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  • Published: 28 November 2023
  • ISBN: 9781761344084
  • Imprint: Penguin Random House Australia Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 17 hr 50 min
  • Narrator: Lewis Fitz-Gerald
  • RRP: $36.99

Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths




A cultural history of the times that shaped Frank Moorhouse and which Moorhouse himself helped to shape.

My writing allows me flight from society through solitude while permitting me to rejoin society on some of my own terms through the trading of the finished work with the society.
My imaginative narrative gives me relief from prevaility and strident ideologies by allowing me the heresy of decadence (as in erotica).
Namely, revenge against normality, reversal of normality and regression from normality.
My imaginative narrative is relief from prevailing self by allowing the potential self, the discarded self, the rejected self and the non-self to have play.
My imaginative narrative is relief from privacy by allowing exposure of self and the network of self.
~ Frank Moorhouse, 1985, private telex
Frank Moorhouse was legendary in Australian literary and cultural life, the author of a huge and diverse body of work – essays, short stories, journalism, scripts, the iconic Edith Trilogy – an unapologetic activist, intellectual, libertarian and champion of freedom of speech and sexual self determination. Though he lived his life publicly, his private stories have not been shared, the many paths he forged left unexamined, until now.

Matthew Lamb shared many a luncheon table with Moorhouse and immersed himself in the archived life and cultural ephemera of Frank’s world. This landmark study, from Moorhouse’s own publisher, the first in a projected two volumes, is the fascinating and comprehensive story of how one of Australia’s most original writers and pioneer of the discontinuous narrative came to be.
Fearless, sardonic and utterly dedicated to his creative life, his relationships with friends, other writers and lovers were complex and long-lasting. Lamb shares the strange paths that Frank traversed and gives us a cultural history of the times that shaped Moorhouse and which Moorhouse himself helped to shape

  • Published: 28 November 2023
  • ISBN: 9781761344084
  • Imprint: Penguin Random House Australia Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 17 hr 50 min
  • Narrator: Lewis Fitz-Gerald
  • RRP: $36.99

About the author

Matthew Lamb

Matthew Lamb is a former editor of Review of Australian Fiction and Island magazines. He has two PhDs, in Literature and Philosophy, respectively.

Praise for Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths

The fruit of years of research, Strange Paths doesn’t just capture the career of a hugely significant Australian writer – it’s a magisterial cultural history of post-war Australia.

Geordie Williamson, The Australian

Lamb somehow allows an intimacy between Moorhouse and the reader while holding his subject at an objective distance. Lamb does justice to an extraordinary life. Writers will relish Moorhouse’s story. For readers who enjoy literary biographies, such as David Marr’s Patrick White: A life.

Becca Whitehead, Books+Publishing

In Lamb’s hands, Moorhouse was someone who would live the creative life no matter what, finding and raising his voice without constraint, all the while exposing the faultlines in Australian society. He enjoyed looking at life from different perspectives and was also a man of action: he wanted change, even if that involved being arrested. Lamb has laid the foundation of a cumulative work that may well reach, even exceed, David Marr’s Patrick White: A Life, which many consider the high-water mark of Australian biography. What Moorhouse would make of that is anyone’s guess, though, at the very least, he’d probably pour himself a martini.

Nigel Featherstone, The Guardian

Strange Paths is as much about changes in Australian print culture and sexual attitudes as it is about Moorhouse’s life. Lamb’s book is not a work of literary criticism but his care in placing Moorhouse’s writing in a detailed historical context is revelatory. It places literary writing at the centre of social change.

Susan Lever, Inside Story

A complex and compelling portrait of the early life of its subject.

judges, The Age Book of the Year, The Age

Written with clarity and verve, it not only offers a revealing account of one of Australia’s most significant writers but also of the wider Australian culture that produced him, and us. Lamb brings a rare breadth and depth of cultural analysis to an appreciation not only of Moorhouse’s literary achievements in a golden era of Australian fiction but also the man’s unstinting efforts as an activist in areas such as worker education, censorship, sexual politics and author’s rights. This is an exemplary biography of the writer-in-context.

Amanda Lohrey, The Age, Books of the Year

Awards & recognition

Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award

Longlisted  •  2024  •  Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Nib Award

The Age Book of the Year

Shortlisted  •  2024  •  Age Book of the Year Award

Discover more

Article
‘When the facts conflict with the legend’ – how does a biographer balance storytelling with the truth?

Matthew Lamb sheds light on the process of writing a biography about Frank Moorhouse, the contradictions in his research and his personal friendship with the author.

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