Orwellian irony

Our thinking about one of the 20th century's best-known writers is being challenged by the 'smelly little truths' Anna Funder uncovered about George Orwell's marriage.

- LINDA HERRICK

In the summer of 2017, Australian writer Anna Funder had hit "peak overload", dragged down by the weight of domestic duties crowding out her work deadlines. Her frustrations came to a head one day after yet another "soul-sapping" trip to a mall to get groceries because that was just part of being a wife, mother and multitasking homemaker.

But it had all tipped over into a mad scramble for time and space. Funder's husband, Craig Allchin, was a busy architect, but she was a busy professional, too - as a writer, a translator of French and German, which she speaks fluently, and a documentary film-maker. She is currently attached to the University of Technology Sydney's creative writing school as a researcher.

Her portfolio of roles came after working as a human rights lawyer in the Australian attorney-general's office in Canberra until the mid-90s, when she stunned her colleagues by quitting the job to move, alone, to Berlin to pursue her dream of becoming a writer.

The result was the publication of her first book, Stasiland (2002), a courageous investigation of the Stasi security apparatus, which terrorised the people of East Germany for 40 years. In 2004, the book won the British Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.

Her debut novel, All That I Am (2011), about a group of German-Jewish dissidents in pre-war London, won Australia's prestigious Miles Franklin Award.

But in 2017, Funder felt her overcrowded life had reached an impasse. "How did I get here?" she asks in her new book, Wifedom, describing the day she drove around the mall car park, mocked by the "empty promises" of the exit signs. "I could never really leave," she writes in the book. "The mall had sucked out my privileged, perimenopausal soul. I had to get her back."