In her 1994 account, Chick recalled approaching people who had known Clift, her birth certificate in hand. Because Clift had died in 1969, Chick’s search was tied to the images and information she accumulated through these conversations; such conversations, often turning on exclamations around Chick and Clift’s physical resemblance, were interspersed with Chick’s self-reflections, written in third person. One effect of this shift in point of view was to distance the narrator from the narrated self, and to suggest not only memories recalled by Chick but also an otherness that resided in herself as an adoptee.

Chick became aware that had she learnt more about Clift than her mother, Marjorie, who had always shared with Chick and her brother knowledge of their adoptions. Clift seemed to fulfil Chick’s childhood dreams of a beautiful and famous birth mother, and to have qualities Chick wanted for herself. Such yearnings Chick knew were magnified for adoptees, but she also wrote feelingly of the mother who nurtured her: ‘I know her.’ Chick’s was a clear-eyed portrait of Clift which acknowledged the risks Clift took and their exhilarating as well as destructive consequences.

Fast forward some thirty years and it is entirely understandable that Searching for Charmian might find a new readership at this moment. The New South Wales Adoption Information Act 1990, which reversed state-imposed confidentiality around adoption, was one important context for Chick’s story and helped create a receptive readership. In 2025, the abiding context for the new edition of Searching for Charmain is celebrity status – something Eliot expressed reservations about in 1994 – which is now shared with Clift by Gina Chick, Suzanne Chick’s daughter and the author of a new preface. This edition captures a culture’s fascination with two unconventional women in Clift and Gina Chick, two generations apart, pulling them into proximity.

Clift’s life story and writing have experienced a remarkable resurgence in recent years. Her books have been republished and translated, her essays newly collected, and her life made the subject of a 2024 documentary, Life Burns High. Last year also saw the publication of The End of the Morning, Clift’s incomplete coming-of-age story featuring her alter-ego Cressida Morley, and the release of an SBS television series, So Long Marianne, which presented Clift (played by Anna Torv) in the arms of Leonard Cohen on the Greek island of Hydra where Clift lived with her family from 1955 to 1964. The affair never happened, but the series speaks to a contemporary fantasy about that island’s bohemian community and Clift’s central role in it.

More surprising still is the renown of Gina Chick. In 2023 Gina won a reality television show, Alone Australia, and in 2025 her memoir, We Are the Stars (2024), was voted number one on Dymocks’ Top 101 Books List. We Are the Stars tells of Gina’s loss of her young daughter, her 1980s upbringing, and how her mother’s and Clift’s stories intersect with her sense of self.

Gina is a minor but important presence in the pages of Searching for Charmian. She offers her mother material and emotional support, and she expresses truths with which Suzanne grapples. Suzanne recalls a young, excited Gina finding an image of Clift for the first time and calling to say, ‘sometimes I think I am too flamboyant, too over the stop … Finding out that my grandmother is Charmian Clift has somehow made it all right. From what I’ve read about her, she’s just like me.’ This story is also told, albeit slightly differently, in We Are the Stars, and again retold in the new preface to Searching for Charmian, with the same point being made: ‘this explains everything.’

Yet not everything is, or can be, explained.

In their respective preface and afterword, Gina and Suzanne tell of visiting Hydra, separately and some decades apart, in search of a connection with Clift beyond the realm of the image. The book was originally at pains to demonstrate Suzanne’s resemblance to Clift by means of the photographs generously distributed throughout its pages. This new edition has replaced those images with a small cluster of Chick family photographs. It is striking, therefore, that Gina reenacts a now widely circulated 1960 photograph by Life photographer James Burke of Clift and Cohen at Hydra’s Douskos Taverna and relates: ‘I broke … I wept for the ghosts of my lineage’. Meanwhile, Suzanne tells of her successful attempt to enter her birth mother’s house, a place she had ‘only seen in photographs’. The original edition of Searching for Charmian turned to photographs to underline Chick’s ties to Clift; this edition is not concerned to persuade readers, or Suzanne herself, of this fact. Contextualised by Gina’s preface, Chick’s autobiography now brings together three generations of creative women. It also looks to the future. As a photographic caption of Gina’s teenage niece asks in anticipation, ‘What happens next?’