Olga Lorenzo has always felt a little like an outsider. Cuban-born, she was 22 when she left Miami to come to Australia, her parents before her had left Cuba to move to the United States, her grand-parents before them left Spain to come to Cuba.
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"There's been this continuity in my background, this sense of being an outsider, there's been a huge hunger to belong and to be accepted and to be loved and find that greater community that embraces you."
While working on her latest novel The Light on the Water, Lorenzo wanted to explore this idea, how we all want to belong to a group, be part of a group, and how it would feel if that group shuts you out.
"I wondered what it would be like to be going through this at the worst possible time of your life … a time when you needed support from other people. For me the worst possible thing would be the loss of a child."
And so we're introduced to Anne Baxter and in the opening chapter she's in prison, the details of her crime are yet to unfold. Recently divorced, still floundering, Baxter takes her young autistic daughter on a bushwalk to Wilson's Promontory. Six-year-old Aida is never seen again. Eighteen months later, and the novel moves back and forth in time, she is charged with her daughter's murder. After bail is granted she returns home to wait, and mourn her daughter. Her own family turns on her, she is physically attacked, sent threatening letters.
"People can judge you instead of supporting you, people can turn on you," Lorenzo says.
During her PhD in creative writing at the University of Melbourne, she explored the ideas of shame and difference in literature and how we handle those differences.
"Difference is very confronting to us and sometimes it's about people coming from a different culture; having Anne coming from an Italian background was purposeful here.
"Sometimes it's just those subtleties we feel when we're talking about our indigenous people or asylum seekers or when we're talking about minorities in any way. There's always that danger that we don't fully embrace and support them as best we can because of those differences.
"These are huge issues for me, I'll always be writing about those things."
And she is, in her fourth book – "a book I've fallen in love with that's writing itself" – "don't they say a writer writes the same book again and again?"
Lorenzo's first novel The Rooms in My Mother's House, about three generations of Cuban women resettling in Miami, was published in 1996 to critical acclaim. It was listed for several literary awards, including the Impac prize. She has won scholarships, and grants to support her writing, including a Varuna Fellowship in 2000.
Busy for the past 20 years raising a family, studying and teaching writing at RMIT, she has another book tucked away.
"It's a difficult novel set in Cuba during the revolution, Spain during the civil war and Miami during the 1980s race riots, it's a very ambitious novel," Lorenzo says.
"I've shown one publisher and they liked it but the feeling was that it might be better to get Light on the Water out first, and then go back to that one.
"But now this fourth book has consumed me, I don't know when it will be out."
As the mother of three children Lorenzo comes back to family, that sense of belonging. She says that her own connections have inspired the idea of "a different kind of family" prevalent in The Light on the Water. She thanks her partner, Warwick Barton, and her children's father, Fairfax cartoonist John Spooner, and his partner Inga Rocis. She is grateful for their generosity and kindness.
"The idea that I'll forever love the people I've loved is very strong with me … it's wonderful if you can live in harmony with these people, find a sense of a greater family, be part of that community of souls we all want."
The Light on the Water, by Olga Lorenzo. Allen & Unwin. $29.99.
