Wild Card: An Autobiography 1923–1958
UWA Publishing, $29.95 pb, 394 pp
Wild Card: An Autobiography 1923–1958 by Dorothy Hewett
Dorothy Hewett’s Wild Card: An Autobiography 1923–1958 was first published by McPhee Gribble in 1990. Now, a decade after Hewett’s death, UWA Publishing has reissued this extraordinary autobiography in a beautifully packaged, reader-friendly format. Reviewing Wild Card for ABR in October 1990, Chris Wallace-Crabbe drew attention to Hewett’s candour in relating explicitly her many sexual experiences. He noted that the sexual self – so often elided in autobiographies – is on full display in Wild Card, and made the crucial observation that for Hewett ‘sex is both somewhere beyond personality … and intrinsic to it’. As Wild Card makes clear, Hewett was an expressively sexual woman, but her sexual desires and experiences were inextricably part of her imaginative and political passions.
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