Intimate Antipathies is a collection of essays on the writing life, offering Luke Carman’s unique comic perspectives on writers’ festivals, residencies and conferences, the particular challenges faced by writers who grow up in contested borderlands like the suburbs of Western Sydney, and the connections between writing and dreaming, writing and mental illness, writing and the complications of family life.

From his famous jeremiad against arts administrators in ‘Getting Square in a Jerking Circle’, through the psychotic attack brought on by the collapse of his marriage, to his surreal account of meeting with Gerald Murnane at a golf club in the remote Victorian village of Goroke, the essays follow the writer in his oscillations through anxiety, outrage and ecstasy — always returning to his great obsession, the home on a small mountain in Sydney’s west, where his antipathies with the real world first began to shape his imagination.