Cassie McCullagh

But Gabrielle is not named in the book, and

And also, I should say to people, Cassie, that we know discussions of mental health and suicide can be distressing for listeners.

So a warning that that is where we're heading.

The other thing that's worth noting is that in that period when Puberty Blues was written, Deborah Adelaide and Gabrielle Carey were already friends and they were at high school together.

But Deborah was not part of the surf scene.

She didn't have the same experience.

She's very clear that her parents would not have let her hang out at the beach like that.

But all of that complicated history, Hannah Kent, feeds into this, well, it's not a very long book, but into a book that I called

Elegant.

How would you describe what's happening in this book?

I love reading stuff about friendship.

I think it is such an interesting relationship and it is so well done here because it includes the care, you know, turning up to say, let's go for a walk.

Let's get out of here.

She helps make the house more welcoming.

But there's also the sort of toughness that can come with long friendship when she can call out her friend on what at one point she describes as sentimental nonsense or she'll say, what are you doing?

Why are you doing this?

And one of the really powerful things she says to her friend is, you can't do to them, meaning your daughter and grandchild, you can't do to them what your father did to you.

And Gabrielle Carey's father died by suicide also at the age of 64.

So this friendship is haunted by each other's families and by the intimacy that came from knowing each other so well.

And Deborah, or the narrator character, was influenced by her friend's family, which was a family full of books and ideas and reading the newspaper and cutting holes in the newspaper in a way her family wasn't.