Hilary McPhee

Hilary McPhee AO is an important part of Australia's publishing history. Together with the late Di Gribble (1942-2011), in 1975 she founded McPhee Gribble Publishing (1975-1989) which became Australia's route to discovering the most interesting new writers, some of whom you can find on this blog: rel="nofollow" target="_top">Tim Winton, Helen Garner, Rod Jones, and Murray Bail amongst others. I heard about her memoir Other People's Houses when McPhee was featured on the ABC Radio National Conversations program, (listen here) and even though I never got round to reading her previous memoir Other People's Words, the story of an accidental publisher (which has been sitting on the TBR *blush* since 2008!) Other People's Houses sounded so intriguing that I jettisoned my reservations about memoirs and reserved a copy at the library.

The Conversations program is headlined as 'The Writer and the Prince', because Other People's Houses is the story of how McPhee was hired to help a Jordanian prince to write a book, an event which coincided with an abrupt change in her personal life. It's about a book project that doesn't see the light of day, and at the same time, about a life journey about starting again in your sixties. It's a cautionary tale, offering a frank insight about how even an enviably smart, savvy woman can delude herself into believing that what you want, is how things are, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. McPhee is upfront about not seeing the warning signs that all would not be well with the book, because she so badly needed the professional affirmation that the project could bring when the rest of her life was falling apart.

Other People's Houses is also a salutary tale for women of a certain age, because an abrupt change in our personal lives is what eventually happens to most of us. It is very common for women to become unpartnered late in life, and after a lifetime of being part of a couple, to have to learn to live alone.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/12/20/other-peoples-houses-by-hilary-mcphee/… (meer)