Cassie McCullough

And, you know, she also did this cookbook called Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

So he's been watching, and this is all from the 1960s, for some reason this kid growing up in suburban Perth with a really rough childhood has found these online videos of Julia Child and has become not only obsessed with the food that she cooks but this allure of a life that's more considered, more genteel, more funny and more sophisticated.

And so he has been...

You know, giving himself this sort of masterclass education in cooking while outside his bedroom door, his mum has been having this series of dreadful encounters with men and ultimately Steve, who becomes his de facto stepfather and brings with him a lot of problems.

And it's also, it's a practical solution to what's real hunger and real poverty.

I mean, this is a story of an underclass living a really very difficult life, but it also becomes a way for him to be generous and to initiate a friendship, for example, with a girl who lives just up the street from Vic's place.

So we see Sam's world starting to change because he met this woman

old man on the bridge, but also he starts to learn about Edie, the woman who's died and that provides him another way of being in the world and thinking about how you might be and thinking about relationships.

Edie being Edith, Vic's wife, who he lost six years earlier and he's never really recovered from the loss of her.

She was everything to him and she sounds like she was a pretty fun person as well.

Now, there's another part of the story, Kate, and I guess giving ourselves the 100-page rule is

I mentioned the makeup earlier on.

It turns out that while living in this brutal environment, Sam has also been experimenting with dressing up and dressing up in his mum's clothes, using her makeup.

and really exploring a part of his identity in private, which is very much at odds with the hypermasculinity and toxicity that's outside the bathroom door.

So as he's exploring his own identity, our sense of threat and danger for this young man and knowing where we met him on the first page really heightens our feelings for this kid.

So we're traversing quite tricky territory.

We're looking at themes of suicide and transgender identity.

And this is all in a young adult context.

I'm just curious, to what extent do you see this as a young adult novel, Kate?

I did read it as a young adult novel, partly because of the way that some things are explained.