How do you decide how much of your personal life you share and how much to conceal?

Memoir is always a fine line between writing truthfully and bleeding all over the page in an uncontained expose that has no regard for the reader’s interest or narrative shape. Holding that in mind, I wanted to maximise what I revealed because I believe in telling our lives as they are – it is a humanistic endeavour to show up unadorned, standing in the fullness of who you are. Women especially are conditioned to curate their messes into something pretty and palatable. I wanted to breach that, while also showing deep care for those I was writing about. My mother, my children, their father, the woman I fell in love with – they are all splayed wide open, but I hope with love.

The Swift Dark Tide is structured as a love letter, poem, meditation and diary. How did you plot the structure of the memoir and how much it did it facilitate (or not) the writing process?

The book begun as a series of writing exercises and chapter-length love letters; I really had no great architecture in mind. It was when I learnt things about my maternal grandmother that the stories got a frame. I could see there was something bigger than my own experience that wanted telling, that this now belonged to my ancestors too. This formalised the sketches into chapters, and as I researched my past I found ways to weave it with the present. In the end, the book is non-linear and crosses time and place, but I never worried about that. I never wanted something straight. I wanted something that washed up on the reader’s mind like a wave.

You are writing a new book, what can you tell us about it?

This is the biography of a gentleman called Ephraim Finch, who was the director of Melbourne’s Jewish Burial Society for thirty years. He is a fascinating human in many ways; a beloved community figure, but also an avid archivist who took detailed histories of the Holocaust survivors he buried over the decades. These are his stories and theirs. Behind the archives, though, is what I learn from Ephraim about life’s greater mysteries – death, of course, but also burial tradition; what it means to mourn communally; the gift of ritual; family ties; what music and poetry and ancient religious texts offer us by way of navigating grief and the oblivion of loss.