As a child, I wanted to run an orphanage or be an author. Perhaps the Madeline books inspired both ideas. Debating whether to do good or have fun, I gave up studying to be a social worker and pursued a life around the written word. Moving to the United States from Australia at the age of twenty-three, I earned a master’s degree in journalism, wrote a slew of press releases as a publicist, and, with small children underfoot, published feature articles in newspapers and magazines.

It never occurred to me to write fiction until I moved to Arizona, and joined a writers’ group. First, I moved gingerly away from factual reporting by writing essays. My essay, The Dog Catcher of Jabiru, won the Tara L. Masih Intercultural Essay Prize in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition in 2014. Then, I discovering I could make things up and get away with it, I started writing novels. I write about women and their families, and the secrets that lie beneath. A love of baking, Boston (where I used to live), and all things British inspired the novel, Lipstick on the Strawberry, published by The Wild Rose Press (2017). The story won the Romantic Elements Category in the First Coast Romance Writers 2015 Beacon Contest. Lipstick on the Strawberry was a finalist for the 2019 Eric Hoffer Book Award and in the 2019 Next Generation Indie Awards. My second novel, Joyous Lies, published by The Wild Rose Press, was released on February 15, 2021. The book was on the short list for the 2021 Somerset Book Awards novel competition for Literary and Contemporary Fiction.

In September 2024, Cold War in a Hot Kitchen, my memoir of growing up in Melbourne, Australia, was published by the Australian publisher Wakefield Press. I flew to Australia for a very successful launch there. As well as being a personal story, the book explores the tensions of the early Cold War period and the constraints on the lives of the three women who lived in our home; my mother, her sister, who was at the time forging a successful career as a feminist journalist, and my paternal grandmother, who disapproved of them both and of her growing tribe of grandchildren. My grandmother, an Englishwoman whose upper lip was so stiff it seemed cemented, had lived an extraordinary life in the remote goldfields of Western Australia, bringing up her four children in conditions bordering on privation until catapulted into social dominance through her husband’s success.

Now widowed, lonely, and living with her oldest son and his family, she ruled the household with an emotional iciness and values opposed to her daughter-in-law and her family. The tensions inside the house mirrored the political tensions outside it. Cold War in a Hot Kitchen reveals a society in upheaval, far from its bland popular image, a time, as one historian wrote, “of outward conformity and growing unease. In this beautifully remembered record, a middle-class girl learns to be a woman in a time on the cusp of radical change. A joy to read.”