Judy couldn't move to Britain for family reasons, so I had to come to the States, and the U.S. government wouldn't give me a Green Card, so I airily told her I'd write a book.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
My mom didn't want me to go to college. She didn't want me to read - when I read, I may as well have been holding a pineapple.
When my mother died, I fell apart. My father wanted to control me. As a consequence, I ran away to America.
I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.
Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
My first girlfriend broke up with me on a yellow legal pad. After she picked me up from the airport one day, she took out a letter that her therapist wrote, and she read it to me. She and her therapists wrote a letter breaking up with me together.
I had to live and breathe Margaret Thatcher for a few months. I totally engulfed myself in her life. I read her autobiography and a biography, 'The Grocer's Daughter.'
Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.
I told her I wanted a plastic surgeon to sew me up, and I wanted her to freeze my ovaries, so I could harvest the eggs and have a biological child through a surrogate.