Life might be telling Sunday Reilly she’s past her use-by date. But she’s not planning to go quietly.
‘It’s two months on a Greek island,’ I said, ‘working holiday, I’ve got the next draft of my novel to finish.’
‘The kids didn’t mention anything,’ he said.
‘That’s because they don’t know yet,’ I said.
Neither did I till that moment.
Cue me realising that this might just be the worst decision I’ve ever made.
You don’t know me very well yet, but believe me, that’s a very high bar.
Sunday Reilly has been many things. An author. A mother. A wife. A daughter. A friend. A lover. But that’s all about to change. Because, whether she likes it or not, Sunday is stuck on a hormonal steam train that’s smashed through everything she thought she knew about herself. And she can’t find the emergency brake.
“Sunday is the kind of character you instantly want as your best friend.”
“Funniest book of 2025. 5 stars!”
“I am absolutely in love with Sunday! This book is one of those rare gems that makes you laugh out loud on public transport and not even care who’s watching.”
“This hilarious tale will resonate with all women.”
“Has you doing pelvic floors and weeping with laughter!”
“Sunday is the kind of character you instantly want as your best friend—flawed, funny, real, and so incredibly relatable.”
“I am absolutely in love with Sunday!”
This is Sunday’s story as she upends her life and takes off for the Greek islands on a whim in search of adventure and romance. She figures her life is halfway done anyway, so what has she got to lose?
Nothing goes to plan, which for Sunday has become par for the course. What was meant to be a retreat to work on her new novel becomes something else altogether as she pursues creative and romantic inspiration in one of the most beautiful corners of the planet.
As she barely makes it through a string of riotously funny near disasters, Sunday picks up the pieces and learns to embrace a new kind of freedom. A journey that was meant to be a distraction from truths she would rather forget becomes an opportunity for transformation as she embarks on a new phase of life.
SUNDAY REILLY IS ALL OUT OF FUCKS TO GIVE is funny, outrageous, angry, and heartbreaking, because life for women of a certain age is all those things. This is an uplifting and tender coming-of-age story for the middle-agers about the search for a new chapter in life full of love, meaning, and purpose after all those things have been stripped away.
It’s a strange thing to be living through a timeline during which you can ask the question, “is the fucker dead yet?” and everyone knows who you’re talking about.
Meanwhile, every second of every minute of every hour of every day, decent human beings breathe their last, including my fine father-in-law, who embarked on his final journey on the weekend.
Tragically for a man who embodied dignity, kindness and strength his entire life, he didn’t give up easily, even though it was well beyond time.
His body was a husk. But his spirit wouldn’t let go.
As I watched him battle forces he would never defeat, it reminded me how ill-equipped so many of us in the West are to confront life’s last adventure: death.
“Life is a sexually transmitted, inevitably fatal, disease.”
My dad was a surgeon.
His favourite saying?
“Life is a sexually transmitted, inevitably fatal, disease.”
Because there are just two things that you can absolutely count on if you’re fortunate enough to take a turn on this great, big, spinning ball of rock we call home.
You will be born.
And you will die.
The “being born” bit is pretty much out of your hands. Although many spiritual traditions would disagree.
But there’s no quibbling with the fact that the death side of the equation is coming for you.
I know that for a fact because my first career out of the blocks was as an archaeologist. Yes, I know. If you’ve met me here before, you’ll know I’ve also done time as a historian, a university lecturer, an art auctioneer, and a journalist, and am currently doing the rounds as an author and screenwriter.
What can I say? I bore easily.
And I’ve seen things. Lots of things.
I also hate Nazis
You’ve seen Indiana Jones, right?
We archaeologists spit in death’s eye and flip it the bird.
We laugh in the face of mortality.
Nazis, not so much. We hate Nazis.
But death? A doddle.
I was fascinated by death as a child and couldn’t get enough of long-dead civilisations. It was inevitable I’d end up knee-deep in the dust wielding a trowel.
Top that off with a childhood crush on Han Solo which evolved into a teen obsession with Indiana Jones… and my fate was sealed.
Yeah. You’re sensing a common theme.
Harrison Ford.
Probably not the wisest way to plan a career path. Intergalactic piracy was off the cards. Because, physics. And count me lucky the crush didn’t persist into adulthood, or I may have ended up a shrink.
Instead, I got myself a degree in archaeology and headed off to the Mediterranean.
Along the way, I dug up my very own, real-life Indy. We were wed in a crusader fortress on the Aegean and have been blissfully happy together ever since… but that’s a story for another day.
This is about confronting the inevitable.
The end of all…. **this**
Archaeologists aren’t afraid of death
First, a ghost story…
It’s not that archaeologists don’t believe in the spirit world. We just don’t think about it too much.
We’re not superstitious, and we’re not squeamish.
But something happened one day that made me think differently about what I was doing.
We were excavating a Hellenistic burial—so, around 2,300 years old—in far-eastern Turkey. It was just one of many in an ancient burial ground. But what made it special was that a man and woman were buried together in the grave, side by side.
They were spooning; the man’s arm resting over the woman’s waist. We were witness to the final expression of love between the couple, and the people who laid them to rest.
Yes, I wept. It was impossible not to.
There were five of us working on the grave, and we all took photos, including the dig photographer, who had three professional cameras. The rest of us had our own SLR film cameras (yes, kids, that was what we had to do back in the days before mobile phones.)
We gathered up the bones and the two silver coins from the soil beneath the man and woman’s hips (the fee for the ferryman across the River Styx that would have been tucked into their clothes when they were buried) and packed them away in the dig house in plastic bags… yeah, I know.
As I said. Tears aside, it’s a very pragmatic profession.
That night, I was in a deep sleep in the room I shared with two other archaeologists.
A freezing blast of wind woke me.
I sat up. Both my roommates were also jolted awake.
“Hey, shut the window, would you, Lisa?” I said.
Lisa checked. “Not open,” she replied.
The door and the window were both closed, and there was not a breath of wind outside.
Weird enough.
But when we got home and developed our photos from that day, none of us had a single shot of the burial on our cameras.
Not. A. Single. One.
Decades later, I still get goosebumps when I think about it.
Why so squeamish?
In the West, we’re so fucking squeamish about death. Sure, we’ll line up to see slasher pics on the big screen and beat our breasts about the loss of innocents in wars far outside our borders.
But as for the thought that death will one day be knocking at our own door?
No thanks. Move along.
I’ve got a theory about that.
Nothing unusual about that. I’m full of them. Theories, I mean.
Hear me out.
During the Renaissance, the big brains of the day tapped into the wisdom of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.
From that, the West got humanism, which places humankind at the centre of the universe.
Human beings made in God’s image.
That gives us the idea that the planet is our plaything. We are masters of all we survey.
It seeped into all aspects of our lives. For one thing, artists were no longer just craftspeople… talented people who made beautiful stuff. They became “geniuses,” channelling God’s creative spirit here on earth. So, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and Donatello became household names. They also became Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
This couldn’t be less like Islam, where under the strictest interpretation of the law, it’s seen as blasphemy to paint anything from nature because it challenges Allah’s divine power as creator of all things on earth.
Christianity, by contrast, applauded human achievement as a “gift from God.”
This thinking also set scientists off the leash. Armed with new technology—microscopes (invented in 1590) and telescopes (invented in 1608)—they started asking “why?” to questions that had, until then, been answered with the catch-all response: “because it’s God’s will.”
I mean, human beings were God’s favourite children, so, sure. What could possibly go wrong?
The blink of a cosmic eye
The scientific advances since that time have been truly extraordinary.
But from a chronological perspective, four hundred years is nothing… The blink of a cosmic eye.
It’s no wonder the reality of the 21st century world we’ve created for ourselves in the West has given us all a chronic case of whiplash.
Think about it this way. If you’re fifty or so, your grandparents were probably born in the first decades of the 1900s.
Presuming you knew them, imagine you high-fived your grandma when she was still around. That’s you “touching” 1900.
If your grandma knew her granddad and high-fived him, it takes her back to 1800 or so. Do that another two times between generations, and it takes you back to 1600.
So, just four high-fives, and you’re in the Age of Enlightenment. The person you’re connected to back then may have been peeling apples with Isaac Newton.
See what I mean? Blink of an eye.
The greatest puzzle of all
Even though it’s only been four hundred years since western science started strutting its way across the global stage, we’ve thrown all our hats in that particular ring.
Got a problem? No worries, friend. Science will find an answer.
But there’s one puzzle that’s stumped us. Not because we’re missing a piece or two.
Because we’ve got nothing.
Death.
We have a fair idea why it happens.
We can even have a guess when it’ll happen.
As for a cure? Forget about it.
That terrifies us. Because even people of faith don’t really know what happens afterwards.
And the rest of us have replaced faith in God with faith in science. Yet neither can give us an answer.
That’s troublesome. Because most of us suspect that death is not the end.
Life is brief, but we all make a mark
Even if you don’t believe our souls persist after our bodies wind down, we all leave pieces behind in our wake.
When I was an archaeologist, I saw it in the thumbprint of the potter who, four-thousand years ago, shaped wet clay into an urn.
I felt it in the chisel mark in the block of stone chipped by a stonemason from a quarry hundreds of kilometres away then carted to a hilltop to become one of thousands in a vast temple built to a god long since forgotten.
And I sensed it in the worn leather of a sandal we discovered; its sole rubbed to a dull patina by whoever abandoned it on the plaster floor of a home two-and-a-half-thousand years ago.
Those people were here. They made their mark. And then they departed.
One day, it will be me.
And one day, it will be you.
Regardless of what you believe happens to our soul after we migrate from our body, that is all that remains: the marks we made while we were here.
Our suit of skin will be a car abandoned by the side of the road.
Without a driver, it will simply rust away.
It might sound odd, but I find that comforting.
Death doesn’t frighten me. Perhaps, in part, because my husband and I fell in love as we used dental picks and trowels to scrape dirt away from the mortal remains of a girl laid to rest five-thousand-years ago.
She was around ten when she died. She lay on a straw bed on top of a slab of flat stones. A spiral of bronze the girth of your forefinger lay in the dirt behind her; a fastening for what would have been a braid of hair long since disintegrated into the soil.
Beside her head was an ornate painted pot, burnished black with geometric designs, crushed flat from the thousands of years of pressure from the soil above her.
We’ll never know who she was, or who buried her with such care and love. And it doesn’t really matter. She was just a girl passing through a fertile river plain with her nomadic family in the far east of what is now known as Turkey.
But she was a human being, no different to you and me in a physical sense.
What did she dream?
Was there a flower she particularly loved that grew beside the stream her people returned to, year after year, on their migration to the summer mountain pastures?
Did she seek out the sweet taste of wild honey on her tongue from hives tangled in the top branches of the poplar trees?
No idea at all.
It’s enough that she was here.
Butterfly wings, and all that.
Who knows what her birth—and death—meant for the people around her, and what small things she may have done that reverberated through time to reach us today? In the smallest way, she may have changed the world.
What I learnt most of all that day was that humanity—the connection between people—is universal and eternal.
It was there in the effort it took to hack a hole in half-frozen soil deep enough to make sure scavengers didn’t disturb the grave.
It was there in the grave gifts; they were prized and valuable possessions. Yet they were not carried away and used as exchange for food, or beasts of burden. They were left, instead, for the girl they buried that day.
Most of all, it was there in the way she was curled up with her hands tucked carefully beneath her head.
Not dead. Just sleeping.
Whoever did that for her loved her. And would miss her.
We need to talk about death.
Because without death, there is no life.
Everything on our planet is in a state of constant flux. Glance down at your hand for a moment. You are looking at atoms that may once have been a dinosaur’s hide… a falling star… a chill wind… a boulder tumbling down a mountainside… the breath of someone you love.
No matter how you feel about the idea of reincarnation, the truth is that even if we put the human spirit to one side, we are literally walking around in a case made of atoms that have existed since the beginning of time.
We borrow these bits and pieces from the cosmic tub of Lego and form them into something else for the time we are here.
After that, we return them to the planet and they are transformed again.
We expose our flesh and bones to the elements, or bury them beneath the soil, then gather what remains and stack bones in charnel houses.
We ritually consume pieces of flesh to preserve the spirit of our ancestors, then burn what remains.
We remove the organs and dry our bodies in salt, then wrap our remains in linen bandages and store them in decorated caskets.
We use plaster to reanimate our skulls, and set the eyes with shells, setting them in altars in our homes as shrines to our ancestors.
We burn everything and hold the ashes in Chinoiserie urns on mantlepieces.
We section bodies and inter them in terracotta urns… alabaster jugs… hollow painted timber logs.
But human beings are much more than animated skin suits.
That’s why we need to let go of our fear of death.
Think of someone you love. Those physical bits are not the first things that come to mind. It’s the intangible things that exist within.
Where do those things come from? No fucking idea. Just as I know that no matter how much science has given us, it is still a long way from mapping the human soul, much less explaining where it goes after our body taps out.
Because one thing is certain.
Life is an extraordinary thing.
I still marvel every time I take a seed and drop it into the soil.
It’s been sitting in a paper sleeve for months. Years, even.
Yet add water, sun and light, and it knows it’s time.
Something magical happens as it bursts through its desiccated skin and sends a green tendril reaching for the sky.
Life never dies. It just changes form.
This is true no matter your faith. Or lack thereof.
The closer we westerners come to embracing this, the less terrified we’ll be about shedding our skin.
And wherever my wonderful father-in-law is now, I trust his spirit has found peace with his departure from his earthly woes and discovered a lasting peace.
Why the Heritage Foundation’s new family plan should terrify you this Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day. Love it or hate it. It’s almost upon us.
Colliding as it does with a moment in time when the ghastly truth about a global enterprise in the rape, exploitation and disposal of girls and young women seeps out from between the cracks of a silo built of rotting lies and decaying carcasses… Well. What can I say?
It made me think about the whole girl-meets-boy thing.
Then, I hear about Moya. An AI-powered robot “designed for human companionship,” apparently. She’s biomimetic, which as far as I can tell means she can walk, has micro-expressions – hey, look! she can wink! – plus, she keeps herself at an oh-so inviting body temperature of between 32 and 36 degrees Celsius, and has “dense” skin, whatever the fuck that means.
For just US$173,000, she can be your very own, uncanny, pink-haired best friend.
Because, yeah. I’m sure all the cashed-up incels lining up to get their hands on Moya are looking for a bot to share “meaningful conversations” with.
There’s not enough Lysol in the world to clean up the mess they’re going to leave behind. Unless, like an oven, Moya comes in a self-cleaning version.
Why go plastic, when real women are amazing?
Given technological advances, it was inevitable.
Like we need a reminder that for most of our time on earth as a species, women have been possessions. Objects to be traded. Used till worn out. Then discarded.
The truth is that it has been a purple patch for women in the west of late. And, when I say “of late,” let’s be quite clear. I’m only talking fifty years or so. My lifetime, basically.
I’m mother to a daughter. One day, I may be grandmother to granddaughters. I also think women are fucking amazing.
So, looking at what’s going on through the lens of my expertise as a historian and student of human nature terrifies me.
Because the release of an influential report last month from the same people who gave us Project 2025 shows they’re playing hardball.
If they have their way, we’re headed back to the dark ages.
It was a top-secret intelligence report written in 1943. But it could have been written today.
It’s fucking inevitable.
As a day of reckoning looms on the horizon, the ship will spring a leak or twenty.
That’s because rats aren’t renowned for hanging around and going down with all hands-on-deck. They start to look around for something to cling to in the stormy seas. Because if nothing else, they’re survivors.
And so, they begin to chatter. Off the record. Anonymously.
Once they start, they can’t stop.
Perhaps it feels good to get it off their chests.
Could be they’re looking for sympathy.
Or maybe they think that by fessing up, they’ll position themselves on the right side of history.
And so it begins: “The world has come to know him for his insatiable greed for power, his ruthlessness, his cruelty and utter lack of feeling, his contempt for established institutions and his lack of moral restraints.”
“… Human life and human suffering seem to leave [him] completely untouched as he plunges along the course he believes he was predestined to take…”
“… Earlier in his career the world… watched him with amusement. Many people refused to take him seriously on the grounds that ‘he could not possibly last.’ As one action after another met with amazing success and the measure of the man became more obvious, this amusement was transformed into incredulousness. To most people, it seemed inconceivable that such things could actually happen in our modern civilisation.”
No. Not Trump. Though, yeah. I can see why you’d think that.
Censorship, control, and rewriting American history
I’ve discovered the line in the sand for corporate America.
It’s not invading a sovereign nation to kidnap its leader.
It’s also quite OK to take potshots at peaceful protesters and disappear American citizens into human cattle pens.
As for sabre rattling and threatening allies and friends? Knock yourself out.
And let’s not get all up in a flap about the rights of children to attend places of learning rather than lining up as targets in shooting galleries.
But the one thing that has corporate America clutching at its pearls?
Swears.
Yes, really.
I found that out the hard way when I discovered that the only Amazon platform I can’t use to advertise my latest novel, Sunday Reilly is All Out of F*cks to Give, is the US.
And you know what that got me thinking about, don’t you?
Because Jacinta and Brian of ABC Melbourne are letting me loose in the studio
Yes, really. Question is, will I be able to behave myself, or will they need to call on the famous “dump” button? Spoiler alert: no they won’t, because I’m dead professional like that.
If you’re interested in hearing me bang on about my latest novel, SUNDAY REILLY IS ALL OUT OF F*CKS TO GIVE, and whatever else might come up, tune in at 1.40pm on 774 ABC Melbourne, or via the ABC Listen app across Australia or internationally.
Worst case scenario, you’ll get to hear Jacinta and Brian, who are absolute fucking legends. And their show has been my favourite Friday afternoon escape for yonks. To be able to hang out with them for a bit = bucket list stuff.
Meantimes, for homework – if you haven’t already met the good-ship Sunday Reilly as she runs ashore in the Aegean, follow the link below to where Goodreads is running an eBook giveaway until 8 February.
I mean, sure. You could also buy an eBook or paperback instead. Writers have to eat, after all. If you want to do that, you can buy my book here:
Because who the fuck doesn’t need a holiday, right? We’re only in January, and I’m already done with 2026.
So, it’s time to hit the road with Sunday Reilly.
Can I share some exciting news with you?
SUNDAY REILLY IS ALL OUT OF F*CKS TO GIVE was released into the wild two days ago, and to my enduring shock/delight, it’s already making waves on the Amazon bestseller lists! Add to that, five-star reviews… it’s an absolute “pinch-me” moment.
Now, the weekend is here, and it’s a long one for those of us in Australia. If you don’t have a summer trip to the Greek islands lined up, and want a fun, sweary holiday read, join Sunday on her ill-advised escape from reality. I promise you’ll have fun.
Don’t believe me? Fair enough, I am a little biased.
“Sunday is the kind of character you instantly want as your best friend.”
“Funniest book of 2025. 5 stars!”
“I am absolutely in love with Sunday! This book is one of those rare gems that makes you laugh out loud on public transport and not even care who’s watching.”
“Has you doing pelvic floors and weeping with laughter!”
“Filled with laughs from the opening page, tears and plenty of WTF moments, this is a fun summer read that is tempered with poignant moments.”
“Sunday is the kind of character you instantly want as your best friend—flawed, funny, real, and so incredibly relatable.”
Dip your toe into the Aegean before you commit!
I’m sending you the first three chapters to sample in case you missed your chance to download a free copy of the ebook. Link below!
But if you’ve known me around these parts for a bit, or follow me on Threads, you’ll know that I have an opinion or two. I also have an agenda to push. That agenda finds its way into everything I make. So, while you’re reading about Sunday’s often disastrous, but ultimately uplifting, adventures in the Aegean, there’s something else at play.
Reviewer Ashleigh Miekle gets it: “This is a book about being yourself. About standing up against judgment and not caring about what the world or people who look down on you think. And about embracing that…. This is a book for anyone and any woman who has ever felt this way or wants to make a change and start being seen as her own person, not an extension of the identities society puts on her.”
And she’s bang-on. It’s exactly what I was trying to say.
Why should that matter for the Trumps, the Putins, the Modis, and the Orbáns of the world?
With all the power clutched in their unnaturally stubby, grubby, grabby little fingers, why would they even care?
How much of a threat can come from a woman of a certain age like me? Or a dancer working three jobs to pay for her lessons? Or a half-starved photographer who makes art for an audience of three including at least one parent and a landlord who hopes to one day see a rent cheque come through?
Because one day, that artist might make something like this.
Authenticity, by its very nature, cannot be replicated. I think what Adam meant to say was that “the appearance of authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible.”
Because Sunday is, without a doubt, as authentic as you can get.
But as with so many other things in life, it’s not all bad news. In fact, once the dust settles, I suspect we’ll start to see the silver gleaming at the heart of this, admittedly, daunting storm cloud.
It doesn’t change the facts, though.
Generative AI is the most accomplished mimic of all time
And it’s flooding the airwaves at the moment.
It’s a factory churning out replicas.
Nothing it makes can ever be authentic, because even when prompted by a human hand, it’s creating things that draw on a vast reservoir of bits and pieces stolen from human beings.
It’s not seeking inspiration from other creative work, which is something all artists do. It’s putting together a grab-bag of well-chosen cultural fragments and gluing them together to create a pleasing chimera that does a pretty bang-on job of looking real.
Does that make it “authentic”?
Fuck, no. I’ve got a fabulously convincing Prada handbag a friend bought me from a market in Istanbul. When I use it and am dressed up to the nines, I’m sure people believe it’s the real thing. But just because it looks real doesn’t make it so.
Roll a shit in glitter, and it’s still just a shiny turd.
I’m shaken. I really am. And I know I’m not alone.
Dealing with the uncertainty and ever-shifting emotional and physical landscape that comes with being a woman of a certain age is bad enough without having to watch the decline of Western civilisation into the bargain.
It pains me to say it. Because I’m a historian with a PhD to prove it. History has been an obsession since I was a tiny thing. I thought that by studying history, I could understand what it meant to be a human being.
Instead, I’m getting to watch history play out in real time… and not in a good way.
We look to the past to avoid repeating its mistakes. Which is why the current state of the world is causing students of history such existential horror.
