Stepping out

"The new novel by French-Australian writer Catherine Rey begins in provincial France in the 1970's. Dressed in borrowed platform shoes and a cape, carrying her possessions in a plastic bag, the seventeen year-old Catherine throws over the traces, rejecting her family and her schooling, to move in with her lover Marco. According to the law then in force, she is under age, and the police will soon be at their door, the couple flees to Belgium. Determined to live as a writer, Catherine spends her days absorbed in her work, not realising it will be thirteen years before her first book is published. She returns to France with Marco, but after a time, her dedication, and the physical toll of his work as a labourer, cause their relationship to break down. Catherine migrates to Western Australia, where her father had been born, only to fall into an abusive relationship more constricting, and much more threatening, than the one she has just left. Written in the intense, high-energy style filled with indignation and humour which made her previous novel The Spruikers Tale such a striking addition to Australian literature, Stepping Out is a cry of rage against the oppression of family life. At the novel's centre is the author's struggle to make peace with the one she calls Madame ma mere, the mother who abandoned her at the age of three weeks old. As much the story of a woman's journey of liberation from the expectations which bind, as a writers confession of the struggles that have shaped her, Stepping Out is intended as a manifesto for the next generation."--Provided by publisherSee more