Anything Can Happen
Warm and wry, mixing high culture and suburban realism, the laconic and the artful, Anything Can Happen is a memoir from one of Australia’s literary trailblazers. Funny, heartbreaking, it has exactly the arc of a good story, with a theme about storytelling and lies and how truth and memory are complex. It keeps in play so many things: irony and spirituality, a slice of social history of Sydney’s inner west, a farm in Victoria, a lesbian subculture, Mardi Gras, the literary pleasures of teaching writing. Juxtaposition is her gift, as is the very natural speaking voice. With the eye of a poet, and the dry drollery of someone who has experienced it all, straight and married, gay and married, mother, friend, lover, writer, this is a raw and powerful account of a life lived fully.
‘I love this memoir - it's the sort of writing Hampton excels at. There's no-one else I know who can hit that dry, droll, edgy note and conjure place and time and character and the random nature of memory and story-telling.’ – Kim Mahood
‘Alive and compelling, and served up in perfect mouthfuls, like an antipasto plate . . . Honesty, great sentences, good flow. Surprises, escalation, energy, digression and return, causation.’ – Gail Bell
Susan Hampton has won many grants and awards for her work. The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, which she co-edited, became a set text on many writing courses. Surly Girls, performance pieces and short stories, won the Steele Rudd Award in 1990 (A&R/Collins Imprint, 1989). The Kindly Ones, (Five Islands Press, 2005) has been described as ‘… a weird satirical travelogue written by one of the Furies...’. It is an extraordinary poem: bold, bitter, intelligent and fantastical.’ It won the 2006 Judith Wright Award and was shortlisted for the NSW and Victorian Premiers’ Awards for poetry, the Age Book of the Year Award, and the ACT Book of the Year Award.
