Fearless in Love and Life
One Leg Over
by Robin Dalton
Text, 2017, 197 pages, $33
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Robin Dalton, literary agent and film producer, is best known for her first memoir, Aunts Up the Cross, which begins, “My great Aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five.” That slim book, originally published under Dalton’s maiden name Robin Eakin, has always been a favourite with Australian readers.
Now aged ninety-six, Dalton has produced a snappily titled sequel, One Leg Over. The back cover blurb quotes from page 11:
During the five months’ duration (weekends only) of my marriage I did not even learn what an orgasm was. Neither did I learn this from the American servicemen with whom I exultingly tripped though the first years of our Pacific War. It took the British Navy, or second wave of wartime visiting servicemen, to teach me this.
Despite this burst of frankness, Dalton archly claims in the afterword that the title refers to the struggle to heave an ageing…
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