ACRA winner Rosie Waterland tells her Australian Story

“I am so done mining my truma for my creative work.. I just want to write fiction now… I want to laugh every day, no more truma.”

Podcast One host of Mum Says My Memoir is A Lie, Rosie Waterland was featured tonight on Australian Story.

See our earlier report on her podcast.

Rosie had a hard upbringing, living in 20 housing commission houses during her childhood due to her schizophrenic father’s violent behaviour and her mother’s alcoholism.

Her unique take on trauma, feminism and mental health has thrust the 32-year-old from the wrong side of the tracks into the spotlight, as one of Australia’s most successful young writers and comedians.

“I always knew I would write my story one day,” Rosie said in the program.

“Every time my dad passed out drunk, or my mum didn’t come home, I was like, ‘Keep it up because I’m remembering all of this.'”

The author and 2018 ACRA winning podcaster has spent years transforming her background of neglect and abuse into comedy, but she told Australian Story show now wants to move on from that. “I am so done mining my truma for my creative work.. I just want to write fiction now.”
 
 

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“Some days our mum could be lovely, and you’d think, ‘Oh my gosh, the nice mum is here’,” she told Australian Story.

“And then that night, she’d go away to the pub and get drunk, and not come home for four days. You could never really fully immerse yourself in any kind of love, because you didn’t trust it.”

Like many of Rosie’s recollections from childhood, her mother Lisa disputes her alleged absences. Lisa says most of the time in her daughters’ formative years home life was safe and stable, and she only remembers leaving them three times at most.

It is this discrepancy of accounts that is at the heart of her award winning podcast.

 

 

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