Biography

'Forget the housework'

Item: Autobiography of My Mother
Author: Gay Bilson

by Gay Bilson •

July–August 2007, no. 293

Autobiography of My Mother: 2nd edition by Meg Stewart

Vintage, $27.95 pb, 356 pp, 9781741668230

Biography

'Forget the housework'

by Gay Bilson •

July–August 2007, no. 293

If you didn’t read Meg Stewart’s gentle, courteous Autobiography of My Mother when it was first published in 1985, no matter. This second edition was precipitated by the research of others. ‘What My Mother Didn’t Tell Me’, the title of the additional chapter, is that Margaret Coen, Meg’s mother, had a long affair with Norman Lindsay in the 1930s. Lindsay was married, in his fifties; Margaret in her early twenties. The first edition is hardly altered, and only the new chapter challenges Coen’s reticence, causing us to think hard about oral history.

Gay Bilson

Gay Bilson was, for twenty-five years (1973–1998), a restaurateur and cook in Sydney. She has created and directed several events centred on food and community, often for the Adelaide Festival, and was an associate director under Peter Sellars for the 2002 festival, producing programs such as Nourish (feeding patients in a large public hospital) and The Edible Library. In 2004 she directed Eating the City, a large community project created by the Spanish food artist and psychologist Alicia Rios, for the City of Melbourne. As an extension of this project, she recorded oral histories with the communities who took part. She is the author of Plenty (2004) and On Digestion (2008).