AustLit

'Julie Catt misspent her youth in Columbia, Missouri lining up tequila shots and winning wet T-shirt competitions. So maybe it wasn't such a stretch to think that twenty years on, mother to six kids from four different paternity arrangements, she'd be sobbing to a therapist about her irrepressible white-trash heritage. Or that her birth parents would turn up, trailing a whole new family. Or even that she'd be living on the other side of the world, having followed her hot butch Australian girlfriend to Sydney.

'But happily married? With a respectable profession? That would be weird...

'Normal is a left-of centre memoir in the mould of Running with Scissors: a funny, insightful, moving and relentlessly frank account of a messy and richly lived life. A complete delight to read, it is a tribute and a reassurance to people in unconventional families everywhere - which, of course, means most of us.' (From the publisher's website.)