True North

Ending a relationship is seldom a planned decision. Catherine Deveny describes the split in this memoir as more of a sudden realisation, and she recalls that in the first moments after waking each morning she had to remind herself who she was and what had happened. She compares that unsteady stretch to a compass that wobbles before it steadies.

Deveny was writing in the wake of a seventeen-year relationship with the father of her children. Months of turmoil followed, and she could not see what would lie beyond them. What she did know was that she had to clear room for a different kind of life.

This was not the first time she had leapt into uncertainty or set aside received ideas. The book traces her path from a restrictive Catholic childhood in Melbourne's working-class inner north, through a teenage search for independence, to university share houses and the city's lively arts scene. Her story is both familiar and singular, and she shows how she learned to live on her own terms.

The memoir is aimed at anyone who is facing a major change, is in the middle of one, or has come through one.