In Full View

“The day my husband called me to say he wanted to marry me, I had 16 frozen pheasants floating in the bath. I was trying to defrost them … I had 32 people coming to dinner … ‘I love you’, he said. ‘I want to marry you’. I stopped talking about the pheasants. The pheasants were not my biggest problem. I had a more pressing problem. I was married to someone else.”

Review: Sydney Morning Herald
 “Love and food are two of the most important things in life, and in this funny, wise and exhilarating book Lily Brett embraces and reflects on all the other things that matter too – aging, sex, death, her body and her delight in eventually becoming strong, her daughter, her parents who, alone in their families, survived the Holocaust, her city and her work. These are candid and deeply felt autobiographical essays in which Brett tells the 50 years of her life with all the insight, grace and humor of her poetry and novels. Brett’s great skill is to make the writing look effortless while convincing us that nothing here is easily won.”