MEMOIR Out Now
DO LOOK NOW
by Helen Yeates
Helen Yeates is the author of the memoir Do Look Now.
War baby Helen Yeates was a latchkey kid from the working-class Brisbane suburb of Annerley, discovering an escape to paradise in a dark cinema. This memoir captures a significant social and cultural history of Brisbane, drawing on her love of film in a highly original, evocative way.
She falls in love and marries in the late 1960s, on the cusp of a time of swinging sexual liberation and radical politics. Surviving a devastating car accident, an addiction to prescription drugs and a traumatic marriage, she becomes a passionate feminist and leftie, navigating her way through a confusing world of changing ideas and morals.
This memoir reveals a colourful life across the decades, in relation to love, sex, amnesia, brain damage, loss, education, partying and politics, with films illuminating everything.
As an Australian pioneer of secondary and tertiary film and media studies, she traces the highlights of a career nurturing young filmmakers and future educators. The book also reveals amusing encounters with international celebrities, a quick trip to Hollywood to hire a famous film director, and mis-steps with singer Bob Dylan and French actress, Isabelle Huppert.
“Do Look Now captures the social and cultural history of Brisbane in the seventies and eighties better than any other memoir I have read, while the encyclopedic knowledge of films gives it an unexpected twist from the personal to the universal.”
— Peter Thompson, author of Jack Nicholson: The Life and Times of an Actor on the Edge
“This is more than a memoir. It is an exciting trip through an exciting life lived in a dangerous reality AND an expanding cinemascape that Helen dedicated her life to understanding. Frankly, I've never read anything like it. Great yarn.”
— Stephen Stockwell, Professor Emeritus Journalism and Communication, Griffith University, Gold Coast
About HELEN
Born in 1945, Helen Yeates grew up in Brisbane, daughter of a secretary and an aviation weather forecaster. She taught at various secondary schools, and trained teachers at UQ and beyond. She became an award-winning film and media academic at the Queensland University of Technology, nurturing some of the brightest young filmmakers of the next generation.
