Wendy Harmer retrieves her favourite teacup from behind cupboard doors that once belonged in an old, colonial farmhouse. Her front door – wood and bevelled glass – was, she suspects, pre-loved by a church congregation or an order of nuns. The mirror in the library was rescued from the old Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, where her husband, Brendan, was born in 1959. Everything in this house – where she has lived and raised a family for 30 years – has a story to tell, including Wendy. Especially Wendy.
“Was there anything about the book that surprised you?” she asks.
We’re here to discuss her memoir, Lies My Mirror Told Me, and to be honest, much of it was surprising. Wendy has been so long in the public eye – as a writer, a comedian, a radio personality – that we think we know her, especially those of us who woke to her cheerful banter on Sydney breakfast radio, first on 2Day FM then on ABC Radio Sydney, for 16 years. But we don’t know the half of it.
The title of the book came from a conversation Wendy had with her mother when she was eight years old. Most of us know Wendy was born with a cleft lip and palate, but perhaps not that the boys at school called her “Eagle Beak and Flat Face and Wendy the Witch”. On one particular day, when she came home emotionally bruised from a bout of their cruelty, her mother suggested she “go and look in the mirror, and when you find something to complain about, you come out and tell me”.
“So, I went to look in the mirror,”
