The first biography of the great Australian writer is sharp, bright and engaging.
Many stories have been told about Frank Moorhouse: of the writer who challenged orthodoxies around sex in Australian literature in the 1970s; of the bon vivant who won an international award in 2007 and immediately blew most of the prize money on a dinner for the assembled writers; of the author of, which was famously knocked out of contention for the Miles Franklin Award for being insufficiently “Australian”.
This biography sets out the conditions for this personality to develop but stops at the threshold of psychological speculation: Lumby sees Moorhouse, she tells the reader, “as a man at the cultural cliff-edge — perpetually running his hand along the railing and staring down with alarmed fascination at the jagged rocks below”.
His literary work is read in conversation with his non-fiction and largely contextualised thematically, in relation to the sexual and gender politics in Australia of the 1970s: his protests against censorship and government surveillance; his broader approach to rules of aesthetic and ethical engagement; and the crossing of national, sexual and gendered boundaries.
One of most affecting stories in the book is that of how clandestine Moorhouse felt he had to be about his queer sexual and gendered identity, especially earlier in his life when gay sex remained criminalised, even as he was writing about queer sex as overtly as any other writer of his generation.Lumby’s decision to rely more on interviews than on letters also has the effect of this biography feeling a little distant from its subject.
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