Rachel Spencer has recently completed a memoir linking periods of grief in mid-life with memories of Paris in the 1980s. She is also, as part of her Creative Writing PhD at Flinders University, working on a true crime story about a very strange attempted murder case that took place in Adelaide in 1981.
Rachel practised law for several years and then entered legal academia. She’s now the Director of Professional Programs in the School of Law at the University of South Australia where her teaching and research interests include legal ethics; law, art and literature; law and popular culture; media representations of lawyers; and access to justice.
For The Hearth’s night of readings on the theme of Nostalgia Rachel will be reading an excerpt from her memoir…
Set in a a time before Facebook and mobile phones, Rachel’s piece explores the ordinary life of an expat Australian, shared with a French woman in her modest apartment in a middle class suburb on the outskirts of Paris. But just as she’s settling into her new French identity, her mother wants her to come back to Australia. She leaves Paris and spends a long time feeling that she made a mistake…
The Hearth 