Anna Goldsworthy

Kerrie Davies’s Delta is touted as ‘the first ever biography on Delta Goodrem’. This is not entirely surprising, given that the singer–songwriter is only twenty years old. But Davies makes no secret of the mythical terms in which she views her subject: ‘[Delta] has raged against failure and exulted in the euphoria of success. Delta has felt the power of youth and the fear of death. And she has fallen in love, had her heart broken, and been betrayed. For Delta, this is just the beginning.’

Where are the great menopause novels? In The Change (1991), Germaine Greer described menopause as the ‘undescribed experience’, but then noted that it had in fact been described extensively, mostly ‘by men for the eyes of other men’. Wendy Harmer’s Farewell My Ovaries is written by a woman for the eyes of other women, but it does not really aspire to greatness. It is unashamedly ‘chick lit’ – or ‘chick-making-the-uneasy-transition-to-hen-lit’.

Several years ago, I was privy to a breakfast conversation with one of our venerable literary critics, in which he lamented the proliferation of novels in Australia by young women. Of particular concern, he announced, was the tendency of said young women to construct ‘itsy-bitsy sentences from itsy-bitsy words’. And he smiled around the table warmly, secure in venerable male polysyllabic verbosity. As a young woman myself of vague literary urges, I felt thoroughly rebuffed. The only words I could think to form were both too itsy-bitsy and obscene to constitute effective rebuttal, and they remained unsaid.

Smugness is an occupational hazard for the writer on etiquette. The exquisite Miss Manners, in Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour, describes the ‘wicked joy’ of her trade: ‘There is that pleasant bubble in the throat, the suppressed giggle at another’s ignorance; the flush of generosity accompanying the resolve to set the poor soul straight; that fever of human kindness when one proclaims, for the benefit of others, one’s superior knowledge.’ Suppressed giggles resound through-out the genre. Surely there’s one coming from the late John Morgan in Debrett’s New Guide to Etiquette and Modern Manners when he suggests that ‘when inviting royalty it is important first to decide, as with any guest, if you are on close enough terms to proffer an invitation’; or that ‘it is bad manners to expel any liquid from any orifice in public, and breastfeeding is no different’.