Lola Bensky

Nineteen-year-old Lola is an overweight, high-school drop-out thrown into the world of rock stardom when she lands a job interviewing music legends such as Cher, Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison for Rock-Out magazine in Australia. Away from Melbourne, far from the reach of her anxious mother and vaudeville-loving father, Lola’s eyes are opened during the 1967 music revolution sweeping the clubs, streets and radio waves of London, New York, California. As she moves through youth, marriage, motherhood and psychoanalysis Lola Bensky discovers she can no longer shrug them off serious thoughts by being cheerful or planning interviews or thinking about food. Slowly Lola begins to realise that perhaps the questions she asked as a young journalist, and the fiction she writes in her adulthood hold the answers to the almost unanswerable questions of her past, especially the question of what it means to be human.Drawing on her own experiences, Lily has created a wonderful character in Lola - full of anxiety, but delightly warm. This is a gentle and funny story, with a vein of seriousness at its core. This is one that will entertain you, and make you think.