Your Own Kind of Girl

The stories we tell ourselves and what happens when we believe them.

ARIA Award-winning singer and actress Clare Bowditch confronts her inner critic in this no-holds-barred memoir.

This is the story I promised myself, aged twenty-one, that I would one day be brave enough - and well enough - to write.

Clare Bowditch has always had a knack for telling stories. Through her music and performing, this beloved Australian artist has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. But what of the stories she used to tell herself? That 'real life' only begins once you're thin or beautiful, that good things only happen to other people.

Your Own Kind of Girlreveals a childhood punctuated by grief, anxiety and compulsion, and tells how these forces shaped Clare's life for better and for worse. This is a heartbreaking, wise and at times playful memoir. Clare's own story told raw and as it happened. A reminder that even on the darkest of nights, victory is closer than it seems.

With startling candour, Clare lays bare her truth in the hope that doing so will inspire anyone who's ever done battle with their inner critic. This is the work of a woman who has found her true power - and wants to pass it on. Happiness, we discover, is only possible when we take charge of the stories we tell ourselves.

Clare Bowditch is a storyteller who lives in Melbourne with her husband Marty, their three teenage children, a white groodle, and one lone surviving free-ranging guinea pig. In terms of 'the fancy stuff', Bowditch is a bestselling ARIA Award-winning musician (Best Female Artist), Rolling Stone Woman of the Year (Contribution to Culture), Logie-nominated actor (for her role as 'Rosanna' on hit TV show Offspring), and a former ABC broadcaster who still misses her talk-back callers very much, and hopes they're doing okay out there. In her spare time, Bowditch does a lot of public-speaking and event-running. She uses humour and the collective terror of 'public-singing' as tools to teach skills around courage and self-leadership. She is also the founder Big Hearted Business, a love project designed to support creative people in their businesses, and businesses with their creative thinking. As a musician Clare has performed and toured with the likes of Leonard Cohen, Paul Kelly, Cat Power, John Butler, Snow Patrol and Gotye. The person she enjoys touring with the most is her drummer and husband, Marty Brown.

Your Own Kind of Girl
Allen and Unwin
Author: Clare Bowditch
ISBN: 9781760528959
RRP: $29.99