Novelist Alex Miller is one of Australia’s most successful, with two Miles Franklin awards under his belt for Journey to the Stone Country and The Ancestor Game. His latest book, Autumn Laing, began as a work loosely modelled on the life of artist Sidney Nolan, but quickly morphed into something different. The heroine, Autumn, is a cranky, fiery woman of 85, flatulent, and impatient, furious at the indignities of old age. She’s looking back on her life with no small measure of guilt. Autumn recognised the talent of artist Pat Donlon as soon as she met him, and they embarked on an affair that would mark the rest of her life. In the novel, she continually casts back into the past, to Melbourne in 1938 and her circle of artists, poets and writers trying to tackle the establishment of the time. I met with Alex to talk about biography, guilt, the masks of the confessional, and how Sidney Nolan came to change his life.