Here I am, five years old. I look at that sweet smiling girl, and she looks back at me. ‘What did you do with my life?’ She asks.

Well. Let me tell you.

When I look at you, I see glorious unselfconsciousness. I see the strawberry blonde hair I have disguised with platinum streaks since my teens; I see the overbite that was corrected but which remains part of my mental image of myself. But you couldn’t care less that you’re a freckly ranga who’ll need braces. You are what the French call bien dans ta peau, which is surely the most magnificent expression on the planet. It means to be at ease, confident, ‘comfortable in your skin,’ whatever skin you’re in.

I have to tell you, little one, it’s a state I’ve been trying to get back to ever since... Let me take you through your life in pictures, as you become me, in the skin we’re in.

I’m pretty sure this is the worst photo ever taken of me. I am 13. It had been a big week. I’d had my first haircut in a salon (mum usually did it), got my first period and braces on my teeth. I would have liked this shag haircut to cover my whole face, and never again to open my mouth, with its James Bond villain metal grin. And I was in an epic battle with my mother, about shaving.

My mother, a 1970s feminist, was against leg shaving. In her view, it was a capitulation to the demands of a world that wanted women to fritter away our time worrying about how we looked, when we could have been doing other things – including changing the world that required this useless behaviour of us. (It seems a lot to expect of stopping shaving, but ‘the personal is political’ was the mantra of the day. And of course it is, too.)

While I admired the (two) girls at school who didn’t shave their legs, it was clear to me that it would be social death not to. My mother was demanding that I risk ostracism for her principles. The principles were fine and feminist and may even have been about to usher in the Beginning of the End of Patriarchy (sadly not, as it turns out). But I couldn’t live up to them and got the razor out.

When she saw my legs, my mother scoffed. “Oh look at you, off to join the glabrous hordes,” she said, as if fitting in came at a cost to my integrity.  

My mother came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was a time when women were openly judged, body part by body part, like horses: good legs, ankles, fine hands, upright bearing, long neck, ‘nice rack’ etc. Even as the outer world changed for Mum, from hats and gloves and bouffant hair, through mini skirts and maxi dresses in the 1970s, this internalised judgement had lodged deep, and she considered herself handsome by it. Possibly, handsome enough to withstand what she then did to herself in the 1980s.  

As she entered early middle age, Mum took to wearing a semi-afro wig (I shudder at the appropriation of it, but back then, it passed as solidarity), and zip-up, crepe-soled leather motorbike boots. There was no motorbike, so perhaps I should be thankful for small mercies.  

Still, the attempt to look windswept and natural was hot and effortful, and dangerously different from the other mums who signalled suburban sanity in cardigans, jeans, discreet pearls in their ears. It seems cruel of me now, but I used to make mum drop me off blocks from school, in case anyone saw her.    

Mum was just navigating beauty, too. We were both so far from being bien dans nôtre peau: she in her mad ’fro and boots, me with my villainous grin and shiny, baby-oiled shins. (TBH I’m in no position to be critical of her hairstyle in light of my later, irrationally beloved poodle perm, but more on that shortly.)  

We are all, whatever we do or don’t do, navigating this world in the skin we’re in.

This photo was taken in 1987, I’m 21. I don’t know it, but my exchange at the Free University in walled-in West Berlin will open me to a beauty inside humans that will result in the book Stasiland and change my life.

I met people there for whom truth was as important as air. They were artists and writers from East Germany who had been kicked out of their country, which lay, locked up like a prison, on the other side of this wall. East Germany was an Orwellian world of fake news: fake election results, fake harvest announcements, fake freedoms. It was a world of total surveillance; there was someone spying on their family, friends and colleagues in every apartment building, kindergarten, workplace, pub. What someone said about you to government spies could wreck your life.

All authoritarian regimes are mistrustful of beauty and the artists who create it. This proves, more than anything else, how beauty is connected with freedom of expression, and so with the truth, and with joy.

And yet for all my admiration for those who refused to kowtow, I see such conformity in my 1980s look. I suppose following fashion, or even just trying to, shows that you’ve understood the subliminal sonar of the time; here, the edict about white ankle socks and oversized coats. I know I should be much more embarrassed by the perm than I am. I can see, with my rational mind, the full horror of it; I can practically smell the chemical burn. But it was something I could wash and leave. And it was a tiny bit of borrowed confidence, Medusa-style, as I faced down those old spies.

I couldn’t stay away from Berlin. This photo is from 1997, as I worked on my book Stasiland about the four brave resisters – three women and a charming old rockstar – and the ex-Stasi spies. I have mercifully outgrown the perm. I recognise this look of curious uncertainty; it feels like how I still face the world.

After I’d known him for a few weeks, my boyfriend gave me a pair of Blundstone boots. I stayed over at his share house, and in the morning the 18-month-old child of a housemate was wandering about with a dirty nappy, before his mother was awake. My BF just scooped him up and changed it. This was a step deeper into love for me, as I watched him quietly take responsibility for the world.  

Now, on the way down to our kayaks on the harbour we can’t pass an overturned e-bike without him stopping to pick it up. Out on the water I frown and tut at the litter as I paddle past it. When we get back to shore, I see he’s scooped up the floating plastic bottles and bags and food wrappers he saw, to put in the bin. His relation to the beauty of the world is to care for it. Me included.  

I wore the Blundstones on our first trip, to Uluru. Looking at this photo I see a sense of calm. I am starting to be me, in the paradox of we.

Sappho, one of the greatest poets of love, famously wrote: ‘the most beautiful sight the dark world offers... is whatever you love best.’  

Love will make someone beautiful – your baby, your boyfriend – and it does not matter one whit what they look like.  

My cousin, an ecstatic, older, first-time father says, in utter seriousness, “Tell me he’s not the most beautiful baby you’ve ever seen!” of his beautiful boy. This is an expression of love so overwhelming it can only be because the baby is the most beautiful thing to have ever existed. And he is – for my cousin.  

We think our feelings are caused by someone’s beauty, when it is our feelings that are making it.  

My cousin has entered the zone of love and beauty. I did too. I was married in my early 30s, and the morse code of the next decades went like this: Baby. Book. Baby, baby. Book. Book. I have lived my life in the zone of love and beauty with these little creatures and their father.

Not that I was qualified to be a writing mother. My first book came out six weeks after my eldest child was born; my husband was often away, we were in a new city without family. My first live radio interview was scheduled at the ABC. I’d passed the building many times. Wasn’t it so lucky, I thought, that it had a childcare centre on the ground floor! I called in advance just to make sure: could I drop my baby off there while I was on air? Just for an hour? The kind childcare worker could barely contain her astonishment at this crazy woman who had imagined her centre as a coat check for infants. (In the end I took my daughter into the recording booth and breastfed during the interview to keep her quiet. When she snuffled a bit, the announcer, a total pro, calmly introduced her to the listeners as an additional guest.)

When I was expecting my second baby I flew to the UK for an award Stasiland was shortlisted for, right at the limit of when pregnant people can fly. I like to think of my second daughter there with me as I accepted the Samuel Johnson Prize on stage at The Savoy hotel. Back home I was photographed for a magazine just before she was born, though she’s tucked under my big black coat and you can barely tell. Six months later, still breastfeeding, I took her on tour to freezing Scandinavia, and seem, from this incriminating photo I just pulled from a box, to have put her down on the floor like an abandoned toy.

My littlest one, my son, was born while I was writing the novel All That I Am. I used to drive him around in the car till he went to sleep, then pull out huge A3 page proofs across the steering wheel to correct them. When the novel won the Miles Franklin Literary Award I was in Greece with his 10-year-old sister, on a lecture trip. She patiently held the wobbly iPhone, take after take, as we recorded the acceptance speech in an Athens hotel room. My children are my lived experience of beauty and joy, and I weave my life around them.

In Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life, I painted the portrait of a woman lost to history. She was Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s brilliant, brave, hilarious first wife. Eileen saved Orwell’s life in the Spanish Civil War, made his writing life possible and co-wrote Animal Farm. But strangely, she barely features in biographies of him. She has been deliberately left out, to make it look as if he accomplished it all – his life and work – alone.  

I learned many things from writing Wifedom, but possibly the most important is that self-deprecation is a dangerous feminine virtue in patriarchy. Women do so much, but we say, ‘Oh, it was nothing,’ or ‘No trouble.’  If we erase our own efforts, it makes it easier then, for history to erase us.

There are not many photographs of Eileen, who died in 1945. Everyone said she was beautiful but cared little about what she looked like. The only makeup she wore was rouge, and she only wore that, she said, to spare other people worry because otherwise she’d look as if she were about to pass out. In the end it was both her anaemia and her constant efforts to spare other people concern, or effort, that undid her. I wish she’d been more trouble.

Not long after Wifedom was published, British artist James d’Arcy Cartwright was moved by it to paint Eileen. And then, so generously, he sent me the work. “Well I enjoyed painting her, or her photograph more exactly,” he wrote, “and, framed, she could survive a little longer, even in Oz.”  

This is the artist’s impulse, whether in words or paint: to share the awe we feel about a beautiful subject, so they can live a little longer in the imagination of others. Now, Eileen watches over me as I work at my desk – hers is a sympathetic face, but I suspect she has her editor’s pencil in her hand, just out of frame.

Yesterday, right at the bottom of the box of photo albums, I touched something soft. I recognised the William Morris Liberty print at once; it was my mother’s makeup bag. I unzipped it gingerly. Inside, a lipstick in a case with a golden clasp. I opened it. It was the mulberry colour she always wore, shaped to the point her lips had made on it, last 27 years ago. It feels like the most intimate thing I have of hers.

A couple of months ago I gave the Closing Address at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. My whole writing life has involved bringing empathy and emotion to other people’s stories. But this one was personal. I was going to talk about my mother and myself, about love and connection and the ordinary kinds of harshness mothering can sometimes involve (see above, re baby on floor). I was so nervous I couldn’t eat for a month, my whole life spiralled towards the deadline like a black hole. I felt transparent; I had no skin to protect me.