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Aoife Clifford

πŸ‘€ Speaker
573 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The Bookshelf
On Tara June Winch's The Yield, Tony Birch's The White Girl and Julia Phillips' Disappearing Earth

And I sort of, after having read The Chain, it's as if Sean Duffy is the little independent movies that Adrian's been making to critical acclaim, and now all of a sudden he's written the blockbuster.

The Bookshelf
On Tara June Winch's The Yield, Tony Birch's The White Girl and Julia Phillips' Disappearing Earth

And The Chain, I think, is going to be it.

The Bookshelf
On Tara June Winch's The Yield, Tony Birch's The White Girl and Julia Phillips' Disappearing Earth

Thank you.

The Bookshelf
On Tara June Winch's The Yield, Tony Birch's The White Girl and Julia Phillips' Disappearing Earth

Fantastic.

The Bookshelf
On Tara June Winch's The Yield, Tony Birch's The White Girl and Julia Phillips' Disappearing Earth

Lovely to be here.

The Bookshelf
On Tara June Winch's The Yield, Tony Birch's The White Girl and Julia Phillips' Disappearing Earth

on the ABC Listen app.

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

Well, she was very, very important to me and I think to my generation of feminists.

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

We were...

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

the young women in our 20s looking for guidance, I guess, and looking for other lives that might have relevance to the lives that we were trying to create for ourselves.

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

And it was sort of interesting that we would go to Southern Rhodesia, as it was then called,

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

where this young woman called Martha Quest, who was the creation of Doris Lessing, and there's a series called The Children of Violence, which I think from memory is four or five books, about Martha Quest's growing up, becoming very politicised, marrying, having children, getting divorced, her whole life cycle.

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

And I guess the reason I and so many of my friends found these books so compelling is

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

is because they mirrored the kinds of struggles, both political and personal struggles, that we were having in our own lives, even though it was a very different country and a very different sensibility.

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

And Martha Quest and her friends were all communists, which we weren't, but we were radical politically, but not communists.

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

But she also was a feminist, even though she wouldn't have used that word back then.

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

And so she was the closest thing I could find.

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

And then, of course, Doris Lessing wrote that extraordinary book called The Golden Notebook, which at the time, I think that was around 1975.

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

And at the time, that really was like a feminist book.

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

bible the fictional feminist bible of the era because it depicted the lives of four women who were having the kinds of struggles with men with work with life with kids with their love lives not perfectly mirrored our own but which but which we could relate to because they were close enough

The Bookshelf
On Graham Norton's A Keeper, R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries and Georgina Harding's Land of the Living with David Hunt, Aoife Clifford and Anne Summers

I mean, what would be on it?