Virginia Trioli: ‘I had to go through a lot of life to be confident to write about me’
When the award-winning journalist set out to write her memoir there was a lot on the table, but she chose to focus on food over feminism.
By Jane Rocca
Virginia Trioli wears Trelise Cooper suit, Trenery shirt, Roxanne Assoulin earrings. Rings and watch Trioli’s own.Credit: GK Photography
Virginia Trioli, a two-time Walkley Award winner and host of ABC TV’s Creative Types, was inspired to write her latest book, A Bit on the Side, after a talkback radio caller got her thinking that food rather than feminism would be her pathway back into book publishing.
It’s been almost 30 years since Trioli published her bestseller Generation F: Why We Still Struggle with Sex and Power, a counter-take on Helen Garner’s 1995 non-fiction book The First Stone, about two alleged sexual assaults at Melbourne University in 1992.
The book was reissued in 2019 with a new foreword in the light of the Me Too movement, and now, with more life experience behind her and some lessons learnt, Trioli is ready to publish a second book, one that’s less pasta dura and more leavened sourdough.
“I didn’t want to write another book just for the sake of writing a book,” says Trioli as she makes me as espresso in her kitchen. (The piping Bialetti espresso machine is removed from the stove and gently rinsed under cool water to stop the coffee from overcooking, a hack she’s happy to share.) “I had to go through a lot of life to be comfortable writing about me, and it’s not something I was that interested in or could have done before now.”
Prince Harry’s Spare helped change her mind. “The memoir dilemma was solved after I read a piece in The New Yorker by ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer, who says he was conflicted by Harry, who didn’t want a lot of things about him in the book,” says Trioli.
“That’s when he [Moehringer] told him, ‘The memoir isn’t about you, Harry. It’s more about what you leave out than what you leave in. It’s a story constructed with the history of you, and what you select are the pieces that have the greater resonance for the greater number of people.’
“That was a great piece of instruction for me going forward.”
A Bit on the Side is more memoir than cookbook, even though the domestic angle appealed to Trioli more, whose interest in food goes back to childhood. Throughout the book, we get glimpses into her life, all revolving around a dish, a food memory, a culinary hack. She also shares some favourite recipes she makes at her home in North Melbourne.
Trelise Cooper suit, Office shoes.Credit: GK Photography
Where actor Stanley Tucci brings glorious cinema to the table with his writing in Taste, and chef Nigella Lawson eloquently leans into the personal and emotive when she shares recipes, Trioli serves up a taste of both, further spiced with a reporter’s sensibility. Whether the topic is the finesse of French cooking or farm-to-table simplicity, she moves from the theoretical to the humorous with ease, using food as a means of self-exploration.
There’s a peppering of the intellectual know-it-all to her style – it wouldn’t be Trioli without it – but her academic dissection of the relevance of the egg in cinema, for example, is very entertaining. Using Stanley Tucci’s 1996 movie Big Night and the recent TV series The Bear, she cracks open a new way of looking at making an omelette. As a result, I watched Emily (Lily Collins) trying to make one in the new season of Emily in Paris in a whole new philosophical light.
Along the way we also learn that Trioli likes her martinis with vodka, prefers a sour gimlet over a sweet one, and always orders small share plates rather than large ones. There’s intimacy and warmth to her stories.
Trioli was one of seven children raised in the Melbourne suburbs of Donvale and Nunawading by her Italian father, who migrated to Australia in the 1930s, and Australian mother. Regular tastes of the Italian way of life were provided via visits to her paternal grandparents in Bendigo, where they ran a fruit and vegetable shop.
Trioli’s love of Italian cuisine stems from them but was reinforced when she shared a house with her older sister Angela in Carlton, then a hub of Melbourne’s Italian community, and through trips to Italy over the years.
As Italians who came to Australia before World War II, the Trioli family’s experience isn’t as well known as that of the migrants who came in the 1950s and ’60s. “That wave of Italian migration has been somewhat erased from our history, and I feel it was a bit erased from our family as well,” says Trioli. “I did ask Dad once if he was afraid to make the voyage to Australia. He told me that you aren’t afraid when you’re with your mother.”
Trioli says her father was loving but also domineering, which meant she couldn’t wait to move out of home. “I loved my dad enormously, but he had a big temper. He could really lose it, and it was very stressful. It created a tension in the household that was very difficult to deal with.
“I can be impatient and I know I have been at times and feel deeply ashamed.”
VIRGINIA TRIOLI
“I remember setting up house with my sister and relishing the peace. The fact that I was in charge of the mood in the house was a lovely realisation of independence.”
Trioli speaks frankly about marrying former boss Russell Skelton, 18 years her senior and with three children from his former relationship, in 2003. She was 36 and found step-parenting a challenge.
“I can be impatient and I know I have been at times and feel deeply ashamed,” she says. “I have become better because of age and stage, and learning through life. I guess you take every opportunity you can to keep building up your stores of compassion and understanding for others and nothing teaches you faster than being a stepmum.
Victoria Beckham trench coat, Perri Cutten singlet, AG jeans, Oroton jewellery. Credit: GK Photography
“A woman I once spoke to struggled with how important her partner’s son was to him. I remember saying to her, ‘Sweetheart, deal with it.’ It was crucial to me that the kids were happy. They had come through a hard time, so I put in some deliberate hard work to make it work.”
Trioli and Skelton welcomed a child of their own, son Addison, in 2012.
Our talk returns to Trioli’s first book, published in 1996. In the 1990s, a third wave of feminism swept over Western culture; it was the advent of the “riot grrrl” movement, Naomi Wolf had written The Beauty Myth and increasingly the personal became political. Trioli is the first to admit that writing a book that picked an argument with Helen Garner, already a celebrated novelist, was a brave move.
“I look back at the Virginia who wrote that book and am very proud of her because she had no friggin’ idea what she was walking into,” says Trioli. “Now I think to myself, why didn’t anyone take me aside and say, ‘Darling, you’re never going to win taking on Helen Garner.’
“She is a glorious icon and I still think of her that way. I respect and revere Helen, which is why writing Generation F was so important to me. But it was also painful. I was attempting to call out someone who was a giant and say, ‘I think you got this wrong. You need to listen to us and hear us out.’ There’s always been a point of tension between the two of us that we’ve never reconciled.”
A few weekends ago Trioli and her husband found themselves perched on bar stools at the Carlton Wine Room, relishing some time together while their son was rehearsing a school play. They ordered duck croquettes, oysters and a bottle of champagne. “We looked at each other and said, ‘We haven’t done this since forever.’ It’s nice to open a little window sometimes and slip through it.”
It’s typical of the small-plate, sliding-doors moments that first connected them and have defined their life together, starting with a conversation they had in Skelton’s office in her early days as a journalist.
“I was always destined to choose someone who is a real intellectual partner,” says Trioli of their marriage. “We fell in love in his office the day we spoke, bouncing our conversation from the wool industry to design, art and politics. It was hard to part ways. Russell is the best conversationalist, the one I still bounce ideas off.
“I said to him the other day, ‘You went for a younger woman. How did that turn out for you?’ To which he replied that it had turned out just fine.”
A Bit on the Side (Macmillan Australia) by Virginia Trioli is out September 24.
Styling: Simone Farrugia; Make-up: Julia Green.
STOCKISTS AG Jeans; Oroton; Perri Cutten; Victoria Beckham
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