Acknowledgements

To Vicki Hastrich, Lucinda Holdforth and Charlotte Wood.

To Russell Daylight, Alice Daylight, Patrick Daylight.

Thanks also to Ben Ball, Joss Bennett, Kerry Bennett, Pippita Bennett, Jemma Birrell, Siobhán Cantrill, Jenny Darling, Clara Finlay, Ashley Hay, James Ley, Patrick McIntyre, Catriona Menzies-Pike, John O’Carroll, Stephen Romei, Meredith Rose, Geordie Williamson, Vikki Willmott-Sharp, Tim Winton, and my students, every one of them.

Some of the essays in this collection were previously published as follows: ‘Detail I’ (as ‘Learning to See’ in Island magazine (ed. Geordie Williamson); ‘Vagina’ in Best Australian Essays 2016 (Black Inc., ed. Geordie Williamson); ‘The Difficulty is the Point’ in The Guardian; ‘Just Anguish’ as a talk called ‘S.J. Perelman: The Writer Who Changed Me’ for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, 2016; ‘The Worst that Could Happen’ in Sydney Review of Books (ed. James Ley); versions of ‘Georgia Blain’ in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, and on the Stella Prize website; ‘A Mole, a Viper, a Toad’ in Sydney Review of Books (ed. Catriona Menzies-Pike); and ‘Inventing the Teenager’ (as ‘Keeping Faith with Words’) in Griffith Review (ed. Ashley Hay).

The writing of this book was generously supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.