Cassie McCullagh

that I was just beside myself when I was reading it, Cassie.

Oh, it was so awkward.

But, you know, what I liked about that story is that it wasn't just that it was about the importance of communication and conversation.

It was that it was very adult.

Not at the beginning.

Like, it's not about being in your 20s.

It's about having been in a relationship for a long time, having children, balancing careers.

It's, I guess, in a way, it's a collection of short stories about being middle-aged.

Which I think is quite an interesting idea because she's making Hillary Clinton a character and imagining her way into Clinton's certainty, the certainty that she will win and she will become president.

But she does it by telling a story of this...

strange relationship she has with this feisty slightly conservative journalist who's always interviewed her in ways she likes again because this woman pushes her a bit and has intelligent conversations with her and then ends up vomiting in her lap

And I think this is a bit of a theme through all of her stories.

We aren't necessarily liking these characters and it's not a comfortable read.

In some ways, there's always a bit of awkwardness and a little bit of vomiting in other people's laps that goes on through these short stories.

So did you like them?

Were you taken in by this way of writing about the world or not?

Cassie, I agree with you about the didacticism, and I think it's a problem, and it's especially going to be a problem for Australian readers.

But I did think that in the middle, there was some really interesting stuff, particularly about relationships.

So although I was amused by some of the stuff about how she described the political candidate and the journalist,

If you pick up this book, maybe start at the third short story and then you'll get something a bit more open-ended and a bit more, as you say, when you can get these whole worlds in these short stories and you want to be left with a bit of ambiguity.