My friends Ellen van Neerven and Tony Birch and Rashida Murphy all had some influence I think, and Louise Erdrich, but maybe musicians as much as authors. So, are there any writers, or specific stories, that you think had a big influence on this novel but not on any of your previous novels?Īs above, the first Alice Walker. They took a lot of us but they never managed to take that. Blak lives here are fucking hardcore in many ways, but they are funny as all hell too. Also, the content around family violence and other racist violence, etc., is pretty unflinching, and I knew readers were going to need the laughs to be able to absorb what I needed to talk about. Ain’t nobody got time for miseryguts when we got a revolution to be planning and holding, brother. Why did you feel it was important for this story to have some humor? While it sounds like Too Much Lip is a serious story, the press material says it has elements of dark humor. I didn’t see anyone in Australian literature who looked like my sistas who are the bravest, staunchest and blackest mob going. It also sprang from my own experience as the sister of Blak men who’ve done many years in Australian prisons, and as a founding member of Sisters Inside prisoner advocacy group. In particular to her first novel, The Third Life Of Grange Copeland. Too Much Lip owes a creative debt to many Aboriginal and other artists, and to Alice Walker, who I interviewed in Sydney in 2015. Killing us in jails, killing us on the streets, and killing us in our own homes too. Those values and the ideas attached to them are killing us.

I wanted to pen a high-energy antidote to the sexist, racist heteronormative values of mainstream Australia. Where did the original idea for Too Much Lip, and how, if at all, did that idea evolve as you wrote this story? The main character Kerry Salter is a criminal-minded queer Blak woman (we in Oz say Blak for Aboriginal people to signify that we are culturally black but often have paler skin) who roars back over the border into her hometown on a stolen Harley Davidson. The book is a fast-paced feminist yarn about overcoming lingering family curses, fraught race relations between Aboriginal and other folks in a small country town, and it’s also a love story.

Too Much Lip is set in the lush landscape of northern NSW, Bundjalung rainforest country with rolling cattle farms stretching to the west, and the mighty Pacific Ocean, or as we say the burragurra, to the East. So, what is Too Much Lip about, and where does it take place? I always like to begin with a plot overview. But as she explains in the following email interview - which I did in honor of this book being released in the U.S. On the surface, Melissa Lucashenko’s 2019 novel Too Much Lip ( hardcover, Kindle) sounds like it’s a feminist fantasy.

Melissa lucashenko