She denies everything, and almost certainly believes herself. I'm not even sure that they are my business. Including most of my own. Too many years of medical training, perhaps, have cemented it permanently in place. And yet turning these stories into fiction might help towards some kind of understanding, towards finding some essence, beyond curiosity, or voyeurism.
Fiction is above all a reordering process, a sense-making process, even when it's black comedy.
Tell me your favourite jokes, and I will tell you your worst fears, I sometimes say across late-night dinner tables when conversation flags. Here is mine. A few weeks before the poet Philip Hodgins' death from leukaemia in 1995, I prepared a newspaper obituary after a request from Philip had been passed on through a mutual friend. Philip had finally decided to discontinue the chemotherapy which had caused him much suffering for many years. Peter Goldsworthy was born in Minlaton, South Australia, and grew up in various country towns, finishing his schooling in Darwin.