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HomePodcastsThe Good Girl Confessional PodcastPodcast #122 Megan Rogers | Unraveling the Mystery of Midlife Crisis: Anaesthetist's...

Podcast #122 Megan Rogers | Unraveling the Mystery of Midlife Crisis: Anaesthetist’s Emotional Journey to Self-Discovery – Exclusive Interview with Megan Rogers!

Today in the Confessional, host Sandy Lowres chat with Megan Rogers, the Australian author of The Heart is a Star – an absorbing and gripping novel, told beautifully.

This is a powerful novel that explores the messiness and complexity of midlife, about the ways in which we navigate an intricate, complicated world; and about how we can uncover our true selves when we are forced to face the myths that make us.

“Layla Byrnes is exhausted. She’s juggling a demanding job as an anaesthetist, a disintegrating marriage, her young kids, and a needy lover. And most particularly she’s managing her histrionically unstable mother, who repeatedly threatens to kill herself. But this year, it’s different. When her mother rings just before Christmas, she doesn’t follow the usual script. Instead, she tells Layla that there’s something she needs to tell her about her much-loved father. In response, Layla drops everything to rush to her childhood home on the wild west coast of Tasmania. She’s determined to finally confront her mother – and find out what really happened to her father – and lay some demons to rest.”

Megan shares her wisdom also. She grew up moving around, which instilled in her a respect for small-town characters and a dislike of linoleum in rental properties. She spent most of her primary school years scribbling in her mother’s 1970s herb books and then telling people they were novels she’d written and published. The Heart is a Star is an engrossing, lyrical and powerfully absorbing novel. You won’t see the twists and turns coming.

You can see Megan’s own heart throughout the characters.

You won’t want to miss this episode.

You can follow Megan Rogers here:
https://www.meganrogerswriter.com/about
https://www.instagram.com/megan_rogers_writer

You can buy The Heart is a Star here (or in good bookstores):
https://cardioid-cobalt-rbj9.squarespace.com/home/books


The Good Girl Confessional is the award-winning Podcast of WB40 – Women Beyond Forty, a platform for women 40, 50, 60 and beyond.

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Wb40 and The Good Girl Confessional Acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land we record this podcast on, the Wurrundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nations and pay out respect to their elders, past, present, and emerging.

Megan Rogers

Megan Rogers grew up moving around, which instilled in her a respect for small-town characters and a dislike of linoleum in rental properties. She spent most of her primary school years scribbling in her mother’s 1970s herb books and then telling people they were novels she’d written and published. Always a bit of a geek, libraries have long been Megan’s haven. Within them she’s been able to foster a life-long love of books, the quiet and librarians. She has also been able to use libraries to feed her studies in broad subjects such as mathematics, science, ballet, astronomy and narratology, and to research questions for her novels such as, ‘How does a body decompose in water?’ and ‘Have astrophysicists proven the existence of soul mates?’ After a stint climbing the corporate ladder, where she eventually headed up the marketing for the State Library of Victoria, Megan gave birth to her first child. One day she saw her daughter scribbling in cookbooks the way she had done all those years ago and was reminded, as often children help us be, that life is short and should be spent doing what we love. In 2012 Australian writer Drusilla Modjeska selected Megan out of hundreds of Australia-wide applications for six months of one-on-one mentoring and in 2013 she was invited to present her writing at Oxford University. In 2014 Megan completed a PhD in Creative Writing and won the Vice Chancellor’s Excellence Award. In 2016 Megan won first place in the My Brother Jack literary awards and has been published in literary journals and academic publications. Megan also holds a Bachelor of Arts/Science from Monash University, a Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing from RMIT University, a Graduate Diploma in Professional Communication from Deakin, and a Master of Marketing from Monash University. In 2017 she had her first non-fiction book published Finding the Plot with Demeter Press. Megan lives on the Mornington Peninsula with her husband and two daughters. Megan’s debut novel The Heart is a Star was released May 2023.

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