Book of Life

You think you know Deborah Conway? You think seeing her striding and scowling down Sydney’s back streets in an oversize coat or galavanting around a golf course wearing a close approximation of plus fours means you know who Deborah Conway is? She figures you probably don’t know the half of it. And there’s a lot to know.

If you have listened to any of Deborah Conway’s songs and were half curious about the origins; if you have ever wondered whatever happened to that chick who covered herself in Nutella and was photographed shovelling cream cakes in to her mouth; if you gave a nanosecond of thought to whose bare arse adorned the giant Billboard ads for Bluegrass jeans in the 1980’s and how much someone could get paid to do that; if you liked Tracey Mann’s vocals in The Takeaways but asked yourself, \”did she really sing them?\”; if you were a movie buff who thought Running On Empty was a classic BEFORE it became a cult phenomenon and need behind the scenes gossip, now’s your chance to find out all this and so much more.


Conway pulls back the curtain on the fevered world of a 1980’s post punk band, the spectacular rise and fall and rise of one of the more obstreperous women working inside Australia’s music industry, a woman who has straddled the high arts and the low without losing her footing or her mind and whose fierce independence has seen her produce her best work.


Book Of Life: the good, the bad, and the ugly of being alive in the 20th and 21st centuries from the vantage point of a music insider (and outsider) with a deep need to tell the truth about it all.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Publication date: 03/10/2023