Normal : The true story of a complicated family

‘I’ll buy the first one since you’ve got a broken heart. Whatcha having?’
I tucked the five-dollar bill back in my pocket. ‘Vodka cranberry. I’m on a health kick.’
Joni returned with the drinks as the DJ was saying, ‘Girls! Who wants to win $200? All you’ve gotta do is get wet!’
I pulled the note out of my back pocket and threw it to Joni. ‘Get me a couple shots of tequila. I’m doin' this.’

Julie Catt misspent her youth in Columbia, Missouri lining up tequila shots and winning wet T-shirt competitions. So maybe it wasn’t such a stretch to think that twenty years on, mother to six kids from four different…paternity arrangements, she’d be sobbing to a therapist about her irrepressible white-trash heritage. Or that her birth parents would turn up, trailing a whole new family. Or even that she’d be living on the other side of the world, having followed her hot butch Australian girlfriend to Sydney.

But happily married? With a respectable profession? That would be weird…

Normal is a left-of centre memoir in the mould of Running with Scissors: a funny, insightful, moving and relentlessly frank account of a messy and richly lived life. A complete delight to read, it is a tribute and a reassurance to people in unconventional families everywhere—which, of course, means most of us.

Praise for Normal:

‘If you have any preconceptions about what family means to you, this is the book to blow those ideas out of the water.’

Sunday Mail Brisbane

‘Catt’s openness and sunny curiosity is irresistible…[she] tells her story with flair. The account of her teen years is redolent with languor and smells of suburban American summers; her descriptions of giving birth are cliché free and oddly thrilling. The emotion is always high… Catt’s exuberant memoir gives flesh and blood to a universal truth: that we’re all making choices all the time, and living with the consequences, even when we don’t think we’re choosing at all.’

Sunday Age

‘Thank heavens, I thought, as I read Julie Catt’s memoir about her misspent youth and the ensuing chaotic years of falling in love and having children, somebody has buggered it up worse than me. So much so, that despite my peccadilloes, Catt makes me look like Jeanette Howard….She drinks, smokes, has had a boob job and can write. Her writing is direct, honest, terrifically entertaining and weirdly reassuring.’

Age

‘Catt throws herself onto the page with unabashed, good-humoured abandon…a real page-turner.’

Australian Bookseller & Publisher

‘Catt lays herself bare with great candour…the underlying message that families are made up of all sorts of different parts but stuck together with the same glue is lovely.'

Sunday Telegraph

‘She drinks, smokes, has had a boob job and can write. Her writing is direct, honest, terrifically entertaining and weirdly reassuring.’

Age