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Rozanna Lilley

Poet and essayist

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Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life

Cover image of Do Oysters Get Bored?

Shortlisted for the 2019 National Biography Award

PUBLICATION DATE: April 2018
FORMAT: Paperback
EXTENT: 228 pages
SIZE: 234 (H) x156 (W) mm
ISBN: 9781742589633

PURCHASE

A baby cries; a mother exits, leaving her family behind; a child finally begins to talk; a father stops breathing.

Rozanna Lilley is a social anthropologist, autism researcher, and Oscar’s mum. Oscar is on the autism spectrum, which means he has a particular way of being in the world and understanding the lives of those around him.

As Rozanna and her husband Neil navigate Oscar’s childhood, the author reflects upon her own childhood and adolescence, spent in a libertarian, self-consciously bohemian household first in Perth and then in Sydney presided over by her parents, the writers Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley.

Through personal essays, Lilley works through the ongoing repercussions of childhood trauma and captures Oscar’s rich inner world, as revealed through his vivid fantasy life and curious observations. Do Oysters Get Bored? is a shimmering examination of an eccentric family, the complexities of care and the toll of grief in middle-age. A set of poems serve as a counterpoint to the essays in this directly charming and surprisingly funny account of daily life.


National Biography Award Judges Comments

“A finely observed reflection on the complexities of family relationships, aptly subtitled a curious life. Rozanna Lilley is the mother of an autistic son, Oscar, and the daughter of eccentric libertarians whose parenting left her own childhood “carelessly broken”. The book takes the form of a series of loosely linked essays and concludes with 44 intensely personal poems, truly poetry as memoir. The stories of Lilley’s childhood and her own parenting are beautifully and gently integrated.”

Reviews

  • Marie O’Rourke in Westerly Magazine
  • Katie Sutherland in the Conversation

Media

  • “Rozanna’s Curious Life” on ABC Radio
  • Interview with Dr. Catherine Noske

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