Patti Miller Books Reviews
Writing True Stories (Updated)
The complete guide to writing autobiography, memoir, personal essay, biography, travel and creative nonfiction.
Allen & Unwin 2017, Routledge 2020, Routledge 2024
Writing True Stories is the essential book for anyone who wants to write a memoir or explore the wider territory of creative nonfiction. It provides practical guidance and inspiration on a vast array of writing topics, including how to access memories, find a narrative voice, build a vivid world on the page, create structure, using research and facing the difficulties of truth-telling.
It introduces key writing skills, and then challenges writers to extend their practice into literary nonfiction, true crime, biography, the personal essay, and travel and sojourn writing. Whether you want to write your own autobiography, investigate a wide-ranging political issue, or bring to life an intriguing history, this book is your guide.
Articles and Reviews
The Joy of High Places
With rare insight and poetic writing, The Joy of High Places combines physical adventure with a powerful emotional journey.
NewSouth 2019
In this extraordinary and unexpected book, Patti tells the story of her own long-distance walking over hundreds of kilometres in Europe and of her brother’s obsession with paragliding.
As adults, a tragic accident changes their relationship. One day, Barney’s wing collapses and he plummets to earth, breaking his spine. The story of his struggle to walk again intersects Patti’s long-distance journeys, creating an intense narrative of determination and triumph.
For Patti, walking is a radical act – a return to what has made us all human — that bestows a connection to wild nature and to creativity it self. But as she listens to her pragmatic and methodical brother tell his story, she learns that flying is his door to untrammelled joy too. She realises that she is ‘meeting’ him for the very first time.
This beautiful and inspiring book tells their story and reveals that the siblings share a willingness to take risks and an indefatigable determination. With rare insight and poetic writing, The Joy of High Places combines physical adventure with a powerful emotional journey.
Each time I opened this book, I felt as though I was returning to a wise and true friend. Patti Miller captures the pleasures of the body, the joy of landscape, the thrill of knowing and being known. More than that, she unpacks the mysteries of memory, and the way we carry our past into our present. I loved it.
— Kathryn Heyman, author of Storm and GracePatti Miller’s The Joy of High Places is a moving and delightful tale of the beauty of nature, the importance of human connection, and a determination that can cross mountains and soar through skies.
— Better Reading
True Friends
A revealing and powerful memoir about the making and unmaking of friendships.
University of Queensland Press 2022
Friendships are among the most important relationships in our lives, often outlasting love affairs, marriages, even, at times, family connections. The loss of a friend can be one of life’s most disturbing events, yet these ‘friend break-ups’ are little acknowledged in our culture.
In True Friends, acclaimed author Patti Miller recounts the joyful making and then painful ending of a long, close friendship. It is a deep and influential relationship in her life, but when it inexplicably unravels, Patti is left searching for answers. As she tries to make sense of this ending, Patti considers other important friendships throughout her life, questioning who we are drawn to, what we really know of each other and why some friendships endure while others end.
Evocative and intimate, this engaging book brings together the personal and the universal and reminds us of the centrality of friendships in our lives.
A beautiful and stirring work
— ReadingsHighly relatable and celebrates the transformative nature of deep personal relationships
— The Sydney Morning Herald
The Mind of a Thief
UQP 2012
Prizes
- Winner – NSW Premier’s Award for History 2013
- Short-listed – WA Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction 2013
- Long-listed: Stella Prize 2013; Nita Kibble Award 2013
- NB. The Mind of a Thief also a set text for the VCE
When Patti Miller discovers that the first post-Mabo Native Title claim was made by the Wiradjuri in the Wellington Valley where she grew up, she is lead to the question at the heart of Australian identity – who are we in relation to our cherished stolen country?
Miller uncovers a chronicle of idealism, destruction and hope in its history of convicts, zealous missionaries, farmers and gold seekers who all took the land from the original inhabitants. But it’s not until she talks to the local Wiradjuri that she realises there’s another set of stories, even about her own family. As one Wiradjuri elder remarks, ‘The whitefellas and blackfellas have two different stories about who’s related to who in this town’.
Black and white politics, family mythologies and the power of place are interwoven as Miller tells a story that is both an individual search for connection and identity and a universal exploration of country and belonging.
Thoughtfully and perceptively relayed, this is a story all about identity, connection to place and how we gain a sense of self through stories of the generations.
— Courier-MailA seamless narrative. [Miller’s] powers of observation give her stories a colourful cohesion. She has produced a remarkably fluid, virtuoso piece of writing.
— Saturday AgeNative title is a complex and vexing issue. This thoughtful, well-researched and beautifully written personal story helps us to understand why it is so important to indigenous people.
— Herald Sun "Great Read"This exploration of identity and belonging is brilliantly crafted, brave and full of love.
— Hobart MercuryIf this book does not resolve all the contradictions of its material that is a tribute to Miller’s integrity. It is an appropriately complex and illuminating response to the Mabo judgment.
— Sydney Morning HeraldThe Mind of a Thief deals with the big issues… the book unfolds into one of the best descriptions I’ve seen of the native title mediation process. This is complex stuff but Miller sets it all out calmly and clearly, using the craft of storytelling.
— Weekend AustralianListen to actress, Claudia Karvan reading from The Mind of a Thief, accompanied by artist, Gria Shead’s images, Graphic Festival, Opera House 2013.
Ransacking Paris
UQP 2015
This is memoir of a year spent writing in Paris at a time when Miller’s life is changing. She explores French memoirists – Montaigne, Rousseau, de Beauvoir and others – each one intent on knowing the self through gazing into the ‘looking glass’ of the great world. They accompany her as she wanders the streets of Paris – they even have coffee together – and they talk about motherhood, truth-telling, memory and the writing journey.
This story of a year spent writing and reading in Paris, explores truth and illusion, self-knowledge and identity – and evokes the beauty, the contradictions and the daily life of contemporary Paris.