My Mum's Bad Diaries

Content note: racially insensitive language, body and weight talk, food talk  And we're straight into reading: it’s 28 November 1982    J is working at St Kilda Road, on the general ledger J and L still don’t know what a general ledger is so here’s a link from the people who know at Xero: https://www.xero.com/au/glossary/general-ledger/ There’s more CB radio talk than there is accounting talk...

It’s 24 November 1982 and there were all types of spaghetti restaurants: Tree, Theatre and Graffiti! We go to the Seaview Ballroom in St Kilda, to see Allniters, INXS, Soldiers of Fortune and No Nonsense. We have more sunburn, more disillusionment with uni, more thinking and more existential angst. There’s a bad poem: Do Something, a party upcoming in Box Hill and an English guy at The Ballroom te...

** Content warning: brief mention of self harm/cutting This is part 1 of this recording session; next episode publishes in two weeks Have you ever wondered what a 6-hour Whatsapp chat must be like? Join us for a taster!  In this episode, Jenny learns more about Lily’s beauty treatments in the South of Turkey, and you're along for the ride. Nails! Hair! Face fillers! We catch up with Lily&apos...

We jump right into the reading as this is essentially part 2 of the last episode where we used up all the time just chatting as we are wont to do We hear more about the CB radio and Jenny’s addiction to it (there's a 'big fight' with brother Jim because he won’t let her use ‘the rig’. Lily laughs about Jenny using the term ‘the rig’ and rightly so because it’s very 1970s CQ CQ Rubbe...

*** Apologies for Lily's sound quality here *** This episode we’re dealing with the tyranny of distance, struggling to find time to record. The solution? Split the episode in two which means in this ep you get quite a bit of chat, with a Lily Paris update and then some TV talk. We hear about the perils of a matte black kitchen, what happened to Lily’s head in Thailand, and something about hom...

We’re off and running, following on from the previous episode with no intro! And it’s doubly exciting because it’s the beginning of Volume 4! In this episode we cover a lot of ground, in the readings and in the in between bits (IBBs, aka the chat). Jenny skips most of the dreams, Lily says ‘great’. It’s ten days until exams but Jenny’s got other things on her mind: how to pin the tuxedo pants, how...

Yes, you read the above correctly, we are moving onto volume 4 BUT in this 50+ minute episode we literally only manage less than ten seconds actually reading the diary. The rest will be in episode 5, sorry about that Chief! So what you will actually hear in this ep is stuff like: Lily's struggles to dye her hair; my struggles with ancestry.com; how Lily will be a Mac (Apple) girl forever beca...

We're approaching the end of 1st  year uni and ALSO the end of Volume 3!! With around 30 volumes to go we aren’t in danger of running out of material any time soon.   In this episode Lily shows her ‘scathe’ for Johnny Rotten’s somewhat naïve, 1980s punk philosophy while Jenny’s feeling sorry for a character on ‘80s soap Sons and Daughters. Jenny’s also determined to lay a good foundation for...

Welcome to the episode with perhaps the most 'cross strings on the FBI wall' yet. Lily and I warm up by talking about the records I’ve recently purchased (as listed in the diaries: Secret Policeman’s Other Ball and Complete Madness) and then get-off topic pretty quickly and onto the recent rival royal appearances of William and Harry: both appearing with top celebs and both in an airspac...

We're back for the 2024 season! But Lily is out of the country, so we will be moving on the fly to bring you the ba-goodness of My Mum's. Nothing will stop us, not oceans and not time zones. I'm doing the socials, so you'll miss Lily's fine wit but nevertheless, we are here to stay and will keep pumping out our content, even if things look a little different as we go forwa...

I find out…   This episode I give a Very Important Health Update (I can’t eat starch or sugar for the next little bit which sucks!), we discuss our thoughts on film Leave the World Behind and the TikTok conspiracies surrounding the movie. We also chat about Wifedom, the amazing book that I’m reading, and read about 1982 Mum still slogging away at her English essay, continuing to listen to 3PBS, an...

We talk about the new Netflix film 'Leave the World Behind'.  Spoilers -- obviously! (Double spoiler: we didn't like it) We'd love to read your comments or questions! Send us a text!

I find out… whose jacket Mum burnt a hole in!    We chat about Mum’s birthday weekend we just had up at the Yarra Valley, the horse ride we went on up there and Chateau Yering which was just full of character!    We also chat about the benefits of the cold shower in the morning (I’m a convert) and how my self-care routine has become a literal full time job.    We read about Mum listening to a punk...

Content warning: we chew peanuts VERY loudly And we have a new, shorter intro which we will record each week. Gets you to the chat and the diary-reading more quickly! I find out that Mum once contemplated taking up smoking a pipe… We read out an email response that Mum received from Nell Campbell (Crabs in Jubilee) after contacting her earlier in the year and fangirling HARD. We chat about my 2024...

Mum is home from her three month jaunt around Europe which included lots of cowbells – big and small – Paris, which seemed cheap after Switzerland, –  ‘ it bankrupted us’ – and a Latin class with a Benedictine monk.   I, on the other hand, unexpectedly quit my job, moved back home and have spent the last couple of months looking after the (three!) cats while trying to figure out a business idea th...

We'd love to read your comments or questions! Send us a text!

This is a special bonus ep, a SIDE RANT that ended up being more than an hour. We talk: power bills politics the anger of the current generation against the older why Mum 'fell off the Marie Kondo train' going to see Barbie - spoiler, we did not like how much we hate emails wrong takes on Little Women the idea of writers building on other author's novels, eg March and Wide Sargasso...

*** Content note – we mention child killing and suicide I find out that Mum once planned to burn her diaries once they got ‘too ridiculous to read’...   Wonder if we’re at that point now?   This episode we read about Mum going to dinner with a murderer (more on that later), failing her psych lab report, wandering Lygon Street and realising that she might even ‘enjoy being alone,’ and becoming even...

** Hey, it's Jenny here. Lily is off on a boat up north so I'm doing the ep description. This is one of our famous* side chats, which is basically an excision out of the loose, baggy body of the longer recording. Sometimes our episodes are wildly discursive and this was one of them. Lily starts by saying how much she's loving THE FEAR OF FLYING by Erica Jong, a book I recommended a...

** Hey, it's Jenny here. Lily is off on a boat up north so I'm doing the ep description. This is one of our famous* side chats, which is basically an excision out of the loose, baggy body of the longer recording. Sometimes our episodes are wildly discursive and this was one of them. This one starts with us talking TV -- if you're anything like us, it's a common topic when we ch...

I find out that Mum once ate 17 liquorice sticks in a day...   IN ONE DAY! The mind boggles   We start this episode with a long chat about what we’re reading (I’m reading Fear of Flying by Erica Jong and it’s soooo good!!) and classics vs contemporary lit, and the growth of genre in modern publishing. (It was so long we made it a side chat which we’ll upload next Thursday.)   We touch on the Holly...

I find out that Mum used to want to learn the drums...??   This time, we read about Mum going up to her Aunt’s place in Woodend, where she goes riding, the lambs are dropping and there’s a bonfire of dead sheep. Mum mucks around on the CB radio and writes an emotional letter to a friend.    We chat about how our expectations of entertainment have changed over time, fandom now vs 40 years ago, the...

I find out that Mum unknowingly attended Prosh* judging in 1982... This episode we have even more tech problems (it’s totally me, during the ep I realise I'm not plugging in my mic/headphones properly!!) and seagulls squawking outside my window (very distracting!! And I don’t live anywhere near the ocean) as we read about Mum buying her first Sex Pistols album for $4.99, going to see Lady Cha...

*** SPOILERS*** Lily finishes reading Jenny's book Little Gods and has some thoughts. We'd love to read your comments or questions! Send us a text!

We'd love to read your comments or questions! Send us a text!