BOOKS
Layla Byrnes is exhausted. She's juggling a demanding job as an anaesthetist, a disintegrating marriage, her kids, and a needy lover. And most particularly she's managing her histrionically unstable mother, who repeatedly threatens to kill herself.
But this year, it's different. When her mother rings just before Christmas, she doesn't follow the usual script. Instead, she tells Layla that there's something she doesn't know about her much-loved father. In response, Layla drops everything to rush to her childhood home on the wild west coast of Tasmania. She's determined to finally confront her mother - and find out what really happened to her father - as well as untangle her unravelling life and lay some demons in her past to rest.
The Heart is a Star is an engrossing, lyrical and powerfully absorbing novel about the complicated and beautiful messiness of midlife; about the ways in which we navigate an intricate, complicated world; and about how we can uncover our true selves when we are forced to face the myths that made us.
Over the past fifty years, feminist literary criticism has become theoretical rather than practical, severing any relationship between literary analysis and the real lived experiences of women. An example of this disconnect is the way in which the madwoman in feminist literature has become a lauded icon of liberation, when in reality her situation would be seen as anything but empowered. Finding the Plot takes this example to task, arguing that in fact any interpretation of women’s madness as subversive reinforces the very gender stereotypes that feminist literary criticism should be calling into question.