Iris Johansen's lovers weathered the sack of city states and the vagaries of the French Revolution; Judith McNaught's heroines endured amnesia, social ostracism and misunderstandings so big they deserved their own ZIP code.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.
She's lonely and wounded and very vulnerable and it really is a story about people at the heart of it all.
This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.
The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!
The Georges were fair; they left all to the Government; but Anne was very bad and a tyrant. She tyrannised over the Irish. She died broken-hearted with all the bad things that were going on about her. For Queen Anne was very wicked; oh, very wicked, indeed!
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.
She told fortunes for a living. It's a wacky book and was great fun to write. It is very much a look at what life was like for women in Australia in the 1960's.
As I travelled around Australia, strangers in pubs, on airplanes, in beach parking lots would bring up Gina Rinehart, not knowing I was writing about her. Everybody had something to say, some of it thoughtful, some of it poorly informed, some of it vividly obscene.
Portraying Pocahontas' story well was important to me because she was a real person and these were real events in her life.
I think mine is the fullest and most plausible account of what went on in Marie Antoinette's life.