Her Fidelity

“Kathy has worked at beloved Brisbane indie record store Dusty's Records for half her life. She arrived as a teenager high on her dad’s supply of Led Zeppelin, stayed through her twenties and suddenly thirty is on the horizon and she’s still there, measuring her self-worth by her knowledge of the Velvet Underground’s back catalogue.

Lately, though, cracks have been appearing in Kathy’s comfortable indie bubble. Her friends – feisty Mel, the only other woman employed at Dusty's, and straight-laced Alex, whom Kathy has known since preschool – are growing up and moving on, while she’s stuck in a cycle of record store, pub, repeat, with the rest of the Dusty's music bros. But how do you move forward when you’re stuck in a groove? And what happens when you realise that you’ve been working so hard to be part of the boys’ club that you never stopped to wonder if you should be creating a club of your own?

Her Fidelity is a feminist coming-of-age story for anyone who has ever felt that a song understood them more than their own family, for anyone who has ever felt like the culture they love might not love them back, and for anyone who has ever turned to Stevie Nicks for advice while ignoring the sensible people around them.”

About the Author

Katharine Pollock worked in independent record stores in Brisbane and Sydney for many years. She holds a PhD in Humanities and Communication Arts from Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre. She was a Writer in Residence at Varuna, The Writers' House in 2020, and Visiting Writer at the National Young Writers’ Festival in 2019. In 2021 she won the Queensland Writers Centre's GenreCon short story competition and had another short story published in ZineWest. Her work has also been published in Kill Your Darlings, Funny Ha Ha and Lip.