039: Are You There Buddha? with Pip Harry

In Are You There Buddha? Author and CBCA winner, Pip Harry talks about coming of age, the mother-daughter relationship, periods and starting high school.

Pip Harry is an Australian children’s author and journalist. Her novel, The Little Wave, won the CBCA 2020 Book of the Year Award for younger readers and the Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her young adult novels include I’ll Tell You Mine, Head of the River, and Because of You, shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year Award, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and Queensland Literary Award. Her latest novel is Are You There, Buddha? and she is currently working on a new middle grade novel due for release in 2022.

In Are You There Buddha? Pip also talks about:

How Pip became an author
Are you there God, it is me Margaret
The 80s: Cleo & Dolly magazines
Periods in the 80s
Why & when Pip wrote Are You There Buddha?
From Playboy to periods: I reread Judy Blume with my tween. She found it perplexing by Pip Harry
The mother-daughter relationship
The narcissistic mother
Motherless daughters, eating disorders
Abandonment and lack of attunement
Absent mothers
How a child feels when the mother abandons the family
The May Gibbs Fellowship
The step-mother and step-daughter relationship
Mindfulness, meditation and Buddha
Bee and Buddha
The Great Mother and the feminine
The noisy world that teenagers are growing up in and finding one’s inner self
Facebook aware of Instagram’s harmful effect on teenage girls, leak reveals
Yumi Stynes, Welcome to Your Period
The other relationships in Are You There Buddha?
Leon, the perfect role model for boys
Talking about climate change
Criticism, rejection and the superego
Create a period pack of books: Welcome to Your Period, Girls Stuff, The Hormone Diaries, Go With The Flow, Blood Moon, The Moon Within, The Edge of Thirteen, The Year The Maps Changed
Dr Lara Owen: Her Blood is Gold
Pip’s first book in Big W
Book face – Are You There Buddha is the perfect cover to create a book face