Lola Bensky

June 10, 2013
Brett’s latest novel (following 2006’s You Gotta Have Balls) is a poignant and autobiographical rumination on the inner life of an Australian music journalist named Lola Bensky. Beginning her career in 1967 when she’s 19 years old, she interviews emerging talent like Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, and Jim Morrison while fixating on being overweight and embarking on a barrage of diets. Lola feels ashamed of her excess pounds because parents Renia and Edek suffered from malnutrition in a German concentration camp during WWII. Although Lola’s career is taking off, she feels like a disappointment to her family, having never graduated from high school; and despite Renia’s intervention, Lola remains heavy. Her survivor’s guilt increases as she grows older, leading to panic attacks when she’s in her 30s. Lola peers into other people’s lives as she hides behind her role as a writer, “seeing how their habits and histories came together to make them who they were.” Brett creates a fascinating portrait of a woman searching for meaning and connections stolen from her family. Agent: Anne Edelstein, Anne Edelstein Literary Agency.

August 1, 2013
German-born, Australia-raised, New York resident Brett (You Gotta Have Balls, 2006, etc.) invests some of her own multicultural back story in her eponymous protagonist, an innocent abroad in a rock-'n'-roll world. When we first meet Lola, she's interviewing rising guitar hero Jimi Hendrix for Rock-Out, the Australian magazine that has sent this 19-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors to London. While most young women would be swooning, Lola is telling Mick Jagger about her mother's ordeal at Auschwitz or--when she crosses the Atlantic to New York--admitting to an arrogant, very stoned Jim Morrison that she doesn't like him. Though she's fat and constantly promising herself she will diet, Lola is too preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her traumatized parents to be intimidated by celebrities. As the story moves by fits and starts through the decades, she marries and then leaves a Former Rock Star (unnamed) for a painter and continues asking naive but oddly effective questions of the people she interviews. Brett's portraits of Lola's subjects contain nothing that isn't already familiar to anyone who has read more than two books on the 1960s music scene, and her prose is so un-nuanced and uninflected that the entire novel sounds as if it was written by a 19-year-old. Yet palpable sincerity and a good heart have the same cumulative impact in the narrative as they do in Lola's interviews. Always utterly herself, she elicits genuine emotions from the stars she encounters (controlling Sonny Bono and pretentious Pete Townshend being the notable exceptions.) Having observed Lola's crippling panic attacks and her devastation over her mother's death, readers will be relieved to see her transformation. A curious mix of wide-eyed ingenuousness and death-haunted anxiety, and certainly no stylistic masterpiece, but so sweet-natured it's impossible not to like.

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July 1, 2013

Lola, a 19-year-old Australian rock music journalist, leads a dazzlingly glamorous life. She spends her days interviewing and hobnobbing with the hottest musicians of 1967, backstage, in their living rooms, and at concerts like the famous Monterey International Pop Festival. But beneath the surface, Lola struggles with deep-seated self-doubt and an eating disorder rooted in the psychological legacy of her parents' experience as Jewish Auschwitz survivors. Via a series of temporal shifts, Brett limns Lola's metamorphosis from a chubby, insecure teenage reporter to a charmingly imperfect wife, mother, and acclaimed novelist who finally learns to believe in happiness. VERDICT In this semiautobiographical novel, best-selling Australian author Brett (Uncomfortably Close; Too Many Men) has crafted an appealing tribute to 1960s pop culture, with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cher, Mick Jagger, and others making cameo appearances. Brett also brilliantly evokes the heartbreaking emotional prison occupied by so many Holocaust survivors and their troubled children. This gorgeous and wise novel is sure to please readers of Jewish fiction, music fans, and anyone interested in the craft of writing.--Kelsy Peterson, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib, Overland Park, KS

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2013
As a reporter for Melbourne-based newspaper Rock-Out, 19-year-old Lola Bensky is in the thick of the 1967 music scene, traveling to London, New York, and California to interview up-and-coming legends. She lends Cher her diamante-lined false eyelashes; talks hair curlers with Jimi Hendrix; discusses being fat with Mama Cass; and compares formative experiences with Janis Joplin. Lola is at all times haunted by her parents' historythey are both survivors of the Holocaustand by her mother's obsession with Lola's weight, which leads Lola from one weird diet to the next. As she moves through the decades of her life, Lola marries someone referred to as Mr. Former Rock Star, divorces him for Mr. Someone Else, and becomes a writer of detective fiction. The narrative meanders between the present and past, and, through it all, Lola remains a curious, anxious Jewish girl on a quest for self-understanding and insight into the human condition. Based on Australian author Brett's own experiences as a rock journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, this is an inside look at an exciting time in rock 'n' roll history and it's great fun to eavesdrop on Lola's conversations with the iconic figures.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

August 18, 2012
Lola Bensky, a character often referred to as Lily Brett’s alter ego, has appeared in Brett’s short fiction, as well her 1990 novel Things Could Be Worse. In Brett’s new novel we get the complete world of Lola. The book opens in London in the swinging 60s, with 19-year-old Lola interviewing soon-to-be famous musicians. Drawing on aspects of Brett’s own life, as much of the author’s writing does, the novel follows Lola through the contemporary culture of the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. When we first meet Lola she is absorbed by her parent’s survival of the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz. She also has a genuine fascination with other people’s lives, and musicians such as Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Janis Joplin and Mama Cass feature in her early life. But then Lola ages, and one of Brett’s remarkable skills is to make the changes in Lola’s attitudes convincing. At 63 years old, Lola is still Lola and could be no-one else. Through seamless switches in time and place, Brett delivers an entertaining story that is also full of heart. Lola Bensky should appeal to a wide readership, not just female readers.

Pip Newling is a writer and bookseller at Shearer’s Bookshop in Leichhardt, Sydney