Fiona Place has always been interested in women, language and identity. She is the author of Cardboard: A Woman Left for Dead, which won the National Book Council Qantas Award for New Writers in 1990. It is a novel about one woman’s life-threatening eating disorder and eventual hard-won recovery. She has written numerous short stories and poems published in literary journals including Meanjin, Southerly and Westerly. She has also worked as a financial commentator for major newspapers including The Australian Financial Review and The Australian. Today she combines motherhood with her work as a writer and an advocate for people with intellectual disabilities. Her essays on disability appear in peer-reviewed journals including Down Syndrome Research and Practice.

Fiona Place is one of our great truth-tellers. There is no other writer like her. —Amanda Lohrey, award-winning fiction writer.

DIGNITY, CREATIVITY This is a wide-ranging, deeply personal examination of the writer’s approach to parenting AND DISABILITY a son with Down syndrome. There is no sugar-coating, no ‘angels’ or ‘forever children’, but the very real life, great love and perceptive thinking of one mother, one son, one family, forging a good life in twenty first century Australia. -- Jill O’Connor, disability advocate

A powerful must-read book with three strands. Fiona shares her own life as she explores the impact of childhood family relationships on later motherhood, the rights and abilities of individuals with Down syndrome and questions the ethics of current termination programmes. I hope this book provokes widespread debate of these issues. —Professor Sue Buckley OBE, psychologist, Down Syndrome Education International

Portrait of the Artist’s Mother illuminates all that is wrong with a society that expects children and mothers to be ‘perfect’. With carefully crafted prose, Fiona Place pushes back against negative assumptions that people with Down syndrome cannot have engaging and fulfilling lives. Her work, irradiated by her love for her son Fraser, is a delight to read. —Jessica White, author of Hearing Maud

Written with extraordinary courage and searing honesty, the author takes the reader on a vivid, sometimes painful, yet life-affirming journey of hope. This book both commands and deserves attention as a creative work and provides unique insight into disability and motherhood. —Miriam Stevenson PhD, disability consultant