Home Truths Kate Morton's Secret Obsession

The Bestseller Talks About Past Lives And Hauntings

- Wendyl Nissen

Australian author Kate Morton has an obsession with houses. She loves old ones in particular because for her, they are repositories of memory.

“Human beings lead their lives in them, they move on, then new people move in,” says Kate. “All that human experience is imprinted on their walls. I have to accept that after six books based around houses, I will never write myself out of it!”

Kate (42) grew up with a mother who also shared the same interest. “She’d sit up in bed with one of those books with graphs on the pages and sketch out plans for houses she wanted to build,” recalls Kate. “At the weekend, we’d be dragged around to look at open homes and I got very good at imagining myself into a life inside these different dwellings.”

Now that she has grown up, Kate has a similar yearning to her mother’s. She explains, “It drives my husband crazy because we only have to go somewhere on holiday that I like, and I’m immediately wondering out loud what it would be like to live there and looking at some of the houses. Even my children now have that wry eye-rolling look and say, ‘Mum! Step away from the real estate window.’”