'It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.
'Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.
'Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Chosen as one of The Conversation Best Books of 2024
Chosen as one of The Guardian Australia's 25 best Australian books of 2024.
'A beguiling mix of fiction, essay and memoir.'
'Michelle de Kretser's new book Theory and Practice is a creative combination of fiction and essay, and concerns the moment in which the encounter with literature, a connection with another human imagination, is replaced by something called 'Theory'. '
'The Miles Franklin winner’s most experimental book yet opens as fiction interrupted by a narrator who starts picking apart her life and feelings about writing'
'“Who will write the history of tears?” The narrator of Michelle de Kretser’s seventh novel returns to this question from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1977). Named once fleetingly, she is a writer, glancing back to growing up in Sri Lanka before her family migrated to Sydney, then reflecting on living in Melbourne to write a thesis on Virginia Woolf. Though her Sydney boyfriend has betrayed her, desire remains as central to her attention as the question of what a novel can do.' (Introduction)
'The narrator of Michelle de Kretser’s seventh novel Theory & Practice is younger than I was when she realises something we all do, eventually: sometimes there can be a great chasm between what we say, write, and purport to know and believe, and what we do.' (Introduction)
'“Who will write the history of tears?” The narrator of Michelle de Kretser’s seventh novel returns to this question from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1977). Named once fleetingly, she is a writer, glancing back to growing up in Sri Lanka before her family migrated to Sydney, then reflecting on living in Melbourne to write a thesis on Virginia Woolf. Though her Sydney boyfriend has betrayed her, desire remains as central to her attention as the question of what a novel can do.' (Introduction)
'The Miles Franklin winner’s most experimental book yet opens as fiction interrupted by a narrator who starts picking apart her life and feelings about writing'
'Michelle de Kretser's new book Theory and Practice is a creative combination of fiction and essay, and concerns the moment in which the encounter with literature, a connection with another human imagination, is replaced by something called 'Theory'. '
