Put Your Whole Self In

I didn’t plan to be a writer. It happened to me. I trained in theatre, performed, and mainly directed productions for sixteen years. Along the way, as a means of refreshing my creative view, I studied photography. That’s when it happened. When I was desperately finishing a roll of film for a photography class, I met a pool full of women who changed me into a writer.
It took five years to write PUT YOUR WHOLE SELF IN. The ideas that this group of older women challenged me with in my early thirties, changed my way of thinking about aging, family, health, birth, death, love, sex…and writing. I am forever indebted to the women of the Northcote Hydrotherapy and Massage Group.

Cover Blurb
Meme McDonald took her camera to the City Baths and her photographer's eye focused on the colour and movement of a circle of older women, splashing and laughing in the pool. This was her first meeting with the Northcote Self-help Hydrotherapy & Massage group.

The stories of these women, in and away from the pool, are told with tenderness and simplicity. Provocative opinions on youth, marriage and motherhood, women at work and at home, love and the loss of it, life and death, are shared with earthy humour, courage and dignity.

Lovingly photographed and, above all, listened to, these women have something important to say. They challenge us all to question the way we perceive our lives.

'In the pool everyone is vulnerable, stripped of familiar clothing. Layers of preconceptions are peeled off and left to one side. Stiff muscles are stretched and aches, whatever their source, are soothed. Bodies emerge freer. Attitudes are loosened. Changes occur.'

This is a journey of women, re-empowered, reaching out and learning together to 'put their whole selves in'. You will laugh and cry with them, and in the end, you will love them.

Awards
Joint Winner, New South Wales State Literary Prize for non-fiction 1993; Winner, Braille & Talking Book Award 1993.

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copyright meme mcdonald 2002