Cassie Hamer

speaker

292 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Cassie Hamer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Talking Aussie Books · Talking Aussie Books with Dianne Yarwood · 2 Jun 2026 podcast

That's not how it works at all.

No.

And I suppose with this book in particular, because it is so different in subject matter.

Partly because it's very directly inspired by an actual friend of yours who we won't name, but I'll refer to as Real Life Maggie, which is the name of our main character in the book.

Now, some years ago, Real Life Maggie came to you and said she wanted to tell you her story.

What did you already know about her life and what did you learn?

I can't wait to hear more about that and especially the complexities of dealing with someone's real life story, which provides so many opportunities but also challenges.

And we've talked a little bit around what the story is in Margaret Are You Leaving, but let's go into a bit more detail.

The book is set in the year 2001, and we start with Maggie and Anna, who are women in their 40s who work together on the switchboard.

board of a TV station fielding viewers' calls.

Maggie is unmarried but dating.

Anna is a mom of two.

Now one night while at work, Maggie gets a call from Lucas, her brother.

to say that their adoptive mother Caroline has died.

Now, unusually Maggie is quite glad or quite emotionless about this.

And we learn that Caroline was quite a horrendous, unloving parent for reasons we find out later in the book.

But that death and the discovery of some information among Caroline's papers triggers Maggie to start a search for her birth mother, of whom she really knows all.

Very little.

Now there's a massive sense of emotion driving that decision.

And it does seem to me that it's an emotion that drives a lot of adopted children who reach midlife and decide they really need to know more about their origins.

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