'When my father, Laurie, retired from his job as a high school science and IT teacher, he’d been a teacher for about thirty-five years. He was, I think, a good teacher. ‘I wasn’t super teacher,’ he told me, ‘I wasn’t Eddy Woo, but my students did well and sometimes they bought me a beer years later, I was an ok teacher.’ I liked the fact that he was a schoolteacher, liked that he chose to work at a public school down the road, because his values were my values.' (Introduction)

'In the months before my first book—a collection of personal essays—was published, I dreamt a series of painstakingly literal nightmares. The return of the repressed? I wish. These were unmediated renderings of my base fears about a book I had written coming into the world.' (Introduction)

'For many cooking a meal each evening can feel like daily drudgery.

'But maybe the kitchen doesn't have to be the place of nightly agony, or at least that's how one sassy celebrity chef of the 1970's made things seem.'

Source: Radio National Fictions.

'BLUEBERRIES could be described as a collection of essays, the closest term available for a book that resists classification: a blend of personal essay, polemic, prose poetry, true-crime journalism and confession that considers a fragmented life, reflecting on what it means to be a woman, a body, an artist. It is both a memoir and an interrogation of memoir. It is a new horizon in storytelling.

'In crystalline prose, Savage explores the essential questions of the examined life: what is it to desire? What is it to accommodate oneself to the world? And at what cost?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.