In a 2009 interview with Michelle de Kretser, who would go on to win the Miles Franklin Literary award – twice – the author characterised her work as “questing, jesting, testing”. It’s an apt description for her seventh and most experimental novel yet, Theory & Practice: a form-melding book contending with colonialism, the disharmony that can arise between our purported ideals and how we live, the depths of jealousy and shame, and motherhood and the maternal figures who shape us. It is also an inquiry into what fiction can look like and what it can achieve.
Theory & Practice opens with a stunted novel – elements of which hint at the book to come – that abruptly ends when it shifts to first person: “At that point, the novel I was writing stalled.”
