Posted by Growing up in the wilds of Australia
This captivating memoir by Leila Kulpas, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating survivors of childhood trauma, recounts her own difficult· upbringing in the Australian bush. Writing in the gradually maturing voice of a growing child, she vividly evokes the natural environment, filled with wonder and danger, and her family’s hardscrabble life farming on a high plateau, many miles over often impassible roads from the nearest town. Kulpas recounts, in compelling detail, the frequently harsh conditions of her early life, including her attempts to navigate her father’s binge drinking and her mother’s abusive rages. She describes, too, her home schooling, her shifting relationships with her sister, brothers, aunts, uncles, and the solace she seeks in the creatures around her, whether in the deep brown eyes of her father’s old horse Hungry or the soft grey fur of a baby kangaroo named Toots. Framed by her intense curiosity about the world and its inhabitants, this memoir then traces her emerging womanhood and her growing resolve to leave the farm and make a life for herself in the city.
Biography
Leila Kulpas is a psychiatrist specialized in treating adults with childhood trauma using psychotherapy and minimal medications. She has a B.A. (Honours Class I) degree in English for her original research on the influence of Virginia Wolf’s Childhood trauma on her writing. Her prose has appeared in The Vancouver Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Review, A National Voices anthology, The Pacific Rim Review of Books, and daily newspapers, and her poetry has been published in chapbooks edited by Patrick Lane, an Ascent Aspirations Magazine anthology and on the internet by Pandora’s Collective.
Praise
“An embracing and at times harrowing memoir, this book wonderfully captures a rural childhood filled with beauty and brutality, pain and challenge. Evoked in amazing detail, it’s a world far distant from the comforts and conformity familiar to many of us urban dwellers. As her Afterword reveals, Leila Kulpas has come a long, long way from her rough ear1y days, growing up on Australia’s Barrington Tops.”
Robin Laurence, Writer & Critic
BOOK EXCELLENCE AWARD FINALIST 2020
9 x 6 – 388 Pages – $ 24.95
