While ‘Dance Memory’ ostensibly tells the story of a wheelchair-bound ballerina, a single mother, her young son, the threat of bushfire, and twelve ducks, it also contains within it, I suspect, Curtin’s philosophy of writing. She compares dance to story: choreography broken down into paragraphs which carry the idea; sentences which make up the sequence; and words which are the steps. But none of that is enough, she says through the character Mignette, unless you can picture the whole and fly beyond it to ‘the place inside that birthed in you the desire, the passion’; unless you have heart, she means.

The narrator in ‘On the Uses of the Dead to the Living’ says that ‘a mountain writes its own story’ – sometimes floating ‘as though untethered to the earth’; sometimes dangerous and dark; at other times burnished by the sun – just as a story moves from philosophic musing through dark episodes to light or enlightenment.

The bulimic Alice Bridget in ‘Hamburger Moon’ calls herself ‘an open book’, a story she recognises though she has never read the words. In between her excesses of eating and expurgation, she wants only for ‘her mother to love her’.

A mother dies, a couple is separated by grief, a dog dies, a child survives, a young woman meets a violent death, the past and present coalesce, and survivors are given redemptive grace. Curtin does not always strike a perfect note; occasionally, the stories are too neatly wrapped. Mostly, though, her slices of life ring true.