“I wouldn’t say I set out to break forms, as to invent new ones,” Michelle de Kretser says of her novel Theory and Practice, winner of the $60,000 Stella prize for women and non-binary writers. “I wanted to write a novel where the reader thinks it isn’t a novel because I’m using nonfictional devices and forms.”
Tricksy and sly, Theory and Practice – the Australian author’s eighth novel – troubles the line between fiction and memoir. It opens with several pages of another ostensibly unrelated novel that is abandoned in its early stages; the reader simply turns a page and is confronted with the line: “At that point, the novel I was writing stalled.” What comes after seems suspiciously like memoir – particularly to anyone vaguely familiar with de Kretser’s biography – following a young Sri Lankan-Australian woman studying English literature at Melbourne University in the 1980s.
