Meet Ballarat author Robbi Neal and The Secret Life of Connie Starr

Neal's latest novel takes readers, as the title suggests, into The Secret Life of Connie Starr - the evocative story of a difficult child who sees her world differently to most.

This is a story fast putting old Ballarat on must-read lists across the nation.

Ballarat in the 1930s and 1940s forms a rich backdrop for Neal's flawed characters to navigate life from dangerous dips into the Yarrowee to lovers' trysts on the Sturt Street corner of Ballarat Base Hospital or soldiers marching on Sturt Street in their first steps to joining the war.

A key character is the Baptist church on Dawson Street, which has undergone a modern multi-million transformation featured on TV show Restoration Australia last year.

To Neal, this imposing character was where her grandfather served as a preacher. A now-destroyed red clinker brick manse next door was home to her mother and, protagonist, Connie.

Hometown-proud, Neal chooses not to get locked down into too much research on the finer points in history but teases them out to see where this might lead, or transform, her characters.

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The Courier is punctuated throughout the plot, both as a key news source at the time and as inspiration to provoke her story. Re-imagined stories about her God-fearing grandfather helped shape Connie's father.

"Some pieces I found were hysterical," Neal said.

"There was one story of a man who married 10 different women and would spend nights in different homes - but in Ballarat at that time, there were no phones to check up on him.

"All the church ministers would meet regularly and got talking once and realised they were all talking about having married this man - he would go to different churches to marry different women ... He told the court he loved being in love.

"I wanted to use it but I couldn't."

But one key character makes home deliveries to in-lust women who visit a well-known Ballarat shoe shop for fittings.

Neal did not intend to return to Ballarat so soon in her writing.

Her first novel The Art of Preserving Love, under the pen name Ada Langton, is set in the town during World War I.

Neal's next novel takes place in Ballarat in the 1970s but another in the works is framed in England during the 1600s, for a change of pace.

Writing became an outlet for Neal when she was diagnosed with cancer, stemming from the BRCA gene, in 2001. She was given a 20 per cent chance of survival. Her children were aged three and five at the time.

Neal's first manuscript won the Varuna HarperCollins Award in 2004. From there Neal started writing a series of feature articles for The Courier's now-defunct weekend magazine.

Neal quipped she was lucky to have many compelling personal experiences to draw on, including a violent father and mother with mental health issues.

"Connie was inspired by my mother. Just before my mother died, she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder ... She's always had a really poor grasp on truth," Neal said.

"That made it hard growing up as a child.

"My mother fell pregnant at 13 to the 28-year-old assistant pastor and that had a real impact on my life and how she mothered me and couldn't mother me. Being 13 at that time and in the environment she grew up in, she still saw herself as sinful.

"It's interesting seeing what things make us really weak and how some things make us really strong. For Connie, her not seeing the world and being in touch with reality is ultimately what saves her and gives her strength."

Her mother knew from the moment Connie was born and "opened her lungs to scream, there was more chaos in the world than before and it wouldn't leave until Connie did".

From a branch in her lemon tree, where she speaks to her angels, Connie contemplates a complex world of dark and light, love and trauma with the complicated characters in her life.

Even Connie is a protagonist that sparks a push-pull effect in readers' endearment towards her.

Neal has experienced her own real struggles with depression, on top of cancer, and a street attack on her life by a man unknown to her.

In this struggle, Neal found small little things - that might be easy to miss - give life meaning.

Often this is in the simple gesture of caring for each other.

"A lot of us carry trauma we don't speak about," Neal said.

"We're all seeking healing."

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