The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: A Writer Looks at Obsession, Creativity and Neuroscience

Description

Bestselling author Sue Woolfe takes us on a very personal search, exploring the connections between neuroscience and the 'felt experiences' that inform the art of storytelling. Using Eva - the cleaning lady protagonist from her acclaimed 2003 novel The Secret Cure - as both catalyst and metaphor, Woolfe explores Western science, psychology and epistemology for clues to better understanding the creative writing process.This is a must-read for readers, writers and anyone interested not only in what it means to be creative, but also how creativity can inform and enrich both art and life.

Sue Woolfe is the author of three novels, several short stories and academic works. Woolfe spent her childhood in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales and was educated at Sydney University and the University of New England. She is the author of Painted Woman, the novel and play, and co-author with Kate Grenville of Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels were Written (2001). Woolfe's best-selling novel Leaning Towards Infinity (2000), about two generations of women mathematicians, was released in 1996, winning the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in 1997 as well as being short-listed for many other prizes, including the prestigious US Tiptree Prize. As well as being published in the United States and UK, Leaning Towards Infinity has been published in translation in a number of countries. Fay Weldon called it 'tumultuous and nourishing', and in the US it was named as 'the deepest novel of ideas for years'. As editor of the anthology Wild Minds (1999), Woolfe assembled stories from some of this century's greatest authors, including Marguerite Duras, Flannery O'Connor, Italo Calvino and Joseph Conrad. In 2004, Woolfe published The Secret Cure, a profoundly moving novel which explores new ways of what it means to be human, to be normal, to be honourable, and what it means to love.