Gabrielle Carey

Falling Out of Love with Ivan Southall

At the age of nine, Gabrielle Carey fell in love with her favourite author. She wasn’t alone. Hundreds of thousands of other young readers also fell in love with Ivan Southall and many wrote him adoring fan mail. But Ivan Southall - warm and tender in his letters to children - is not, she finds, so loveable in real life. In fact, he is not the man Gabrielle remembered at all.

Part memoir, part literary biography, this intimate book explores what happens when we reach back in time to recover our first loves. What will we find when we stop believing in the ideas and the people that made us who we are? What’s left over?

 

Falling Out of Love with Ivan Southall

Australian Scholarly Press

At the age of nine, Gabrielle Carey fell in love with her favourite author. She wasn’t alone. Hundreds of thousands of other young readers also fell in love with Ivan Southall and many wrote him adoring fan mail.

What happens when a woman re-encounters the very first man she ever fell in love with? Especially if that man was someone she never met?

Part memoir, part literary biography, this book explores the intimate reader-writer relationship, a relationship that Ivan Southall described as ‘like a love affair’.

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