“I have a social science background and was a researcher for years. I kept coming back to this idea that the whole process was flawed because in terms of documenting the entire English language it had to have been a gendered exercise,” she says. “I wonder if any words have just disappeared from our language simply because they were never written down because they were spoken by women or working-class people in the birthing room.”
Williams has always wanted to write creatively and had her first work published when she was 15. “It was very imaginatively titledFifteen. It was all about being 15. AndDolly magazine published it,which was thrilling. It was the beginning and end of my brilliant career for the next 30 years.“
As a social scientist she was co-author ofTime Bomb:Work,Rest and Play in Australia Today. But academia lost its appeal and she and her partner,Shannon,took their two sons to Italy to work on organic farms with a view to deciding how they wanted to live their own lives in the Adelaide Hills. Out of that emerged her memoir,One Italian Summer.
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She had always dreamt of writing fiction,but “I was dyslexic,so if teachers ever suggested anything to do with reading or writing it was remedial classes,not to pursue it as a career”. So if Esme is ambivalent about the dictionary in the novel,the same applied to Williams in reality. She has a “love-hate” relationship with dictionaries.
“People were constantly telling me to pick one up and look up the words that I was spelling incorrectly,which of course you can’t do if you can’t spell the word – the dictionary doesn’t help. But sometimes when something is a challenge for you it becomes a curiosity and a passion just because you are interested in it. I’ve always been interested in words because I’ve always had trouble with them. But ironically they have also been the way I express myself best.“
And while she’s not a collector of dictionaries,she does have one special one. Her partner gave her a first edition of the first volume of theOED. “It’s the one that ‘bondmaid’ was left out of.”
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