First Impressions: Karen Hitchcock, author

KAREN Hitchcock insists she is not out to resuscitate that long-discredited role model, the superwoman. Even so, she does a fair imitation of one.

KAREN Hitchcock insists she is not out to resuscitate that long-discredited role model, the superwoman. Even so, she does a fair imitation of one.

This first-time author and mother of four-year-old twins works part-time as a nuclear medicine specialist and lecturer at the John Hunter Hospital in the NSW coastal city of Newcastle. She undertook her gruelling specialist exams while her daughters were toddlers, an experience she describes as "by far the hardest thing I've ever done ... I have never cried in public so many times in my life".

She has just finished a PhD in English (creative writing), fitting this around her family life and medical career. This month, her debut short story collection, Little White Slips -- which her mentor and friend Helen Garner describes as "fresh and new and full of shocking beauty" -- is released. (Some of these stories were written as part of Hitchcock's PhD.) The writer-doctor, 37, is also working on her first novel, which deals with ageing and loneliness, and is due out next year.

As if this weren't enough to cram into her schedule, she is training for her first big triathlon event in November. Four mornings a week she's up by 4.30am in order to swim 3km and at the weekends she goes on bike rides of up to 110km. "I just really, really love it," says Hitchcock, who has a humble manner and the ultra-lean yet muscular physique of a long-distance runner.

How does she squeeze it all in? She answers with a wry laugh: "Military precision." When we meet in her publisher Picador's highrise Sydney offices, I ask Hitchcock when she finds time to rest. "I sleep, really well," she jokes.

She adds in a half-pleading, half-emphatic tone: "I am balanced. Everything I do, I do part-time ... I have a few days during the week that are writing days, a few days that are hospital days and a few days that are family days or long-ride days." (All of which adds up to more than seven days a week, but Hitchcock doesn't seem to notice this.)

The press release for Little White Slips describes Hitchcock as "one of the most exciting recruits to the Australian Picador list in years". The 13 stories that comprise her collection have an almost claustrophobic intensity.

Told from a female perspective, they interrogate crumbling marriages, women's ambivalent relationships with their bodies, sexual betrayal,the stresses of new motherhood and of juggling family life with relentlessly demanding medicalcareers.

Hitchcock's prose is drip-fed with jet-black humour, and with medical references ranging from the mechanics of a sex-change operation to psychoanalysts' penchant for wearing black and reading James Joyce.

When Picador bought Little White Slips they also signed up, sight unseen, Hitchcock's yet-to-be-completed novel, a testament to the power of her stories.

Picador publisher Rod Morrison tells Review: "What immediately impressed me was the clarity, honesty and pugnacity of the voice.

"It's as though the barriers between author and reader have been stripped away. It's confronting, intense and addictive, and works beautifully in the short form."

Along with Garner and poet Judith Beveridge, Hitchcock has other high-profile literary champions. Several stories in her collection were selected for The Best Australian Stories (2008, 2007 and 2006), edited by Delia Falconer and Robert Drewe, and have appeared in prestigious journals including Meanjin and Griffith Review.

The collection's opening story draws on Hitchcock's training to be a medical specialist; an "unbelievably hard" year that took a toll on her family life, even after her husband, Michael Currie, cut back his work hours to be with thechildren.

"I think that they (the twins) suffered, actually," Hitchcock says candidly, over the low,insistent roar of Picador's airconditioning. In the story, a young mother training to be a specialist finds her study regime so demanding she takes Ritalin and stops menstruating. She almost destroys her relationships with her young daughter and husband, aided and abetted by her womanising study buddy.

Hitchcock says with a chuckle that there was no dreamboat study buddy to distract her when she was cramming for her exams.

She agrees "there is a brutal honesty behind a lot of the humour" in her book, a reflection of her belief that "on the inside, we are raging beasts".

In two of her stories -- one of them titled Fat Arse -- women rejoice at how their close female friends have gained weight; specifically, they are ecstatic that their friends' backsides have grown bigger than their own. Hitchcock says women don't admit to such rivalry "but it's so true ... I think there is a strong element of competition in women's friendships, in a way I haven't really experienced in friendships with men."

A recurring theme in the collection is women's insecurity about their own bodies. The writer says of this: "Among my friends and people who I have treated, there is a really large undercurrent of self-hatred." Has she experienced such self-loathing? Her reply is almost indignant: "I am a woman, of course, of course."

Melbourne-born, Hitchcock discovered medicine at the age of 23, after completing an arts degree and deciding "I wanted to be a psychoanalyst. Unfortunately, I discovered that to treat actual patients, you need some kind of actual clinical qualification."

She ended up working in nuclear medicine because this non-clinical specialty allows her to work as a doctor part-time and keep writing.

The fact that her husband is a psychoanalyst didn't stop her writing a satirical story about the neglected wife of an analyst who forms a rewarding relationship with a plastic Freud action figure.

She explains that her send-up grew out being taught about Freud by non-clinicians while studying for her arts degree: "I found so much of it, in retrospect, a complete wank." She adds that "most of the (qualified) psychoanalysts I know are witty and wise people".

Hitchcock seems to own up to being an overachiever when she admits that "I feel this pressure to do lots of things because I spent most of my (early) life not doing anything".

She grew up in Melbourne's working-class outer west. Her mother managed a TAB branch and her late father was a cabinet-maker. They both worked full-time so "heaps of kids roamed the streets. We could do whatever we wanted ... In my peer group, kids were having babies at 14." Such memories inform her story about a girl whose father abandons her. From the age of 12, the girl deludes herself she can control her relationships with men by having calculated, joyless sex withthem.

Hitchcock's frantic multi-tasking may also be reparation, of sorts, for her "misspent youth". She was a smoker from the ages of 12 to 22, and at 17, she ran away to the US to marry a singer in a "hardcore" emo band. The marriage lasted one year.

"It was hideous," she volunteers. She and her 18-year-old husband ended up working in a fruit and veg shop for $4 an hour. After a "ridiculous" year, she returned to Australia and made up for lost time, studying arts, then medicine. Although many would consider a combined medical-literary career unconventional, she points out there is a long and distinguished tradition of doctors (Chekhov, Bulgakov, Oliver Sacks, Peter Goldsworthy) writing fiction: "Medicine, particularly at the physician level, is all about people's stories and their histories and attending to details and hearing what people are actually saying behind what they're saying. These are writers' skills, also."

Little White Slips by Karen Hitchcock is published on August 29 by Picador