How do we become who we are? In this edition of Literati Glitterati, Mel chats to the authors of two books consumed by precisely this question.
The first is Where I slept, an autofictional work set in nineties Melbourne by writer and poet Libby Angel, which charts a young woman’s journey towards artistic self actualisation as she traverses the city’s sharehouses, squats and streets. Libby chats with Mel about unreliable narrators, writing visually, and the role of music in her practice.
The second, Eleven Letters to You, by prominent literary critic Helen Elliot, is a memoir told in letters to the people who shaped her as a young person coming of age in the fifties and sixties: her neighbours, teachers, colleagues, mentors. Helen and Mel talk everyday kindness, Helen's gleaming memory, and her ferocious girlhood reading habit.
About this program
Championing stylish wordsmiths and sterling conversation, Literati Glitterati is a weekly book show that loves a good story, well told.
LITERATI GLITTERATI SALON: A MONTHLY BOOK CLUB
Join Mel and a rotating roster of bookish conversationalists as they unpack Literati Glitterati’s book of the month.
Expect a spiriting assortment of cult classics, forgotten wonders, timeless treasures, zesty new releases and pulp fictions wrestled straight from the zeitgeist by Mel herself.
Each book will be announced a month out from the special, so that you can read along at home. On the last Wednesday of every month, tune into Literati Glitterati from midday till 1pm with your thoughts and feelings ready: we’ll be taking questions through the text line.
Literati Glitterati Salon: a monthly book club for folks who like a good story, well told.
NEXT MONTH'S BOOK: A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin.
The Lit Glit salon returns with A Manual For Cleaning Women, a pulverising selection of short stories from the previously unsung queen of story, Lucia Berlin.
Berlin wrote in binges, brilliantly, throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s until her death in 2004. Ten years later, with the release of this book, she became a New York Times Bestseller and the kind of writer I’d start a fight with my then boyfriend about.
You think Bukowski lived a life? Maaaate. If there can only be one true cataloguer of the ugly-beautiful, the itinerant, the mundane-transcendent, the gurgling bottle, to imbue the city dump with the majesty of a field of wildflowers, then Lit Glit decrees: it is she.
On Wednesday 31 July from midday to 1pm, join Mel, writers Tony Birch and Grace Yee, and painter Kirsty Budge for a belter of a conversation about the woman who could be described as the godmother of autofiction. As Berlin herself said – “The story is the thing.”
Buy the collection with the intro by her mate Lydia Davis (!!!!) and the afterword by her son, and be prepared to have your heart shucked like an oyster.
