Free to a Good Home
Catherine Deveny on marriage, megachurches, plastic surgery, private schools, strip clubs, Sexpo, Hey Hey It’s Saturday and much, much more …
Take two reality pills and call me in the morning.
Swine Flu. Financial meltdown. It’s been a bad year for pigs and pigs in suits. The only thing for it is a good dose of Catherine Deveny, who each week in the Age puts everything into perspective with her trademark iconoclastic wit.
Free to a Good Home includes her thoughts on gifted children and breakfast television, sexy billboards and the bill of rights. She reflects on her youngest child’s first day at school, and on how to be happy in hard times.
Fearlessly funny and always provocative, Deveny is the perfect antidote to the modern world’s ills.
Can anyone explain why I did this? I went to the chemist and bought this crap I put on my face to make me look younger. I put the jar on the counter. The chemist girl said, ‘Is this stuff any good?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘I’m sixty.’ Eyes like saucers, mouth agape, she gasped, ‘OH MY GOD! Sixty! Toula! Fatima! Kelly! Come and check out this old lady. She’s sixty!’ So the other chemist girls scurried over and after a bit of oohing and aahing one said, ‘Oh my God! Sixty? You look like you’re forty-five!’
I’m forty. Chemist girls, one. Smart-arse, zero.
Catherine Deveny is the author of It’s Not My Fault They Print Them (2007), Say When (2008) and Free To A Good Home (2009).
Catherine is a television comedy writer, comedian, author, social commentator and broadcaster well known for her work as columnist with the Age newspaper and as an ABC regular. She cites her biggest influences as Bill Hicks, Richard Dawkins, Billy Bragg and Alice Miller. Deveny’s television work includes Network Seven’s Tonight Live with Steve Vizard, Full Frontal, ABC TV’s Good News Week, BackBerner and Q&A, Network 10’s Rove Live, The Wedge, skitHOUSE and The 7pm Project.
She performs regularly on radio and television and is a popular fill in broadcaster on 774 ABC Melbourne. Deveny has written for the Logie Awards, the Aria Music Awards and co-wrote the 2005 AFI Awards with Russell Crow. Deveny opened the The 2010 Global Atheist Convention Melbourne, Australia 12-14 March with Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, Philip Adams, Dan Barker and PZ Myers.
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