Beginning with the uneasy aftermath of the night before her fortieth birthday, Second Half First looks back across the decades that shaped Drusilla Modjeska’s life as a reader, writer, and thinker.

It starts from her childhood in England and her parents’ difficult marriage, to early married life in Papua New Guinea. Then, she travels to Sydney in the 1970s, where she entered a circle of writers that included Helen Garner.

Modjeska reflects on friendships, lovers, and the shifting demands of independence, as well as the intellectual influences that shaped her work. Writers such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir appear alongside memories of literary households, evolving relationships, and the realities of building a life around books.

Moving between personal history and literary reflection, the memoir considers love, loss, ageing, and the bonds that sustain a thinking life. The result is a candid and searching account of how reading, writing, and experience slowly assemble a life.