Cirrus@Austlit

'The definitive biography of one of Australia's best-known men of letters.

'Many writers fashion a career out of their writing. Some fashion brilliant careers. Very few, however, commit to their art in a manner that inflects every aspect of their own daily life. Frank Moorhouse was one of the rare writers who actively chose to live a life that was as grounded in conscious aesthetic and ethical choices as was his writing.

'A decade before his death in 2022, Frank Moorhouse asked renowned journalist, writer and academic Catharine Lumby to be his biographer. This was an inspired choice, influenced by their decades of friendship and by Lumby's close engagement with, and appreciation for, Moorhouse's writing. She 'got' him and his work, he said, in a way few others did.

'Frank Moorhouse was one of Australia's best-known and most-loved authors, here and around the world. His career spanned the genres of the novel, the short story, the essay, the memoir, the erotic novella, the screenplay and the historical monograph. He even invented a literary form: the discontinuous narrative. Moorhouse was also one of the country's foremost public intellectuals, his contribution to Australian cultural, social and political life was prolific, erudite and astoundingly broad. Throughout his career he moved between the roles of activist, author, advocate and scholar. His interests ranged across intimate relationships, social mores, history, politics, international law, foreign policy, intellectual property and censorship.

'On all these subjects, he wrote and spoke with distinctive elegance, wit and perception.

'Given Moorhouse's impact on literature and public intellectual life, it is astonishing that this is the first literary biography of a man recognised as one of our most important writers and thinkers. In this fascinating and crucial work, Catharine Lumby threads the intellectual and aesthetic aspects of Moorhouse's literary, personal and political life into a sparkling dialogue, highlighting the depth of his impact on Australian literature and culture.' (Publication summary)

'Frank Moorhouse, one of Australia’s most prolific and loved authors, essayists, and public intellectuals, died aged eighty-three on 26 June. Moorhouse left a legacy of eighteen fiction and non-fiction books, a series of screenplays, and countless essays. He was also a tireless activist on a range of fronts, including opposing censorship and promoting copyright law reform.'(Introduction) 

'Frank Moorhouse structured his 2005 semi-fictional memoir Martini around his favourite drink. He was fascinated by the rituals and rules for living well that the martini symbolised.' 

'One of the seminal films of the 1970s, Alvin Purple depicts Alvin's struggles with his irresistibility to women - from his school days and time as a waterbed salesman to his short-lived career as a sex therapist. The 'definitive ocker comedy', Alvin Purple survived a critical mauling and went on to become the most commercially successful Australian film of the 1970s.

'Catharine Lumby takes a fresh look at the film, the social and political era in which it was made and the forces that fuelled its success. She revisits claims that the movie is little more than an exercise in sexploitation and argues that the film is far more complex than its detractors have allowed.' (Publisher's blurb)

According to McFarlane 'Lumby situates this discourse on Alvin as a representation of female desire in the 1970s context of a feminist polemics which made itself felt variously in the high-level argumentation of a Germaine Greer and in more populist vein in the pages of Cleo magazine.'