Hello, Beautiful!

I realise that, despite all the references to my longing to be a writer, two things are apparent.

The first is that I don't actually do much writing; the second is that my teenage reflections display absolutely no talent for it. My Diary is prima facie evidence of self-delusion on a grand scale.

A memoir in parts, from one of Australia's best-loved playwrights.

Hannie Rayson - writer, mother, daughter, sister, wife, romantic, adventuress, parking-spot optimist - has spent a lifetime giving voice to others in the many roles she has written for stage and television.

In her new book, she shines the spotlight on herself. This collection of stories from a dramatic life radiate with the great warmth and humour that has made Hannie one of the best-known playwrights in the country. From a childhood in Brighton to a urinary tract infection in Spain, from a body buried under the house to a play on a tram, Hello, Beautiful! captures a life behind the scenes - a life of tender moments, hilarious encounters and, inevitably, drama.

Read Caroline Baum's Review

You can tell from the title that this is a Happy Book.

Hello, Beautiful! is a very modern hybrid: a memoir of life lived to its fullest, and a collection of essays on the absurdities and dilemmas of contemporary urban life. Living in inner city Melbourne gives Rayson, one of life's natural observers and eavesdroppers, the opportunity to observe her gentrified boho neighbourhood and community like a social anthropologist - with affection and wry amusement.

Her own family also supply her with abundant material with which to exploit her comic skills in deadpan delivery and timing (her only child Jack providing some of the book's pithiest comments). As you would expect from a life of any depth, not all the material is as sunny as Rayson's own nature: a piece about a miscarriage is heart-twistingly sad and her reminiscences about her father, who liked a drink and could not hold on to money, simmers with slow cooked frustration.

You'd have to have a hard and humourless heart not to be cheered by Hello, Beautiful!. But there is a spiritual dimension to Hannie Rayson's down-to-earth existence: gratitude for small things: family, friendship, a sense of belonging and purpose. She knows she is lucky in love and life and her enthusiasm and appreciation spills onto these pages infectiously. Recognising your own good fortune and spreading it around must surely be a kind of grace.

About the Author

Hannie Rayson is a playwright and screenwriter. Her works-including Hotel Sorrento, Inheritance and Life After George-have been performed around Australia and internationally. She has been awarded two Australian Writers' Guild Awards, four Helpmann Awards, two NSW Premier's Literary Awards and a Victorian Premier's Literary Award. Her play Life After George was the first play to be nominated for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Hannie lives in Melbourne.