Theory and Practice

Theory and Practice is set in Melbourne in 1986, where an Australian graduate student has moved to write a master's thesis on Virginia Woolf's late novels. It's the era when poststructuralist theory — Derrida, Foucault, Barthes — has become the required lens for reading literature, and her supervisor pushes her deeper into it even as her own instincts pull toward more direct, personal writing.

Her intellectual life is complicated by two things. First, an affair with Kit, a fellow student who already has a girlfriend, which forces her to confront the distance between her feminist principles and her actual behavior. Second, a discovery in Woolf's diaries: racist remarks that unsettle her admiration for a writer she has built part of her identity around.

Partway through, the novel breaks its own fictional frame — the narrator sets aside the story she's been telling and begins writing more directly about her own past, including her relationship with her mother, as a way of getting at truths that invented narrative kept slipping past. Michelle de Kretser blends essay, memoir, and fiction into a short, dense novel about theory's limits when it meets an actual life, and about shame, desire, and honesty. It won the 2025 Adelaide Festival Award for Literature and was widely shortlisted, including for the Miles Franklin Award.