Local authors including Helen Garner, Marcia Langton, Sophie Cunningham and Gideon Haigh discuss the locations in and around Melbourne that have inspired their prose.
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Alice Pung was almost 40, not 16, and pregnant with her third child, not her first, when she moved in with her parents in Melbourne during lockdown last year, accompanied by her husband Nick and their two boys, aged six and two. But as with her new novel’s adolescent narrator, Karuna, Alice found herself at times stifled by her mother’s “practical kind of love”.
“It was so weird. I went back into the book when I was editing it and I thought, ‘Oh, these lines were authentic because that’s what I said to my mum three days ago and I feel guilty about it,’ ” Alice says, laughing.
Author Alice Pung on the inspiration behind One Hundred Days smh.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from smh.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Yearning for an escape from her suburban isolation, the teenager loses herself in Walt Whitmanâs poetry and copies of Readerâs Digest. The book is written from Karunaâs quietly furious perspective, addressed to the baby growing within her as she feels her own life vanishing before her.
Pungâs own mother wanted to impose the confinement tradition for the authorâs first pregnancy, she says â but the baby was premature, so she had to go to hospital daily. (âI got the advantages â she made all the great food, but I didnât have to be trapped for a whole month at home,â Pung remembers.)