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Fashion designer Alannah Hill always leaves when she is having fun. Well, nearly always. There was that excruciating Derby Day when she fled after her teeth fell out. That was not fun. Not fun at all. But do you know what? “By the time I got home, I’d realised we are stronger and more resilient than we give ourselves credit for,” says Hill, who recounts the anecdote in her new book, The Handbag of Happiness.

The sweet-looking hardback is a shameless parade of Hill’s “misunderstandings, misdemeanours and misadventures”. The St Kilda-dwelling Tasmanian catalogues each episode with a favourite item of clothing or accessory, kicking off with the eponymous handbag.

“Can a really, really expensive designer handbag make you happy?” she asks, describing a black and silver Miu Miu number for which she forked out $4000 in New York City 12 years ago.

Alannah Hill in 2014. pic supplied in 2020

“I’d never been so happy in all my life!” she goes on. “In fact, I was so happy I levitated six floors up, suddenly appearing in the fancy Bergdorf Goodman restaurant, where I congratulated myself with a Bergdorf burger and Diet Coke. I’d done it! I finally owned a designer handbag. My handbag suggested to everybody I swanked towards that I was a successful person showing economic prosperity — the stains of childhood insecurity miraculously gone!

“For 10 minutes I was so puffed up with happiness I felt like a bright red helium balloon. And then the happiness disappeared. And so did the red helium balloon.”

Nothing, she decided, makes a woman happy for more than 10 minutes at a time. “But perhaps those perfect 10 minutes are worth living for, and the hours that circle them worth fighting for, making the 10 minutes feel just a little bit longer.”

No one who has read Alannah Hill’s 2018 memoir, Butterfly on a Pin, which describes a traumatic and dysfunctional childhood in Tasmania, would begrudge her a moment of happiness.

She’s a survivor. One of her biggest messages in what is ostensibly a lighthearted look at life’s little flunks is the importance of developing resilience to cope with whatever comes your way.

“It’s very hard to say what the book is about, but I think I wanted to write a book about shame, resilience, bravado and delusion,” Hill tells TasWeekend from the St Kilda home she shares with her son Edward, 19.

“Go to self-help aisles in bookshops and you will find so many platitudes. I wanted to say that it’s OK to fail, to fall down and pick yourself up — and not to be able to pick yourself up.”

Not right away, anyway. We need to give ourselves quiet time to recover from difficult days, Hill says. She describes her process, which involves solitude and sweeping the house, in the chapter The Blessing Gown of Silent Sadness.

“Just put on the blessing gown of silence and learn to be alone — and you need to be alone to learn to be alone,” she says. “Most people are terrified of it. As you get older, though, you love to be alone.

“I turn the music and TV off. I have a mini-Magnum [ice-cream] and I sit and think and regroup. If anyone even knocks on my door except an Uber driver, I am in a state of panic. There is no entertaining done here. Well, only for Ed’s friends. And I make them read out chapters of Handbag.”

Alannah Hill with model. Picture: Tim Carrafa

It’s hard work as an introvert trying to be an extrovert when you leave the house, she says, especially when she attends high-end events such as Melbourne racing cup carnival days.

Hill tries to keep such engagements to four hours maximum, including travel time. Within that slot, she blocks out up an hour to hide in the bathroom if she’s feeling a bit freaked out or just out of place. Or plain old bored.

“You can only be great for three hours,” she says.

At parties, Hill says she leaps right in to deep and meaningful conversation. “I launch into a personal question. If people aren’t interested, I go to the bathroom … and leave,” she says.

Getting back to that dreadful Derby Day a few years ago, which she attended midway through a complicated three-month series of dental procedures.

“Derby Day has always filled me with anxiety,” she writes, but a fashion gal needs to hobnob to show off her rags, and Hill had a new label, Louise Love, to promote.

“My photo was taken with Miranda Kerr for the social pages, and it confirmed my worst suspicions,” she writes. “A 54-year-old fashion designer, arriving alone in a chauffeured car to the extravagant Derby Day in a bobby sock, with foundation-covered legs and wearing an ‘old favourite’, was attired completely inappropriately. I felt like mutton dressed as Lan.”

Earlier, she was talking up Louise Love with a department store chief executive in the Birdcage when her first crown flew out of her mouth and into her drink.

“I heard it go plop and, panic-stricken, I thought about fainting. Was I dreaming? No, I was wide awake!

“The CEO didn’t see the first tooth fall. With my quick Tassie reflexes, I scooped the tooth out of the wine with my tongue, expertly flicking it back into its stump.”

Worse was to come, when two of her temporaries flew out, falling on to the ground. With a linen hanky over her mouth, the designer rushed to her waiting car and wondered whether she would ever recover.

“But we do recover, we do survive,” she says.

Hill says she had no intentions of writing another book.

“I was so flattened like a pancake by Butterfly,” she says. “I felt really guilty and cowed. I thought I had no words left in me.”

Her publisher Hardie Grant managed to ignite her enthusiasm, though, and she was up up and away, finishing writing the book over the first Melbourne lockdown earlier this year.

After we hang up, Hill plans to go trawling op shops with Edward, whom she raised as a sole parent, with Melbourne’s second COVID-19 lockdown having just eased.

“Today is our first day of stores opening and I can’t accept it, Love,” she says. “I’m pretending it is still happening. I did a lot in lockdown. I got to know Ed again. He likes doof and he was going out a lot. I’ve loved him not slipping out at night. And I finished the book in lockdown.

“I felt safe. I’m a bit of a recluse.”

Hill says she watches Tasmania “like a hawk”, having fled the nest in her late teens and lived in Melbourne ever since, making a splash with her Alannah Hill womenswear. She’d love to buy a second home here, perhaps something old in the Midlands.

Her focus is on Tasmania for another reason, too, as she reveals a 10-part TV series based on Butterfly on a Pin project is under way.

Hill sold the film rights to her autobiography and says the makers plan to shoot the series in Tasmania. The project is a partnership with Arena Media and Fremantle Films, with My Brilliant Career’s Gillian Armstrong directing, Rob Connolly (Balibo, The Boys and Romulus My Father) producing and Katherine Thompson screenwriting. Hill has signed on as an executive producer and consultant.

As just like that, this butterfly on the wing is reinventing herself once more.

The Handbag of Happiness book by fashion designer Alannah Hill, who grew up in Tassie. For TasWeekend feature.

The Handbag of Happiness,

Alannah Hill,

Hardie Grant, $29.99