Second Half First

Thoughtful, absorbing, utterly original; a memoir full of literary doors standing temptingly ajar. I loved it.

Annabel Crabb

Second Half First offers a diaphanous and nuanced vision of the layers of a life, and of life writing. Its magnificent collective portrait reveals Modjeska’s life as part of those it intersects with, including the women writers she lives with and reads ... [a] luminous and captivating work

Felicity Plunkett, Australian

With an amazing lightness of touch, [Modjeska] takes her reader on a journey across continents and centuries, discussing, among other things, lovers, parents, family, friends, literature, visual art, depression, death, and the post-colonial realities of Papua New Guinea ... Second Half First is a deeply crafted narrative, not only in its weave and structure, but also in the ways in which Modjeska invokes the visual arts to articulate her concerns ... Second Half First has a soul. It is both solid and expansive. Modjeska assembles her stanzas masterfully to create a poem of great insight, intelligence, and beauty.

Bernadette Brennan, Australian Book Review

This enthralling memoir ... is a remarkable literary work ... Modjeska’s eloquent reckoning not only of her own history, but of her intellectual life, reaffirm[s] her as a lucid, formidable thinker ... Wise, vital and relayed in Modjeska’s restrained, sophisticated prose, [the book is] a major contribution to a literary lineage traceable to Virginia Woolf, one of Modjeska’s own heroes, herself a constant presence throughout this remarkable book.

Gerard Elsom, Books+Publishing

Second Half First is a beautiful, sometimes profound, and always engaging memoir by a great writer.

Mark Rubbo, Readings Magazine

Second Half First is on my shelf near the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who also wrote despite tragedy and liked travelling in remote, unmapped regions. For this reader, Modjeska's work, with its unanswered questions, is a beacon.

Sydney Morning Herald

Compelling reading

Newtown Review of Books

Modjeska’s memoir Second Half First is warm, intelligent and open-hearted, and provides a rarely captured perspective … Like Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, Modjeska takes the reader to the close grain of an older woman’s life: to friendships that restore perspective on shared experiences … to a vibrant late love affair … Also examined are the complexities of the literary form, including those of the memoir

Brenda Walker, The Monthly