Kate Halfpenny’s book about how a midlife sea change turned into a nightmare is now an Aussie hit.
A few years ago, Kate Halfpenny felt as if she had lost everything. The former magazine journalist had suffered a breakdown brought on by a stressful job, her three kids had left the nest, her Melbourne apartment was heavily mortgaged and had needed remediation work. The world was also in the midst of a pandemic.
Facing all these challenges, Halfpenny and her second husband, Chris, decided to chase the midlife, middle-class dream of trading city life for a quieter, coastal one. They figured things could only improve with a move out of town.
Within three weeks of selling their flawed but cool warehouse-conversion apartment in central Melbourne’s Collingwood, they had bought a house with a 700 sqm garden in Ocean Grove, a small beach town a 90-minute drive south of Melbourne, popular with retirees and handier to Halfpenny’s elderly parents. Their mortgage slashed, in early 2021 they drove away from Melbourne to start their new, chilled life.
But the dream quickly soured, as Halfpenny writes in her brave, compelling and at times hilarious memoir, Boogie Wonderland. While she wasn’t quite prepared for the conservatism of a small town after buzzy, multicultural Collingwood, she was even less prepared to be dealing with a problem that became more apparent in their new setting: Chris’s alcoholism.
“I felt like I was running away from something rather than running to something,” says Halfpenny. But asked if she would make the same shift again, she says, “I absolutely would. It was difficult for us because we were super-traumatised by the Covid lockdowns, and the pressure we were under with our $1.8 million leaking apartment.
“Menopause, the bad job, it was all hitting at once. Ideally, if you’re doing the sea change or the tree change, do it when you don’t have another whole lot of dominoes in your life. We left under pressure.”
She is talking by Zoom from a coastal motel room in Apollo Bay on Victoria’s Great Ocean Rd, where she is attending a literary festival to promote the release of Boogie Wonderland. To her midlife female readers, Halfpenny feels like bits of ourselves or of someone we know. By her mid-50s, she had been through a divorce, remarriage and redundancy.
She shares those universal experiences, along with the empty-nesting, menopause, her husband’s battle with alcoholism and the effect that had on their marriage.
“The feedback I’m getting from strangers is they say, ‘I saw myself in this part,’ or, ‘I hated empty nesting, too,’ or, ‘My dad was an alcoholic.’ Ostensibly, the book is about one woman, but the book is about everybody. It’s everyone’s story: birth, death, joy, reinvention, ageing. I think that’s the key to it.”
Around the time of her 50th birthday eight years ago, she was made redundant from a high-profile job as a senior editor at Who magazine, where she had worked for 23 years. She had started at the news and pop-culture weekly as its Melbourne writer when she was pregnant with her first child. “There were two losses of self in the past five years. I was Kate from Who, and then one day I wasn’t. Who was I without that role? And then the children left home and I wasn’t prepared for that, either.”
Initially, she transitioned to digital media, before she moved to a communications job in a multi-million-dollar education business, where employees were expected to dance in the office each morning to demonstrate their joyful alignment with company culture.
It’s everyone’s story: birth, death, joy, reinvention, ageing. I think that’s the key to it.
It paid well, but the role mentally and emotionally destroyed her. She collapsed under the weight of the stress, a breakdown tipping her into suicidal thoughts.
“The idea had been gnawing at me for weeks. Maybe the best way to provide for my darlings was to remove myself from the equation,” she writes. “I had tons of life insurance, enough to pay off the mortgage and then some. It made sense. I’d gone from being the strong one, the problem-solver who kept it all together and did it with joy and fun, to a shadow. As I leaned against the balcony, the idea of climbing up and over, of a final fast fall, didn’t terrify me. It brought a sense of calm.”
With experience of mental illness – she shares her experience of postnatal depression, which was so bad it led to a psychiatric ward admission – she left the job at the firm she refers to as “X-land’’ in her memoir and told Chris, “Let’s get out of here.”
Dream vs reality
Living by the coast had always been a dream. Halfpenny writes that it was often a topic at dinners with friends ‒ that total lifestyle switch as seen in the popular TV series SeaChange.
The plan was that salt water would heal her – sweat, the ocean and her tears. But after they unpacked their furniture at Ocean Grove, there were more Covid lockdowns and Chris’s brother John died unexpectedly.
Chris’s drinking accelerated from social to social and secretive. He was sober during his work hours, but when Halfpenny smelled booze on his breath one afternoon at the beach, he was defensive – it was just a bit of fun, a drink with lunch, nothing to get fussed about.
Two weeks later, they were at the beach one weekend afternoon with her father, who took a tumble. Chris this time was too drunk to be able to lift the older man back up.
“I was confused,’’ she says. “It was daytime. We weren’t day drinkers, even on holiday, except for our Sunday afternoon discos.”
But when she challenged him, “Chris looked me in the eye and said I was imagining it, or he’d just had a Diet Coke. Brushed it off and made me feel like I was going mad.”
She was furious, worried and terrified. “I didn’t want to lose another marriage or this particular husband who I love. I had this certain image in my head of myself as a successful middle-aged, middle-class woman. I didn’t know how to say to people, ‘Oh yeah, my husband’s an alcoholic and our marriage is in real trouble.’”
It also meant that Halfpenny had to dig for resilience when she herself needed support. “Chris’s collapse meant that I couldn’t actually wallow in my own breakdown and be picked up by him, which I think was what I needed at the time. I was running low on energy and initiative and starting my own business, reflecting on my career, reflecting on not having children around. It was all going on at once.”
In their new home they felt lonely and cut off from friends and their routines. Halfpenny also realised belatedly the importance of the community they had left behind. She loved the beach lifestyle, but it didn’t make up for the things she had taken for granted in Melbourne, such as an active social life, dressing up for work and walking to the office.
Now, she had swapped that for a place where the local uniform was exercise wear, wetsuits and jandals. Her new home was a place that closed at 5pm, “which eyes city refugees with suspicion”.
In her memoir, she writes, “It seemed increasingly clear that the disconnects we’d felt in our new home were about more than the lack of nightlife nearly driving us around the bend, only seeing white faces and not being able to find our people. We were both a bit fucked up by our move, much as we loved a lot of it.”
Living in the first person
After 40 years of observing and writing about others’ lives in her journalism, Halfpenny is now getting used to writing and talking about her own life, using the words “I’’ and “me’’.
Establishing a freelance business from her desk in Ocean Grove, she took on writing commissions and contributed columns to The Age, drawing on her and Chris’s relocation experiences and, for a while, trying out a hybrid lifestyle where they rented an apartment back in Melbourne to try to get the best of both worlds.
The columns quickly became popular (they were also published in The Age’s sister paper, The Sydney Morning Herald). A publisher got in touch – could she write a book about their experience, but also include stories about couples who had done the same thing with this foot-in-two-camps lifestyle? It would be called Reverse Sea Change.
Halfpenny signed the contract and interviewed other couples with similar hybrid lives. But at the same time, the drama in her own home was building.
The Zoom call flickers. “I signed the book contract in June, 2023. I was literally writing it while all of this was happening, while [Chris] was drinking every afternoon and evening. I was under all kinds of emotional stress and writing a book about it at the same time.”
The contracted book evolved into Boogie Wonderland. She put aside the stories of other sea changers and focused on writing about her own – and Chris’s – life, about loss and reinvention, alcoholism and relationships.
A natural ending to her memoir came early last year. Chris, who had done one stint in rehab, admitted he needed to go back for treatment. She told him she could be married to an alcoholic “but not a drunk’’. He entered a three-week residential programme on February 27, 2024 and has been sober since. He was happy for his story to be told – both he and Halfpenny want the disease of alcoholism better understood.
Halfpenny writes in the first pages of her book that when she was younger, she imagined that by 50 she’d be sorted. She would have “an excellent career, zero internal angst and a cool signature style. I’d go trekking in Morocco with girlfriends.”
When she did the change to coastal living closer to 60, that, too, she visualised as “wafting about in palazzo pants passing charcuterie platters and murmuring, ‘The cheese is local’ to ace, chilled-out neighbours”.
Place or people?
To others considering a geographical shift like theirs, her eyes widen behind her black-framed glasses. “Do your due diligence for what is important to you. I found out that multiculturalism is important to me, which I didn’t really realise before I moved from the city. I’d always taken it for granted, and when it wasn’t there, I found that really confronting.
“You also really do have to work out whether home is a geographical location or home is your family and friends. Do not underestimate the effect it will have on you if you are suddenly transplanted somewhere where you don’t know anyone.” (After a period, the couple gave up the rented city apartment to focus on making Ocean Grove their home.)
Halfpenny will be 60 next year and she says she’s finally content with the move. She shifted to an acceptance of Ocean Grove’s advantages rather than focusing on what was missing. She and Chris have a new life, version 2.0, which sounds as if it ticks many boxes. She does a gym class at 7am, before taking the dog, Sally, for a walk on the beach. The garden shed has been converted into a workspace for her. Amid new projects are ghostwriting a book for “a fabulous American woman”, writing feature articles for The Age and continuing the column that became the seed for Boogie Wonderland.
There’s another walk with the dog at dusk, and on a good day, she goes boogie boarding. Chris, who has a job in insurance regulation, also works from home and was recently named “member of the month” at their gym. She does craft after dinner – crochet or tapestry – “dag alert’’, she laughs – and is always in bed with a book by 8.30pm. Melbourne friends drive down for weekend stays, her two sons, Jack and Felix, are close by in Melbourne and her daughter, Sadie will soon be living in Adelaide, relocating from Queensland.
Drawn to stare at the stars above her home without the light pollution of a city, she says the slower pace of life fills her up. She admits to missing the “glittery thrill’’ of having a drink with her husband (she still drinks alcohol, but not when they’re on their own). On balance, it’s been a good move. And it’s looking a lot like notes Halfpenny made at the suggestion of a coach she met in the midst of her career crisis. “He told me to write down what my dream life looked like. No detail too big or small. No self-editing.” The last line of her journalling was: “Be in charge of my own life for the first time in decades while staying married.” And now, she is.
“We’re just focusing on our health – emotional and physical – and that feels like such a luxury. This feels like such a time of opportunity. “I’ve been working and worrying about people since I was 16. It’s good to give yourself permission to be selfish if you like.”
Boogie Wonderland: A memoir about sea changes, marriage and riding the waves of midlife, by Kate Halfpenny (Simon & Schuster, RRP$39.99), is out now.