Rosie Waterland has just released her second book, Every Lie I’ve Ever Told, and is preparing to tour her live show Crazy Lady. She is a true-crime fiend who returns to Truman Capote every year and now has her mother, who is a recovering alcoholic, living with her and reintroducing her to the the smell of her childhood.
What’s nostalgia-inducing
My mum has been an alcoholic since I’ve been born and has been sober for the past year. The last few months she’s been staying with me in my house and she uses Youth-Dew [fragrance] by Estée Lauder. She used to always wear it when I was a kid. There’s just something so lovely and sentimental and nostalgic about coming home and smelling that in my house. I feel like I’m a little kid again around my mum. I didn’t even know what it was and I came home and I smelled it, I said, “Mum, I feel like I’m seven; what is that smell?” She said, “It’s Youth-Dew, I’ve been wearing it your whole life.” That smell is my mum.
I’m really sentimental about a book called the Gift Angel which my mum gave me when I was in kindergarten. It’s just a book that has the alphabet from A to Z and each letter is an angel. I’ve kept the book my entire life. The Velveteen Rabbit is another I have kept forever, that I’ve had since I was a very, very little kid. I wish I had more adult, fancy choices to tell. There are very few things left over from my childhood: we moved so much, we went to more than 20 schools, I’d say I lived in more than 100 houses. I can’t even count. So much of our stuff got lost. The few things I have from my childhood are things I have kept myself – so baby photos, school reports, all that stuff. When I was a kid I understood if I don’t keep this no one else was going to. I had a box full of special things and those two books were always in the box. Those and my Super Nintendo.
What’s thrilling
My eyelash extensions, basically. That’s all I use now. Since I started getting eyelash extensions a couple of years ago I just wake up and leave the house. They’re really the best thing in my life. The other week I was in Woolworths – I get people coming up to me sometimes to say they like my work, or whatever – this girl came up to me and said, “Rosie?” When I said “yeah” she said, “I wasn’t sure if it was you but then I saw your lashes and I knew that it was.” I feel like I’m on that sliding scale, you know when people get Botox and they don’t know when to stop and they end up looking like that weird frozen look [where] you don’t know whether they’re 29 or 59. I feel like I’m in that weird place where I might be taking it too far. Every time I go to get them done I’m like “maybe a little bit bigger this time, maybe a little bit bigger” and it’s a weird sliding scale. When I first got them I kept looking in the mirror and I couldn’t believe how big they were, and I reckon I’ve sized up five times since then. I’ll probably end up walking around with these eyelashes that weigh my eyes down. I had to do an acting gig last year and they had to remove them for it. I looked in the mirror and I was like, “That’s not what I look like, I don’t accept that face.” I’ve literally forgotten what I look like without them.
I’ve been reading David Sedaris Theft by Finding; it’s just amazing. I love that he can literally publish his journals and it is the most entertaining thing. That he’s just that good of a writer that the writing he did for himself, that he never thought anyone would see is an incredibly entertaining book. I also am super psyched about all the Australian female author books that are out right now. Brodie Lancaster’s book No Way! Okay, Fine is so good, so funny. And then obviously there’s Jamila Rizvi’s book Not Just Lucky – it’s brilliant. I haven’t read Jenny Valentish’s book Woman of Substances yet but I’m super psyched to read it. There’s a lot of cool stuff coming out by Australian women right now.
What I keep going back to
I don’t have a particular product but just a cheap lipgloss from Priceline. That is the only thing I put on my face now. I think it’s the first thing girls experiment with when they are 12 or 13 because it’s easy and you can’t really eff it up. Even to this day I have maybe 10 lipglosses floating around my house or in my bag. They are all cheap, they’re all from Priceline and it changes every time. I believe every claim they ever make about every lipgloss so I have to buy it.
David Sedaris books, I always reread because he’s such a master of his craft, the best memoirist, the best at telling stories, the best at making even the most mundane things entertaining and engaging. It’s like my bible.
Another book I have read more than any other is In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I probably read it once a year, I love that book so much. It triggered my weird obsession with true crime. I’d never read anything like it, which is surprising to me because at the time it was published nobody had ever read anything like it and it completely revolutionised creative nonfiction. And then I read it for the first time decades after it was published, probably when I was 19 or 20, and I hadn’t read anything like it even then. The way he vividly describes this awful crime that obsesses this tiny town but he manages to weave the book into a linear narrative and story, I had never been hooked in by a true-crime story but I think it wasn’t just the facts, it was creatively turned into this narrative. It’s certainly problematic but I think that was the way he managed to make it engaging and entertaining in that way that triggered my obsession with true crime. I reread it because it’s so damn entertaining every time I read it. I know all the shocks, all the twists and turns and I am still shocked every time I read that book.
- Tickets for Rosie Waterland’s show Crazy Lady are available now