Cirrus@Austlit

'Georgia Blain’s fiction has always observed the effects of disruption on the domestic lives of her urban middle-class characters. Her novels and short stories often have drawn on her experiences. But, as a writer of cool restraint, she was aware that tragedy and coincidence were piling up in her life with a clumsy lack of credibility.

Towards the end of The Museum of Words, she summarises the “plot line” of her memoir as if it were a novel being assessed by her editor:

The central character has just put her mother in a home with Alzheimer’s, her mentor and best friend has terminal brain cancer, she has written a book about terminal brain cancer, and now she has it too … Maybe a little too much?' (Introduction)