

And that's where her story begins in the town that her Uncle Neil lives in, where she emulates Drew Barrymore with daisies in her hair and listens to Smashing Pumpkins and The Cranberries in her headphones and inexplicably finds herself drawn to two kids in town.

Uh, and their friendship is something that illuminates her and makes her feel seen for the first time, which is quite powerful.

What is this place, Holly?

copies

of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.

I had been dreaming of seeing my book for as long as I'd been dreaming of being a writer in my life, which was since I was a teen, since I was a kid.

And I...

I'm kind of thrilled that I completely failed at having any kind of composure because how could you? If you walked into that room with a whole life of yearning for something that felt genuinely impossible would ever come to fruition.

And you saw what I saw and you went, yeah, cool.

Where do you want me to stand for my photo? Oh, insufferable.

Was your book about that?

And how did it feel when your voice that was very quiet suddenly was heard by so many people?

Oh, Franny.

Okay, two things are coming to mind.

I think the first one is that I tried my darndest not to write Alice Hart.

I tried writing many other ideas before.

And I loved them, and they're in a draw, and one day they'll come back to me, but the problem with them is that I wasn't made, I don't think.

My granny and mum didn't make me and raise me, and the cells in me are not made to tell stories at arm's length from my heart.

Do you have a favourite?

What was different then that meant you could actually write unhindered, unencumbered?

I wouldn't wish this on anyone.

It makes so much sense that this was how it happened too, because I think a force like fear needs something, a force equal and greater than to break its vice on us, to put a chink in its grip that it has on our minds.

And for me, it was death.

It was losing someone really close to me.

I had not experienced death in my life.

I hadn't ...

What, what did that first draft look like for you?