Olivia De Zilva's Plastic Budgie is a brutally funny and inventive debut about family and identity, full of itchy Y2K nostalgia, curses and glimpses of birds.
Olivia was named after a lycra-clad singer her parents saw on Rage. As a child, she lost the ability to speak and spent a year barking like a dog. Her Gong Gong bought her a yellow bird in a shoebox from the Adelaide Central Markets. Her heart was broken by a guitar teacher at a school disco. She started university and learnt to swim and travelled to Guangzhao for her cousin's wedding. And in between all that, she tried to form an adult person, while feeling more like a person-shaped hole.
In her semi-autobiographical, genre-defying and wonderfully crafted debut, De Zilva collects stories in a cabinet: neat coming-of-age anecdotes and sitcom characters trapped on shelves. Then she breaks it all apart.
Plastic Budgie questions how our memories form us, in a way that is somehow both unapologetically sentimental and eternally surprising.
