Overview

'She was a good person when she wasn't drunk.' Debbie's earliest memory of her mother is that her mother was not there, but any story of neglect always has two sides. When Debbie's daughter, Heather, says she wants to write a book about her upbringing, Debbie begins to string together jagged memories of growing up with Stella, and it's proving more painful than she could've ever imagined. Part memoir, part biography, part imagination, Little Bit is a story with a third side. Told in the alternating perspectives of Debbie and Stella, Heather writes the story of her mother's and grandmother's lives, where addiction is rife and regret is a constant, and where survival for a woman in a man's world is anything but straightforward. Fiction or nonfiction, this is a book that cannot be categorised and will not be quiet.

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9781923042537

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Reviews

'Inventive, evocative, and fiercely loving.' - Anna Goldsworthy 'Little Bit is a richly imagined novel of grief, yearning, love and despair. But it's also a real-life love-letter sent from a daughter to her mother, mailed and from the present to the past, recalling lives marked by sadness that would be unbearable if the telling was not so unblinking and true.' - Geordie Williamson, Australian 'A moving testament to the collective nature of storytelling, Little Bit uncovers and embraces both the desire and difficulty we confront when seeking to know the past. With compassion and honesty, Heather Taylor-Johnson weaves the stories of three women - including herself as writer, daughter and granddaughter - into an impressively layered exploration of trauma's legacy and our need to know and remember. Debbie's story and Heather's journey to telling it will stay with me.' - Katherine Brabon, Body Friend 'A loving excavation of a family's dysfunction. Heartbreaking one minute, and darkly comic the next. Prepare to lose your heart to its rowdy, resilient, incorrigible cast of characters.' - Carol Lefevre, Murmurations

Author Information

Heather Taylor-Johnson is an American-born, multi-form writer, living and working on Kaurna land near Port Adelaide. She's the author of five poetry collections and a verse novel. The anthology she edited, Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of chronic illness and pain, is read in disability circles around the world. Her essays have won Island's Nonfiction Prize and been shortlisted for the Australian Book Review's Calibre Prize, while her second novel, Jean Harley was Here, was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Fiction. She's an arts critic, mentor and assessor, and runs a modest writers' retreat in the Fleurieu Peninsula. She's an Adjunct Researcher at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, where she received her PhD in Creative Writing.

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