AustLit

'Some days, if the wash hadn't been too grubby, Mum would scrape the hot ash from under the copper, let the water cool down, then plonk me naked into the 'pot'. Grinning wickedly she would tell me I was being boiled until tender. 'And then I will gobble you all up!''

Bron was Phyllis Nicholls' first child. An Imaginary Mother is an open-hearted memoir of her mother and their intense relationship over fifty-six years. Phyllis was a secretive, complex and unpredictable woman. Before her marriage, Phyllis worked happily as a designer in Vida Turner's pioneering textile company. After WW II, with a young family, she had to cope with the isolation of a struggling farm, her husband's conversion to a rigid religion and her increasing mood changes between despair, melancholy and joy. Yet to the end of almost eighty years, Phyll was a stoic. She saw her 'madnesses' as the inevitable ups and downs of a full life, to be worked around with a mixture of courage, stealth, ingenuity and, whenever possible, with humour.' (Publisher's blurb)