(Lily Brett's third novel is about a happy marriage, the p...)
Lily Brett's third novel is about a happy marriage, the presence of death in life, the yearning for meaning and the realization that making sense of life is sheer farce. Esther Zepler and her husband, Sean, both expats from Melbourne, live and work in New York. They are both successful - she writes obituaries for papers worldwide and he is an artist. They are also successful parents. Brett writes with great wit and a sometimes shockingly base humor which is always very funny - for my money she's much better than Nora Ephron. Nothing is out of place in this novel as it concentrates upon Esther's life, her pain as well as her happiness.
(An award-winning collection of interrelated stories, firs...)
An award-winning collection of interrelated stories, first published in Australia, brings together middle-class men and women who share a community and the same terrible childhood memory - their parents were all Holocaust survivors.
(In New York Lily Brett turns her razor-sharp gaze on a ci...)
In New York Lily Brett turns her razor-sharp gaze on a city which has entertained, inspired and perplexed her for the decade she has lived there in a SoHo loft apartment with her artist husband. Lily muses on the dearth of single men and crime, the effect Monica Lewinsky has had on body image and New York street conversation, and celebrity hairdressers expert in the latest plastic surgery fads. This is a very personal account of New York life, told with all the wit and insight that the award-winning author of Too Many Men and In Full View is famous for.
(Lily Brett's fifth collection of poetry, In Her Strapless...)
Lily Brett's fifth collection of poetry, In Her Strapless Dresses, brings to life Carlton laneways, bicycles, family, New York and the author's relationship with her mother.
(The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Ruth Rothwax, the o...)
The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Ruth Rothwax, the owner of her own successful business, Rothwax Correspondence, becomes obsessed with returning to Poland with her father, in order to make sense of her family's past, come to terms with their overwhelming loss, and put her own life into perspective so that she can confront the future.
(Ruth Rothwax, the heroine of Lily Brett's Too Many Men, w...)
Ruth Rothwax, the heroine of Lily Brett's Too Many Men, which was hailed as "irresistible" (People) as well as "funny," "powerful," and "chilling" (O magazine), is back. The proprietor of a successful letter-writing business, Ruth has just branched out into a new greeting-card line. But it's not easy. Her father, Edek, is driving her crazy at the office. And the very people she thought would be most supportive - other women - are not. Instead of acting in one another's best interests, the women are catty and competitive, behaviors Ruth swears that she will never imitate. Until she meets the one woman who turns her aspirations of sisterly solidarity - and her life - upside down. Fresh off the plane from Poland, Zofia is a buxom, sixty-something femme fatale with a talent for making balls. Meatballs, that is. When Edek asks his savvy daughter to fund his friend Zofia's restaurant, how can Ruth say no? But Ruth knows that gleam in Zofia's eye, and it means trouble is on the way for all of them. An unforgettable, heartwarming story of embracing life, You Gotta Have Balls is a funny, moving triumph from the highly inventive Lily Brett.
(It hasn't been easy for Ruth Rothwax, the proprietor of a...)
It hasn't been easy for Ruth Rothwax, the proprietor of a successful letter-writing business, to branch out into a new greeting-card line. Her father, Edek, is driving her crazy at the office. Other women, who she thought would be supportive, are being catty and competitive, behavior Ruth swears that she will never imitate. But then Zofia arrives to turn Ruth's aspirations of sisterly solidarity - and her life - upside down. Fresh off the plane from Poland - a buxom, sixty-something femme fatale with a talent for making meatballs - Zofia wants to open a restaurant. And Edek, Zofia's most passionate admirer, wants his daughter to finance the enterprise. But Ruth knows that gleam in Zofia's eye only too well...and she knows it means big trouble for all of them.
(Lola Bensky is a nineteen-year-old rock journalist who ir...)
Lola Bensky is a nineteen-year-old rock journalist who irons her hair straight and asks a lot of questions. A high-school dropout, she's not sure how she got the job - but she's been sent by her Australian newspaper right to the heart of the London music scene at the most exciting time in music history: 1967. Lola spends her days planning diets and interviewing rock stars. In London, Mick Jagger makes her a cup of tea, Jimi Hendrix (possibly) propositions her and Cher borrows her false eyelashes.
Lily Brett is a German-born Australian novelist, essayist, music journalist. She is also an excellent writer and poet, who lives in New York now.
Background
Brett was born on September 5, 1946, in Feldafing, Starnberg, Germany. Brett's parents, Max (Mojsze Brajtsztajn) and Rose (née Szpindler), lived in Łódź, Poland, before the outbreak of World War II. During that war, they survived more than five years of Nazi control including being confined to the Łódź Ghetto, where they married, in occupied Poland, before being taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they were eventually separated. After the European theatre of war ended in May 1945, it took six months for the couple to find each other. Brett was born as Luba Brajsztajn (Germanicised as Lilijahne Breitstein) in 1946 in Feldafing displaced persons camp in Bavaria, Germany. In 1948 she emigrated to Australia with her parents. Brett lived in North Carlton, Melbourne from 1948 to 1989 and then in New York City.
Education
Lily Brett went to a Jewish kindergarten in 1954.
Brett attended University High School, Melbourne in 1963 but did not matriculate - instead of sitting two of her final exams she watched Hitchcock's Psycho.
In 1966 Brett successfully applied to be a music journalist at pop music weekly, Go-Set, and in May she replaced founding feature writer, Doug Panther. She later reflected: "My career is inexplicable and it's a career path that nobody should follow! It basically starts with an 18-year old refusing to go to university because that was the one thing that my parents wanted of me, that and to be slim. So I defied both of those desires. My mother said I had to get a job, which shocked me. There was a new newspaper opening up in Australia called Go-Set and I walked into the office and I started work the next day. I don't think this would happen today." The paper's editor was Tony Schauble, and according to Go-Set staff photographer, Colin Beard, "[Brett] had been to see Schauble several times and had made a favorable impression on him and more importantly, she had a car, which was an attractive incentive to employ her." Fellow writers included Vince Lovegrove, Molly Meldrum, Ed Nimmervoll and Stan Rofe. In November 1966 Brett was interviewed on The Go! Show, a Victorian-based pop music show, by its host, Johnny Young (also a pop singer). Young described Brett's style: "She seemed genuinely interested in the pop stars she interviewed, but she could also be intimidating at times."
In January 1967 Brett and Beard traveled to the United Kingdom for Go-Set, "where they experienced a swinging live music scene." According to Beard "at first she had little idea about what to write but eventually developed her own style, which was more personal and intimate than Panther's. Her features in Go-Set showed that she was able to help the musicians feel relaxed and in doing so they would disclose more to her than they had to Panther." As a result of her work, "for the first time, Australian teenagers saw that two Australians they knew [were] reporting on the English music scene." The pair then traveled to America to cover the Monterey International Pop Festival (mid-June 1967), before returning to Australia. In 2014 Brett published her fictionalized account of her time in the UK and US in the novel Lola Bensky, including her encounters with Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, and Lillian Roxon. Soon after returning to Australia Brett married Rob Lovett (ex-the Loved One's guitarist) and the couple has two children.
Brett regularly appeared on Uptight, one of the first weekly national TV shows devoted to pop music, it broadcast for four hours on Saturday mornings, which ran from October 1967 to 1969. While working for Go-Set, early in 1968, Brett became a band manager for a newly formed male soul vocal trio, the Virgil Brothers, modeled on the Walker Brothers. The original line-up was her then-partner Lovett, Mick Hadley (ex-Purple Hearts) and Malcolm McGee (ex-Python Lee Jackson). In May Hadley left and was replaced by Peter Doyle. The group issued three singles, "Temptation's 'Bout to Get Me" (June 1968), "Here I Am" (September) and "When You Walk Away" (September 1969). They had relocated to the UK prior to the third single, where they subsequently disbanded.
Brett continued with Go-Set until September 1968, "she wanted more fulfilling work, and was also about to have a family and so needed a better income than the low wages Go-Set Publications paid."After she left Meldrum took on her interview-based "Pop Speak Out" column, however "Meldrum lacked Brett's skill in personalizing her columns or being able to get celebrities to disclose deep information; on top of this he also lacked Panther's literacy." Another aspect of her Go-Set work was record reviews, which were taken up by Nimmervoll, he was "more descriptive, knowledge-based, and historically comparative than Brett's reviews. In the limited column space available, Nimmervoll captured the meaning of the recording and its place in rock music history." In January 1969 her cover story on Johnny Farnham appeared in the second edition of Gas (an offshoot of Go-Set).
From 1979 she resumed writing: including poetry, prose fiction, and non-fiction. Brett published her first collection of poetry, The Auschwitz Poems, in 1986, which was illustrated by Rankin's drawings. Winning many awards, The Auschwitz Poems was awarded the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards: C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry in 1987. Her short story, "Luba", was entered in the National Short Story of the Year competition in 1988 and received an honorable mention. It was printed in The Canberra Times, one of the competition's sponsors, in December. In the following year, Brett moved from Melbourne to New York City with Rankin.
Brett's first work of fiction, Things Could Be Worse, appeared in 1990. Stephanie Green of The Canberra Times described it in April that year as a set of "self-contained [stories], they are all about a group of Jewish immigrants living in Melbourne after World War II. The characters form a community, strive to success in a new land, fend off the memories of war, and hold on to their sense of what it means to be Jewish in the face of centuries of displacement." Green's fellow reviewer, Helen Elliott, felt Just Like That (1994) showed that "The joke, and the entire seriousness of this brilliant novel, lies in the way Brett has turned the anguish of generations into art... [and] has created an unusually lovely woman [Ester Zepler, the protagonist], full of laughter, torn with anxiety, capable of malice and brimming with love."
Her fifth and most celebrated novel, Too Many Men, was published in 2001. Publishers Weekly's staff writer felt that "The hardest effect to bring off in fiction is a vision that is at once tender, deeply comic and yet aware of the ultimate sadness of life, the lachrymae rerum. Brett has succeeded triumphantly." Her next novel, You Gotta Have Balls (2005), is the third to feature Ruth Rothwax and her father Edek. Helen Greenwood of The Sydney Morning Herald finds that "Brett herself travels a brave road to joy, instead of the tracks of despair, which is not an easy path for a born worrier. To do so, she sidelines one of the major characters in her work, the Holocaust, and the book is the less for it."
Achievements
The book “You Gotta Have Balls” (2005) has seen significant success, especially in Europe, and has been translated into many languages and been made into a major theatre production in Germany and is touring Europe. The stage adaptation of You Gotta Have Balls, titled Chuzpe in German, starring Otto Schenk, opened at the Kammerspiele Theatre in Vienna in November 2012, was later staged at the Münchner Kammerspiele (2014) and played at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm in 2016.
Lola Bensky (2013), Brett's seventh novel was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and it received the 2014 Prix Medicis étranger prize in France. Brett has published ten volumes of poetry, four collections of essays, and seven novels. She has also contributed writings to a wide range of newspaper and literary publications, including many columns and articles in Die Zeit, The Australian, Die Welt, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitungfrankfurter. A portrait of Lily Brett hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
Quotations:
"The poems are never really black - because of her inherent optimism - but they are often sad."
"It seems to me that all men are particularly adept at removing a bra from a woman's body.One deft twist of the wrist and a woman is bra-less. Putting a bra on a woman is a different matter. They can't do it. Most men have never tried."
"Empathy seems to be in short supply today. We are more and more politically polarised. There is hatred all around us. In all parts of the world. Refugees and asylum seekers are once again being treated as less than human even in the most comfortable, wealthy and underpopulated countries. We are again seeing prejudice, racism, bigotry. It is aimed at anyone who is different from us. Whether the difference is in the colour of our skin, our religious beliefs, our sexual orientation or the language we speak. This hatred is a straight path to disaster. Too many of us appear to have a diminished conscience. Please, polish your conscience. The world needs it."
Personality
Brett is a serious comic. Her surgical bent, her dissection of superficially well-ordered, mundane suburban life and the pedestrians that make their way through it, is tempered by an eye for the absurd and for the plain funny.
Connections
Lily Brett married Rob Lovett in 1968. In 1979 they got divorced. In 1989 Lily Brett married David Rankin. He is an Australian painter.
