At heart of Peggy's art

Human emotions are evident and raw in Melbourne author Peggy Frew's debut novel House of Sticks.

PEGGY Frew's interest in the "musicality" of words has led her in two different artistic directions.

As bass guitarist with the ARIA-winning Melbourne indie rock band Art of Fighting, she collaborated on melodies and lyrics.

Frew was 19 and an aspiring author when she and former partner Ollie Browne started the band in 1997. As well as writing songs, she worked on what she calls her "enormous practice novel".

The band has been on a hiatus since 2007 and Frew is now the mother of three children, aged two to seven, with partner Mick Turner, a musician and painter. A published author, she has never been busier.

Human emotions are evident and raw in Frew's debut novel House of Sticks. But it would be wrong to assume her central character - Bonnie, a musician who puts her career on hold to raise three children with artisan partner Pete - is based on Frew.

Bonnie's experiences may have had their beginnings in reality, but Frew says her life is "not all that interesting".

The novel, which last year won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript, is an accomplished and compassionate portrait of contemporary family life in all its delights and drudgery. It is also a suspenseful story of how suspicion and guilt can tear a couple apart.

Bonnie has few regrets about leaving the world of music - "an empty way of life" always on the move - and its superficial relationships.

But isolation in the suburbs as Pete builds his furniture business and the grinding routines of motherhood at times threaten to overwhelm her. Bonnie's nerves are tested when Doug, a friend from Pete's past, turns up to help in the business.

Doug is a clamouring, intrusive presence. His backhanded comments on her parenting skills and his leer when discussing some girl from the past with Pete put her on edge.

Tension and paranoia build and Bonnie fears for her children.

Frew says that after deciding on her initial scenario of the three-way dynamic between Bonnie, Pete and Doug, she became interested in the idea of tension from someone who is on the edge of what's appropriate.

"If we only know what goes on inside Bonnie's head, we don't really know what the truth is and we don't know what Doug's intentions are," she says. "I think that adds an extra layer to the tension."

Though the novel is concerned with motherhood and family life, Frew hopes it will have a broad appeal and raise questions of ethics.

"I'd hope that it might make people think about questions of community and identity and isolation when we are ironically very close in terms of the ease in communication," she says.

"We live in the city and everything is at your fingertips, yet people seem to be more isolated and the whole notion of family is becoming something that is closed."

Frew's literary talents were first rewarded when she won The Age short-story award in 2009 with a work from her professional-writing course at RMIT.

Winning literary awards was a totally different experience from the band's ARIA success for best alternative release in 2001. "The ARIA was a joint effort . . . but winning the two literary prizes,

. . . I had to attribute that success to myself," she says. "It was a revelation because I'm not the most confident person in the world . . . to find out that other people have connected with it is pretty much the ultimate thrill. And I felt that strongly with the writing because it was completely my own work."

Now developing ideas for a second novel, Frew tries to write two mornings a week, babysitters permitting, at a hired desk in a shared studio.

House of Sticks by Peggy Frew, Scribe, $29.95