Hard Joy: Life and writing. An intimate and incisive portrait of our times

This compelling memoir of Susan Varga’s life across seven decades circles between Australia and Europe, activism and seclusion, the writing and the everyday life.

She was born into war-torn Budapest, her family escaping loss and trauma to make a new life in Sydney. But Susan makes another escape, from the narrow confines of suburbia into the arms of the exciting and contradictory world of the Sydney Push.

As a young woman she lives in London, Paris, Bendigo and Holland, before returning to Sydney, keen to to take part of Gough Whitlam’s reformist agenda; a powerful time of change.

Yet Susan also spends a long time lost in the wilderness, wrestling with the dilemmas of being a woman; to have a child or not, find a conventional career or not, become a writer or not, to find a life of social activism, to marry or not, to make do with a succession of unsuitable men.

When she finally commits to the demands and joys of writing, and to a surprising love, her life assumes a new harmony. Then fate intervenes to throw up major challenges, testing her will to re-find the hard joys of life.

In straight forward prose interlaced with the richer voice of poetry, Varga moves through the intersections between her own life and the wider world. In the tradition of her acclaimed first memoir, Heddy and Me, Hard Joy is an intimate, warm yet incisive portrait of our times.