In her 2009 memoir Affection, Krissy Kneen recounted her cloistered upbringing, first in Blacktown, New South Wales, then in Bororen, Queensland, where her family ran a tourist attraction called Dragonhall. As a child, she experienced a deeply sensuous inner life marked by an intense sexual precocity. As an adult, she retains a predilection for crushes on strangers: there is her bookshop colleague Christopher and then his friend, Paul. When Kneen unexpectedly spends an evening exchanging messages with Paul via Facebook, she knows what is coming: “[a]lready, right up front, he feels like family to me.” Kneen’s second memoir, The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen, traces the lineage of this desire for kinship and belonging. “I know I am compensating”, she writes, “for the emptiness I feel when I am with my own maternal family.” Rather than imparting a firm sense of identity, the extreme closeness of the household in which Kneen was raised – she lived with her mother, aunt, sister and grandparents – has engendered a sense of amputation. Dominating all their lives is her formidable grandmother, who “ensured we had no friends, no community, no other family. All we had was her.” She is known to them as Lotty but was born as Dragica in territory now belonging to Slovenia.