The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves #author Sue Woolfe

 A wild girl who once climbed on rooves. A secret never spoken. A catastrophe that changed everything.

Frances adored and feared her beautiful, unpredictable mother. No one ever explained the sudden rages or the silence that settled over the family.

Years later, now a composer, Frances looks back, searching her memories for the truth. As fragments of the past come into focus, she begins to uncover the hidden life her mother never revealed — a childhood of freedom and defiance, and a wound that shaped everything that followed.

Luminous and deeply affecting, The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves is a powerful novel from Sue Woolfe about mothers and daughters, memory and silence, and the mysterious ways creativity can emerge from experience.

To connect with Sue ...
https://suewoolfe.com.au/pages/the-girl-who-climbed-on-rooves/ 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Good afternoon, Sue Wolf. Welcome to Yellow Shelf. Oh, thank you, Joe. I'm very pleased to be here. Oh, it's my pleasure. Sue, you have written so many novels and your latest novel is out now. I'm so excited to finally be able to chat to you. Congratulations. Tell us all about the girl who climbed roofs.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Where do I start? Would you like to tell me to tell you how I began right now? Well, okay, there's always been a big mystery about my mother. She was very beautiful and she was very loving, but she had these crazy rages. Um, where she called me all sorts of names, and it was like she was living somewhere else. And I knew that from when I was very young, but I never knew what was wrong, and she was always tight-lipped about her childhood. So I I always wanted to write about it, but I didn't know her. And she died. Um, and then they had the uh 2017 Royal Commission into um uh institutions response to sexual abuse. It's a long name. Anyway, I was listening to this. Do you remember it? It was on TV for about a year, and people, victims were talking. And sometimes things they'd say, I think, oh my god, that's the name my mother called me. Like she used to call me devil's spawn when she's in one of these rages. And we used to go prawning, and I thought devil's pawn had something to do with prawning, so I thought she's calling me a prawn, so that was all right. Um, but uh uh gradually I realized that mum must have had some connection to an orphanage because that didn't make sense because she wasn't an orphan. So I rang the only the last remaining relative, my mum's cousin, Auntie Gloria, and I said, Tell me what really happened. And she said, No, I can't tell you anything. But a few months later she was dying, and she called me and said, Come over, I need to tell you the secret. And then she had sworn mum had sworn it's a secrecy. So um then I found out that she was in one of these terrible, abusive orphanages, and I went crazy. I'd had a book commissioned by a great publisher, I was very proud of that, and I was writing away, but when I found this out, I couldn't write about anything but that orphanage. I lived in it, I smelt it, I felt it, I heard it, I saw the girls digging pins into me, which apparently they did. And then um what saved me was about pneumonia. Amazing, isn't it? Anyway, I started doing research and I found this 96-year-old woman who had been in my mum's orphanage, who could still, she was still trembling with anger and fear when she told me about the whips they'd use as they walked up and down the aisles while the kids were eating. And that the it the kids were scared out of their wits. So they'd wet their beds at night and they'd have pinned to their sheets the next morning, their wet, smelly sheets to wear all day to shame them. And it was a ruling of shame. And I realized this was my mother. Oh my god, it was huge. But I couldn't figure out how to write it. I don't know if anyone if you've ever tried to write your own biography or your mother's biography. I just went round and round in circles until at last I found a solution. I found a composer. And um I have been teaching composers creativity because I teach the neuroscience of creativity to people, and I've been teaching composers at ANU. And uh the composer just lifted it off and started to tell a story.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Sue, it's fascinating, and I know like even the visual of your book cover is you know inspires me for curiosity, and the story's fascinating. I think it's that idea of lasting family secrets and you know the stigma that goes with that, the unknown. Like, imagine if your aunt had gone to her grave not sharing this, and so it's there, you know, we respectfully we understand there's a stigma, but this this has lasting traumatic impacts.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Well, the thing is that between 1920 and 1970, get this right, there were half a million kids go through those awful orphanages, and most of them were not orphans. Most of them, like um, there's not many records still remaining, but in 1955 in Queensland, there were 2,106 kids in orphanage, in orphanages, and only 18 of them, one eighth, were orphans. So that means there's a lot of people in our community still who are perhaps keeping secret of what their childhood was like and and bearing a burden that's too great for any human being to bear.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

And I find it interesting because now we, you know, generations now are encouraged to talk and share and not carry shame and not have burdens, but you know, for our parents, grandparents, you know, they just had to bury this.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

And the the whole philosophy of those days was if you forget it, then it'll go away. Because they didn't realize that sort of thing. But you know, someone going through those orphanages, as many people in our community did, um, and but possibly not commit admitting to it, they they have they have poor brain development. I know this from my neuroscience reading, so their brains never develop. So my mother and women like her were rearing children, but they were still children themselves because they'd never grown up, and that's terrible.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

And there's things.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

So anyway, yeah. Sorry, sorry, I was just gonna say it does have a happy ending despite.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Well, I was about to touch on that. I was gonna say that the themes in this are, you know, trauma, uh, mother-daughter relationship, family secrets, but there's hope.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Yes, yes, and there is hope because I read as I was writing it a wonderful book called The Souls Code by James Hillman. And his argument is he was a psychologist, and his argument is that just as important as having therapy for trauma is realizing your life's calling. And if you can find your life's calling, whether it be a swimmer or an acrobat or a carpenter or a composer, um, that will save you, it will lift you out. And I really do believe that.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Yeah. And Sue, I I mean, I touched on it earlier. You've written lots of novels, you do a lot of wonderful creative work. For anyone who's watching who um wants to know more about you as an author, do you want to share a bit about you? We'd love to know more.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

Well, I really was saved by writing. I love writing, I love the space you go into. And shall I tell you how I write? Because it's very simple.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Yeah, and feel free to share that because I think that's fascinating, your writing process.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Yes, because anyone can do it. So I do meditate and I go into this empty-headed space where there's nothing in my mind. Nothing. And I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just sitting there with a pencil. I use pencil because handwriting is much better at going all over the brain than um typing. So, yes, and um and the everyone knows that they should do that. They should not control your brain, you just let it go because it goes all over the brain if it you do that. The other thing that's really important is you must respect whatever comes up. So no matter when a thought flickers across your mind, you must respect it, you must write it down and capture it because that's your unconscious speaking to you. So I start all my novels like that. Um, except for this one, I was worrying about my mother and trying to find her story. So I yes, but usually I'm starting a new one and it's just lovely. I sit at my desk and wait for a thought to clicker by.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

And Sue, I I mean, I just want to encourage people to go and buy this. If they see this on a bookstore or they see it on Amazon, like you'll see the cover, the visual, the picture. It's a book, yeah. It's a it's more, it's more than just a story. You know, showing someone's memory. Yeah, hold it up. I'll um it's it it sparks curiosity for me of like what's this story about? So well done.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

And can you guess who the girl who climbed our roofs was? You tell me, you tell us. Well, maybe you have to read it to find out.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

It's not me. Okay, no. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna leave it with there with the audience so you know they they can work out who that girl is. Um, you know, it sounds like you're gonna continue to write, which is wonderful. I'd love to have you back, Sue, to share any future work. Um, but yeah, I I recommend people dive into this. There's a lot of curiosity, lots of hope and learnings. Um and Sue, well done. Like, well done for being brave. And, you know, a lot of people don't dive into family secrets, you know, or they keep they they honour their parents and keep the secrets. But you know, I I often think it's probably not good to keep secrets.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

And especially this one. I realized I was writing it, that there may be hundreds of thousands of people like me wondering why the older relatives they have are strange, erratic, and targeted about their childhood. I realized that it's uh it's a story that everybody needs to consider just in case.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

Yeah, yeah. Sue, thank you so much for joining us. All the best.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Thank you. It was great fun.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Cheers.