Heyyyyy!

Thank you a billion for all the love and joy when I revealed the cover of my brand new upcoming novel called Big Feelings wow omg exciting last fortnight. I’m excited to tell you more about the book and the process of writing it in the coming months leading to publication.

April has been *a month*. Of rest and racing in equal measure. Of highs and lows. Of excitement and defeat. Of reading, and lots of it.

The Newcastle Writers Festival (aka my day job) went off without a hitch and I am so delighted and proud — we reached pre-covid audience numbers, welcomed a glorious and diverse suite of writers from near and far, and I personally had the best time interviewing Emily Maguire about Rapture (y’all know how much I love that book, and that lady), and chatting with Jessie Tu, Hayley Scrivenor and Courtney Collins about second-book syndrome. They were candid and humble, hilarious and tender. Both Jessie and Courtney told excellent stories of their second book actually being brutally rejected and having to write a whole new one instead, and both laughed at the end that it felt like a therapy session.

Feelings about second-book syndrome

Amy Lovat

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Mar 13

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Can we take a moment to appreciate these cute AF photos of my dad introducing himself to Emily?! I gave him Rapture last year and he loved it so much and was so excited to meet her and having two of my fave people grasp hands was almost too much for my heart.

The day after the festival, Laura and I flew to Anangu Country for three blue-skied days at Uluru. A total bucketlist moment for me, and I loved every minute. The best part was that because it’s still 30+ degrees there during the day, we did a bunch of sunrise and sunset tours, meaning we had the whole day to lay by the pool like lizards. I read three books, we finished White Lotus, and also got to soak up the transcendental colours of Uluru and Kata Tjuta.

Straight back into work mode for a blitz: post-festival admin, finishing a PhD proofread on disability care in tertiary placement, prepping for the Writing NSW course I’m running on character and dialogue (it starts today but isn’t too late to join!), and covering a couple of days at my fave local bookshop.

Then, of course, the long weekend, which meant bonus days of rest and reads.

See what I mean? April was busy… but not. The trees are changing colour, it’s currently pouring rain but yesterday I got sunburnt, and, if I’m feeling romantic, I think it might be my fave month.

The winner of this month’s free book is paid subscriber Claire M. I’ve emailed you x

Before we get into this week’s reading round-up, a reminder of the rules of Read Your Feelings ‘book reviews’!

• I will tell you every book I read, even the embarrassing ones.

• I will tell you every book I started but didn’t finish, and why.

• I will tell you the brief plot and my feelings about it, with no spoilers.

• If a book isn’t for me, I’ll say that, but I don’t want to turn anyone off reading it in general. I’m not going to yuck anyone’s yum.

• I will be honest, but I won’t punch down. That means there’s a line I won’t cross. As an author and a writer’s festival manager and a literary curator and an editor, I know a lot of fellow authors and I also know how hard it is to write a fucking book in the first place, so I’m never going to lay into a debut or rag on anyone’s style just because it wasn’t my cuppa tea. But if it’s Stephenie Meyer, I reserve the right to draw your attention to the objectively terrible prose and we can all have a giggle. It’ll be fun. (Not that I plan to re-read Twilight anytime soon.)

Every book I read in April 2025

Host City by David Owen Kelly

A novella that blends memoir and historical events with dystopia, set in the 1980s in Darlinghurst, Sydney. From the blurb: “These are the days of strange rumours. Talk you can catch the gay plague from kissing, or from a mosquito bite. Talk of the government building a wall around ‘Darlo’ to keep the plague contained. Talk of old quarantine stations around Australia being reopened, of the army being used to round up all the poofters. Bashings increase tenfold and you’re dead meat if you don’t have someone to watch your back.”

I loved reading about the queer scene of the eighties, especially as I used to live in Darlo so I’m familiar with a lot of the street corners mentioned. It’s easy to romanticise the era, but reading this book made me once again grateful to have come out (and come of age) in the 2010s. It’s a quick, enjoyable read that takes a dark turn and bleeds into a world of ‘what could have been’. Hard recommend.

(Side note: can small publishers plz, plz hire proofreaders?!)

Appreciation by Liam Pieper

I picked this up last year at Bri Lee’s recommendation, loved the first few chapters, then got distracted — but not before inviting him to NWF! Inspired by hearing Liam speak about his ghostwriting career (highly recommend this fascinating article) at the festival, I took Appreciation to Uluru and, lying by the pool, dove back in and savoured every fucking sentence. This book is so clever, so funny — a satirical look at the value of art, what makes an artist, cancel culture (“In the future, everyone will be cancelled for 15 minutes”), class systems and celebrity.

Oli is a painter, a good Aussie bloke from the bush, but queer! He appeals in equal measure to the left and right and his career has been going gangbusters… until he manages, in one fell swoop, to offend both ‘sides’ when he appears on national television at the end of a bender and unpatriotically denigrates war myths/hero stories of which the nation is proud. His career is in tatters, and the only way his manager thinks he can save himself and his business is by publishing a tell-all memoir, which is to be ghostwritten by someone from his distant past.

Having worked as a ghostwriter for famous authors and major publishers for many years, Liam really knows his shit, and lifts the lid on the world of storytelling for celebrity in astute and hilarious ways. Five stars.

Bonus fun fact: Liam was the ghostwriter for the iconic bestselling The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

For a complete change of pace, I then picked up a book that has long been on my TBR: The Argonauts by American writer and academic Maggie Nelson, who is most well known for Bluets, and also for being genre-defying. She’s married to the gender-fluid artist Harry Dodge and they have a child together. The Argonauts is part essay, part memoir — a philosophical musing in non-chronological pieces, on queer culture and parenthood in particular. She writes about being pregnant with their first child, while Harry was undergoing top surgery, and the way society reacted to their non-conventional family.

“You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”

Some of my other favourite quotes:

“Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that?”

“The moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.”

“How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?”

It feels especially poignant to be typing these words when LGBTQIA+ people and their rights are under threat — to say the least. If you’re not up to date with the latest despicable actions of J.K. Rowling, I suggest reading this as a starter.

17 Years Later by JP Pomare

I really genre-hopped this month and I’m loving it! Another change of pace came in the form of the absolute binge-worthy 17 Years Later by one of my favourite Australian crime authors. JP has bloody done it again; this book was excellent.

17 years ago, the Primrose family were violently slaughtered in their grand house. The personal chef was accused and sent to prison, but some people had doubts it was really him. A true-crime podcaster is intrigued by the old case and tracks down the accused’s psychologist, someone who maintained his client’s innocence throughout. She wants to create a new season of the podcast all about the case, and opens doors that have long been closed. SO GOOD.

Skipshock by Caroline O’Donoghue

An early copy of Irish author and podcaster (Sentimental Garbage ilysm) Caroline O’Donoghue’s upcoming YA fantasy novel landed at my doorstep, and to be perfectly honest, it’s not something I’d usually dabble in. But for some reason, I felt called to crack the cover over the Easter weekend while I was nursing a head cold, wrapped on the couch like a burrito. And I’m truly glad I did. Nice to expand my reading horizons and such. I also liked the nostalgia-inducing teen romance vibe.

Skipshock is the first in a duology. Now, plz forgive me — readers of this newsletter will know I am quite terrible at summarising and reviewing books. This will be possibly my worst attempt. *clears throat.* Margo is a human, and she accidentally … time-travels? world-slips? … into a realm that is very Hunger Games-esque, where the rich South (or the Capitol, if you will) have taken control of the poor North and life is pretty tough. She meets Moon, who is a travelling salesman, and I give up… this is too hard. It’s modernity meets other-worldly.

Lolololol that was pathetic. I am sorry. Read the book if it sounds like your thing!

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

Oh gosh, I basically sobbed my way through this small but powerful memoir. Geraldine Brooks’ husband of decades died suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of his book tour in 2019. Thanks to the gruelling admin of death, she felt as if she never had a chance to properly grieve, or as she puts it, to release the ‘howl in her chest’ (oof, gutted). So in 2023, post-covid, she travelled from her home in Martha’s Vineyard to Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania, holed up in a shack for a month and decided to, essentially, feel her feelings. The book moves between 2019, where she recounts the days following Tony’s death, and then the ‘present day’ when she’s grieving and remembering, surrounded by trees and birds and bracing ocean swims.

Reading this book reminded me of the time I booked my own grief-trip. It was my birthday in 2017, and I had this one rare, glorious week with no freelance deadlines, so I booked an isolated Airbnb outside Bellingen, NSW, with a hammock and an outdoor bathtub and a mountain view. No phone service, just books and a journal and a yoga mat. I danced and laughed and swam in the freezing river and talked to myself and wept and slept. I cried for the person I thought I’d be, the life I thought I’d have.

Six months later, I’d fallen in love with a woman. Six months after that, I took her to the same place where I’d stayed to feel and heal. We continued going back, again and again, until a few years later when we eloped in front of the same glorious, looming mountain I’d stared at, alone in 2017, wondering what would become of me.

There is so much power in allowing. In making space for sadness to bubble to the surface. In making the feelings bigger, they later felt smaller and more manageable.

Memorial Days is a beautiful book, a gift to us all.

Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent

My very professional notes: perfection. Hannah’s memoir traces her time as a teenager on a year-long exchange program to Iceland, where she first learned the story of Agnes, the last person to be executed in Iceland in 1830, and the protagonist in her bestselling Burial Rites. I will have more to say about this book soon as I’m interviewing Hannah at the upcoming Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival!

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Books I didn’t finish

As promised, a moment of transparency. This month, I started but didn’t finish The Season by Helen Garner (omg I know, literary blasphemy, but I still love her) and Table for One by Emma Gannon (love her newsletter and non-fiction and I wanted to love Olive and this latest one based on theme/plot, but… I just can’t. Tonally, it’s a no.)

See you soon?

In the next little bit, I’ll be hosting sessions at Sydney Writers Festival, Words on the Waves, and Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival. You can see all upcoming events on my website x

And as always… ONE earnest recommendation for this month

I love anything that helps with the mental load of life stuff… and that’s why I’m recommending this toothbrush subscription I have had for a couple of years now. Yes, a toothbrush subscription, v glamorous! Toothcrush sends you a new toothbrush every three months, which is how often we’re meant to change our toothbrushes but obvs none of us ever do, right?! They’re bamboo and eco-friendly and each delivery is a different colour which is FUN. Also, super cheap and free delivery in Australia. I’m seriously, earnestly, recommending Toothcrush and I’m excited to share the love!

In a fortnight, I’m sending paid subscribers my latest bookish personal essay — this one is all about how I signed a two-book publishing deal!

Amy x

P.S. My first unofficial review has come through of Big Feelings and I am delighted.

Pre-order my book!