240 pages
Paperback, 21 x 15 cm
Published October 2008
ISBN 9781920882389
The new novel by French-Australian author Catherine Rey opens in provincial France in the 1970s, with the eighteen-year-old protagonist, dressed in borrowed platform shoes and a cape, her possessions in a plastic bag, abandoning her home and schooling, to move in with her lover Marco.
Two passions fuel her rebellion: rage at the cruelties of family life, particularly those inflicted by and on her mother; and a deep commitment to the act of writing, in the face of all obstacles and indifference.
Stepping Out is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, written with Rey’s characteristic combination of indignation, frankness and humour, as much a dramatisation of the conflicts that have shaped her as a writer, as a testament for the generation that follows.
