Kirsten Krauth

And, you know, he's a beautiful writer.

So he evokes kind of the Brisbane scene at that time.

And also the main one was James Freud.

He has two memoirs and they're really interesting because one he wrote as an alcoholic, as an addict.

And the other one he wrote when he came clean.

So he basically says that the first one, you know, none of it's true.

So I was really interested in this kind of gap there between, you know, what you can make up in memoir.

And that had a huge impact on the book, especially there's a chapter called Barbados, which James Freud wrote and sang.

And it just really brought across this idea of

The idea of fame and what happens to people, what happens to musicians after they have a really successful hit and where they end up.

Yes, I did a PhD in creative writing at the University of Canberra.

The novel was the major component of that.

There was also a critical component, which is called an exegesis.

And the novel and the exegesis both started with photography, which is also a theme of the book.

I was looking at photographs of teenagers and photographs of children that are quite confronting.

And from that, Mona, the main character, arrived because in the beginning she's being photographed by a famous photographer.

In terms of reading, the book that probably shifted and was also about photography shifted my thinking completely.

was Patti Smith's Just Kids.

So it's about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe and it's such a beautiful, romantic book.

Isn't it lovely?