Sue Woolfe – April 7 2019

Autism awareness month – April

Sue has worked as a teacher, scriptwriter, journalist, TV subtitle editor, documentary maker and cook. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and currently teaches fiction writing to postgraduates at The University of Sydney. Sue’s other works include the textbook, Language and Literature, and a book about her research into creativity, The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: A Writer Looks at Creativity and Neuroscience. She wrote Leaning Towards Infinity both as a novel and a stage play and her other novels  include Painted Woman (also produced as a stage play) and The Oldest Song in the World. She has edited the anthology Wild Minds: Stories Of Outsiders and Dreamers and co-authored, with Kate Grenville, Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written. Many of Sue’s insights come from personal experience. Two of her four brothers died in childhood, one of whom was autistic and died two years after being placed in an institution, and when Sue’s mother became mentally ill, her father took away her surviving brothers and she was left, at age 14, to take sole care her mother.

The Secret Cure
Picador, 2003; ISBN 9780980296495
Based on a true story about Hans Asperger, the ‘Schindler’ for children with Asperger’s Syndrome in World War II Austria, The Secret Cure is a love story and an exploration of new ways to be human, honourable and passionate. Eva, a cleaning lady in a small scientific laboratory, embarks on a secret mission to discover a cure for her daughter who suffers from Asperger’s. Meanwhile, the group of determined scientists working at the laboratory showcase their aspirations, jealousies, hatreds, intrigues, deceptions and triumphs as they try to make the regional Australian laboratory internationally famous.

Leaning Towards Infinity
Vintage, 1996; ISBN 9780091832285
Frances Montrose, an Australian English teacher with no formal mathematics training, carried across the world, in a borrowed suitcase bulging with a friend’s ball dresses, something no one knew about: the discovery of a new number. Told through the voice of her daughter, Hypatia, this novel is not just about mathematics; it is a very strong family story about mothers and daughters, and many readers who would not normally read a literary novel – never mind one about an abstract science such as mathematics – have read Leaning Towards Infinity and responded to it in a very personal way.