"I am lucky to be here" ”

Since the day she walked onto the MasterChef Australia set back in 2009, Julie Goodwin has openly shared her life. But in writing a memoir, she had to examine the demons she'd battled privately... until now.

- TIFFANY DUNK

At the age of 16, something happened that would change the trajectory of Julie Goodwin's life. She was a student at Sydney's Hornsby Girls High School and it was a day, she recalls, like any other, when a memory came back to her. An awful, traumatic and long-buried memory of being sexually abused close to a decade earlier.

"It was sudden," she tells The Weekly today of that watershed moment. "Nothing triggered it - it was just like the memory was always there, like a dusty book on a library shelf. And one day, I took it down, looked at it and went, 'Holy crap! How have I not thought about that for nine years?' Then, as I sat with it, I realised why I hadn't thought about it and shoved it away again."

This is just one of many previously secret stories the 53-year-old reveals in her memoir, Your Time Starts Now. Honest, raw and at times incredibly confronting, the decision to open up her entire world, she says, isn't something she has done lightly. But the thought of writing her life story without including those ugly parts? That was something Julie says she would never have considered.

Her life has been public record since that iconic MasterChef Australia win in 2009. People have watched her succeed as well as occasionally fall. She's opened up to The Weekly in previous years about a lot of her tough times, including a hospitalisation for mental health, a drink-driving arrest and growing up with a single mum who struggled to put food on the table. She did this, she has always said, in the hope it might help somebody else treading an equally rough road.

"When I was asked to write a memoir, I knew I wouldn't write a fluffy food-based memoir with just some MasterChef stories," she says now of revealing her darkest moments, warts and all. "It was hard, but I had to do it."