Susan's Johnson's beautiful and confronting memoir of motherhood and the writing experience struck raw nerves and heartstrings in 1999 amongst both the public and the media, producing widespread word of mouth and brilliant reviews. This incredible response to Susan's first non-fiction project sets the scene for a very successful entrance into the Vintage market for the new B format paperback edition.

Check out the Isabel Allende quote below!

'I am writing these lines with tears in my eyes ... an extraordinary book from such a great writer and such a great woman.' Isabel Allende

'thrilling secrets and hard-won knowledge - and writing so fiercely beautiful the pages seem to tremble with the weight of their words.' Debra Adelaide, Sydney Morning Herald

'[A] wrenchingly courageous memoir . written with the poetic precision and pragmatic clarity of the survivor.' Andiee Paviour, Who Magazine

'[Susan Johnson has written a] searing account of the most profound attack on her identity' Anna King Murdoch, The Age

'The author has felt death brush against her and elegantly tells it . As a fellow writer I tremble for her, for how will she better this book? Jane Messer, Australian Review of Books

When acclaimed fiction writer Susan Johnson fell pregnant with her first child, nothing was further from her mind than the consequences of that potent life-giving act. And nothing was further from her mind than the possibility of her body twice failing to survive the moment of birth, resulting in an emergency temporary colostomy, nor the reverberations of her experience and how it would change the intimate knowledge she had of herself forever.

Confronting and disturbingly beautiful, A Better Woman is Susan Johnson's lilting, bittersweet chronicle of her life surrounding the births of her two precious sons and the new relationship she had to forge with herself, her family and the way she wrote. Her story, which forced her to come face to face with the limitations of her body and her trust in it, is an achingly personal insight into the evolution of her identity as a woman, writer, mother and partner. But transcending her loss of faith in what she knew and understood of herself is a keenly felt sense of power, of life and of hope.

Some of my close friends will be learning for the first time in these pages the full story of what happened to me after the birth of my two sons.

I did not wilfully deceive them. It was just that I could hardly bear to have been such a failure at having a baby, an event in human life we know to be both ordinary and extraordinary but which we take to be commonplace. An emergency temporary colostomy as a result of giving birth does not feature anywhere in our romanticised imagery of new mothers and babies triumphantly awash in flowers, breast milk and champagne.