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Kelly Doust

Kelly Doust

Category Archives: Food

A few of my favourite things

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by kellydoust in Art, Books & films, Fashion, Food, Inspirations, markets & shopping

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Amy Adams, Big Eyes, Frida Giannini, Gabrielle Zevin, Girls, Gucci, Jemima Kirk, Lena Dunham, The Bakehouse Studio, The Storied Life of AJ FIkry

11057273_1538219093109222_6852092253340208011_nTO READ: THE STORIED LIFE OF AJ FIKRY
Bookish folk, this is for you. The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin is a perfect novel about a failing bookstore, its cranky owner, a perky sales rep and a precocious foundling. Mostly it’s about love, though – love and books. Mr Fikry, you’re my kind of man.

TO WATCH: BIG EYES
The story of artist Margaret Keane and her domineering cheat of a husband is so extraordinary, it seems hard to believe it hasn’t been told sooner on the big screen. Tim Burton does the tale justice without going over the top on the magic realism and it’s a better film for it, but I loved the small touches that were present in the haunting eyes of Keane’s women and children. Don’t fret, Amy Adams fans… Oscar’s coming for her one day soon. Great 60s fashion and architecture, too for all the die-hard vintage peeps out there.

10305063_1541679779429820_54041439847273506_nTO LUST AFTER: NEW-SEASON GUCCI
Frida Giannini’s nailed it – this is all I want to wear in the coming season. I’m thinking 70s nostalgia is a-ok when I missed it first time round… just. I didn’t miss out on a very fetching bowl cut, though (all photographic evidence destroyed). How amazing is this jacket!?

AND SOME ACE TV: GIRLS SEASON 4
Lena Dunham’s comedy about four twenty-something women in New York just gets better and better, and this season was the pinnacle for me. Jemima Kirk’s Jessa is a joy to behold but man, she’s a piece of work!

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ALSO – VISIT: YOUR LOCAL ARTIST’S STUDIO
I recently made a trip to The Bakehouse Studio, workspace of Marrickville artist Lisa Holzl. I’m writing a clay sculptor into the next novel and got such a great feel for her character and life in this magical space.

Home again

21 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by kellydoust in Art, theatre & culture, Fashion, markets & shopping, Food, Inspirations, Travel, Writing

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Clara Button, Italy, Natural History Museum, UK, V&A Museum, Vanity Fair

Shakespeare shoes, V&A Museum

I’ve only just regained my equilibrium after an overseas holiday and find myself starting to sink into old routines again with pleasure and a little sadness.

Being on the road is lovely. Visiting new places every few days and catching up with old friends and family… It’s always a surprise to find I enjoy the nomadic lifestyle when I’m such a homebody at heart. I miss it – even the annoying bits like airports and disappointing meals. But one can’t travel forever (one can, of course, but I doubt it would suit me and we’d end up very poor!) so here we are, home again.

Tile detail, Bangkok's Grand Palace

It was a wonderful holiday. There were a few days spent exploring Dubai, a week in England visiting London, Oxford and tripping about the countryside catching up with everyone, four days in Rome alone with James (bliss), a week in Umbria with the extended family and another couple of days in Thailand on the way home, just us three. It felt like being away for twice as long. The key was to keep moving; nothing felt stale.

Roman rooftops

 

Special of the day: lunch in Rome

Our Umbrian villa

There were so many favourite moments: England was all nostalgia for me, my second home. Visiting my husband’s family farm in Somerset, wandering about the galleries in London with essential trips to the V&A, Natural History Museum and Liberty (yes, I’m a grown-up Clara Button) and a day in Oxford with my treasured friend, Meiling. Dubai was a blast of heat and strange luxury, Bangkok humid and delicious (oh, how we ate) and Italy was, as always, sumptuous, inspiring and seeped in the sort of history that makes my mind boggle. Get this – in Rome we were staying in a little hotel (a former Palazzo with soaring ceilings) opposite 2,500-year-old Etruscan ruins. With a bus stop and busy thoroughfare roaring only a few feet away. It felt like madness that it wasn’t cordoned off or treated with more fanfare.

Hairy fella, Orvieto

Country girl, Somerset

Drooling over designer vintage, Liberty London

After pouring everything I had into the novel I’ve been working on for the past year or so, I was feeling so empty; emotionally and physically drained. It came not a moment too soon.

Vanity Fair’s May issue featured an article about Salman Rushdie, and went into much depth about the circumstances surrounding the release of The Satanic Verses and the subsequent fatwa placed upon him by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. One passage struck me as very true: “One holds so much of a novel in one’s head during the years of work that when it’s done and the thing in your head evaporates it’s a little like having your brain removed. I felt lobotomized.”

While my novel is certainly not on the scale of Verses and didn’t take me five years to write, I have to say that I do understand how he felt.

Kelly Doust

IT’S COMING!

Next book publishedNovember 5, 2019
The Power Age, Published by Murdoch Book

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