The central themes may seem to be death and grief, but there’s so much more to author Debra Adelaide’s latest book. It’s a gorgeous hardback (for those of us to whom the book is important as an artefact) and not overlong. It’s a profound and beautiful masterpiece, described by publisher UQP as a “shimmering mosaic of a novel”. But it is only a novel in the looser sense of the term.

When I Am Sixty-Four is based on Debra Adelaide’s friendship with Gabrielle Carey, who famously co-wrote Puberty Blues (a novel and later a 1981 film directed by Bruce Beresford) with Kathy Lette.

Adelaide was born in Sydney and grew up in the Sutherland Shire. She is a contemporary of Carey and Lette and went to high school with them.

Adelaide remained friends with Carey throughout their lives as academics and authors and, just as importantly, as mothers, taking care of each other’s children and sharing the successes and vicissitudes of the literary life.

Adelaide taught creative writing for 20 years and is now an adjunct associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney. She is the author or editor of 18 books, including fiction, non-fiction and reference works. Her best-known work is the 2008 novel The Household Guide to Dying, which was an international sensation.

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When I Am Sixty-Four’s title references a famous Beatles’ song and the tragic fact that Carey’s father also took his own life at the age of 64. Carey was the same age when she died.

The book is a literary reaction to her friend’s death and is Adelaide’s first book with UQP. It is quite different to any other book she has written, something she makes clear in an open letter to her readers:

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‘… we spent time together walking around the neighbourhood, talking over the same topics. Trying to lift her spirits’

“Indeed, it is not one I ever imagined I would find myself writing,” Adelaide writes. “It was inspired by the illness and death of my lifelong friend Gaberielle Carey, whose suffering was something I was involved in especially during the final months of her life.

“During that period, we spent time together walking around the neighbourhood, talking over the same topics. Trying to lift her spirits. The structure and content of When I Am Sixty-Four reflects this, as well as including reminiscences of our shared past, which reach back to when we were both twelve and went to high school together.”

However, this book is not a traditional memoir, she points out. It is “autofiction” as her friend and most of the characters are unnamed.

“That makes it more universal, I hope,” Adelaide tells me when we chat by phone. “My last book was an academic publication. It has been a while since I’ve had a novel published. It was important with this book that I was not writing a memoir about my dead friend Gabrielle Carey. I was writing a book that was about grief and other things.”

The fact that it is not a novel in the normal sense was something of a relief for Adelaide, who says she was freed from the usual problems of structure. This book just flowed, although it was not without some difficulty.

“Emotionally it was very hard to write,” she says. “But writing it was not hard. For the first time I wasn’t grappling with structure and plot. I just started by writing snippets and then adding to them.”

She wrote this book in 2024, the year after Carey’s death. It was published recently and already the response is overwhelmingly positive.

“When you write a book that has this sense of intimacy people come up to you and confess things and share the most amazing stories from their own lives,” she says. “It’s wonderful.”

One of the beauties of the book is Adelaide’s descriptions of literary and domestic life. When I mention how much I enjoyed this aspect of her writing she is chuffed.

“I’m incorrigibly domestic,” she says.

The descriptions of daily life, her garden, the birds that frequent her suburb and other minutiae will ring true for everyone. I mean, how many authors do you know who invoke the name of the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote? She also muses on the Ibis, or so-called Bin Chicken, which is part of our urban landscape. There is even a Bin Chicken on the cover! We love that.

In her letter to readers, Adelaide admits she did ask herself why she was writing this book … “and why I felt compelled to push on with a project that in so many ways was not something I would normally write. Then towards the end the answer came to me simply and clearly: my friend Gab would have written this too, if she could have. As she was gone, I knew it was up to me to capture her story, and to honour her extraordinary life and contribution to literature.”

When I Am Sixty-Four by Debra Adelaide, UQP, $34.99.

uqp.com.au/books/when-i-am-sixty-four