Book excerpt:

I lived the ‘life of Riley’ in London at an early age. It was a preposterously wonderful time of fun, glamour, career excitement and excess. It finally ended. I later got a spot of cancer. Life goes on and I’m still a ridiculously lucky girl from Oz.

In her gripping personal memoir, A Girl From Oz, Australian journalist and filmmaker Lyndall Hobbs reveals tales from the Hollywood highlife. In fact, she has seen and done just about everything: tangled with Cambodian pirates for a scoop, grappled with Hollywood sexism as a feature director, wooed acting royalty, raised two children on her own and survived cancer in the unforgiving American medical system.

In this heartfelt, hilarious and self-deprecating memoir, Lyndall recounts the thrills and spills of her unbelievable, star-studded life story: from charming Australian television audiences and becoming the UK’s youngest television journalist, to making her first Hollywood feature film and rubbing shoulders with London and LA’s A-list.

Lyndall Hobbs is an Australian writer, filmmaker and interior designer. Born in Melbourne in 1952, she wrote regular columns in Go-Set and Newsday at the age of seventeen. She began her television career at GTV Nine News and A Current Affair in Australia, and after moving to London worked as a reporter and presenter for ITN’s First Report and Thames TV’s Today show. Her short films Dead on Time (written by Richard Curtis and starring Rowan Atkinson) and Hobbs’s Choice led to a directing career in the United States, where she shot music videos for artists such as Chaka Khan, as well as Saturday Night Live shorts and a feature film, Back to the Beach, which received two thumbs up from Siskel and Ebert. Lyndall has two children, Lola and Nick, and lives in Los Angeles.