JAMES JOYCE: A LIFE
Gabrielle Carey

If you know nothing about James Joyce but would like to – without the bother of reading him – this is the book for you.

And if you are a die-hard Joycean who has spent your life puzzling over his work but know nothing about his life, this is also the book for you.

Gabrielle Carey was an award winning Irish Australian writer. Her infamous semi-autobiographical teen novel, Puberty Blues, co-written with Kathy Lette, was the first novel written by teenagers to be published in Australia. It was later adapted for film.

Carey was a poet and author. She published 11 books, and, after teaching at the University of Sydney and the University of Canberra, became a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney, specialising in James Joyce.

She lived in Ireland in the mid 1980s, an influence prevalent in much of her writing.

Gabrielle Carey died in 2023.

Vale Gabrielle Carey — Bloomsdays in Sydney will not be the same without Gabrielle Carey. As Sydney’s foremost Joycean academic, if not Australia’s, her contribution to the promotion and understanding of James Joyce’s literature, especially Ulysses, was enormous. Thank you Gabrielle, and vale.

— Sydney Bloomsday

Carey’s book is enthusiastic and intelligent, her portrait of the artist rendering Joyce as brilliant and incessantly driven to write, but also as a flawed and exasperating figure, selfish, self-pitying, smutty and fickle. As Carey tells it, he is someone you would find fascinating to meet — perhaps until, like Tim Finnegan, the drink kicked in.

— Peter Marks, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sydney

— Professor David Day, formerly of University College Dublin