This collection of short stories by Cate Kennedy can be found on the Senior Fiction Shelves in the Australian section at A KENN.
'Like a House on Fire' is a collection of short stories, written by award winning writer Cate Kennedy. In these stories, Kennedy once again takes ordinary lives and dissects their ironies, injustices and pleasures with her humane eye and wry sense of humour. In ‘Laminex and Mirrors’, a young woman working as a cleaner in a hospital helps an elderly patient defy doctor’s orders. In ‘Cross-Country’, a jilted lover manages to misinterpret her ex’s new life. And in ‘Ashes’, a son accompanies his mother on a journey to scatter his father’s remains, while lifelong resentments simmer in the background. Cate Kennedy’s poignant short stories find the beauty and tragedy in illness and mortality, life and love.
From https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/like-a-house-on-fire
You said in a conversation with Helen Garner after Like a House on Fire was published, that, 'Everything's ordinary in my work … I live in a very ordinary place, a farm on a river. I listen to other people and I hear what they're saying. The gift is the ordinariness – things that are well-used, unexpressed, taken for granted. I love to look at those things in a fresh way.' How do you think your appreciation for the ordinary might have worked in writing 'A glimpse of paradise'?
Well, one of the powerful things about writing from ordinary life is the elements you select from it are immediately recognisable to people. So you can hide things in plain sight, in a way, or subvert expectation. I like the idea that I could make you, the reader, pay better attention to something by showing it to you and suggesting there's something more, under the surface. So that thing could suddenly seem funny, or poignant, or even frightening, just when you were taking it for granted and not expecting a twist or added dimension. Observational comedy does this all the time – making us laugh at what seems obvious once it's pointed out to us but until that moment has been invisible. Psychological suspense seems to work in the same way to me: the stories I always find most terrifying, for instance, are the ones that are set in completely banal and familiar places, so I thought I would play with that idea a bit.
From an interview with Madeleine Watts in the Griffith Review.
