For most of 2020, I had a rash on the back of my hand that would not go away. I…

In the blurb-saturated present, authors can decry blurbs as corrupt and silly all they like. When they publish new books, however, they will still be obliged to solicit blurbs, and most will provide them for friends and colleagues on request.

Like many of the memoirs, essays and novels concerning motherhood that have been published in the last decade, Bad Art Mother reaches beyond the reductive ideals of good and bad mothering that have, I imagine, always plagued mothers.

I started Chilean Poet just before Christmas while I was visiting my family in Brisbane and then I finished it during the first days of the new year, while I was ferociously coming down. It was life-affirming and glorious and gently wise and I loved it, needed it. It temporarily restored some sense of hope, like a synthetic serotonin.

Can the analogy between poetry and work help us understand capitalism in the contemporary moment? Is poetry itself a form of work? 

On a long drive once, in a hot summer, on a stretch of the Hume where rolling, sheep-ravaged hills the colour of bone gave glimpses of a long train full of wheat, my father-in-law explained train wheels to me: how they ran, how they turned, how they stayed on the tracks. The rim on the wheel, he said, was less important than its shape.

Rurality and mobility are polarities within registers of logic that animate the new worlds of both women. Our protagonist wishes to retain both in the hope of dwelling perpetually in her personal landscape of myths as she journeys through myriad worlds. 

Driving was something that was for other people, a way of interfacing easily with the world that I would always lack. 

So I take it – with a caveat. I am not the Road Warrior – neither Mad Max himself, nor my mate from Caba. But I am a Road Warrior. It’s how I live and where I feel most like myself. On the road, alone, living by the sun and stars, with no waged labour or clocks in sight.

Before there were call centres, help desks, delivery bikes and Uber, before labour hire firms and all the rest started offering young people new ways of working long and hard for doubtful return, before the term ‘gig economy’ had come into being – before all that the one way to make a quick, modest dollar was to drive cabs on the night shift. It was a Sydney thing.

Tony Birch tells incredibly important stories incredibly well and Dark as Last Night is both an antidote and a lullaby in pandemic times.

‘This idea of difference, reinforcing difference through representation, and how this relates to social power, is what I want to use this book as an opportunity to think more about.’

Maybe you already know that working minimally feels feasible when there is work, when you have, or can return to, a paid job, when you are fairly confident that, frightening though the thought might be, if you lost your paid job you could find another.

How to describe the current motherhood-memoir nexus? Owing to commercial pressures, nonfiction books by women writers dealing in any way with motherhood are unlikely to be sold as books of thinking, exploration, reportage, cultural critique or all the above. Instead they are dubbed motherhood memoirs. At the same time writing about mothering has become constrained, made predictable, by certain memoiristic tropes, vocabularies, intensities and scales. I don’t want to make any big declarations about how when you spit in a bookshop you hit a memoir, except to note it’s not only women, it’s brain surgeons, the children of spies, young writers with hybrid identities, survivors of trauma, each getting pushed down the memoir route by their publishers or agents or maybe by their own sense of what kind of books are possible and wanted.

Limberlost is a tender study of the dangers of averting our gaze, and of how we might go through life with very little involvement.