Olivia De Zilva’s Plastic Budgie is a brutally funny and inventive debut about family and self, full of itchy Y2K nostalgia, curses and glimpses of birds.

There was no use googling am I cursed because the search engine algorithm would always say yes.

Olivia was named after a lycra-clad singer her parents saw on Rage. As a child, she lost the ability to speak and spent a year barking like a dog. Her Gong Gong bought her a yellow bird in a shoebox from the Adelaide Central Markets. Her heart was broken by a guitar teacher after a school disco. She started university and learnt to run and travelled to Guangzhou for her cousins wedding.

In her brutally funny, genre-defying debut, Olivia De Zilva collects stories on shelves: neat coming-of-age anecdotes and sitcom characters trapped behind glass.

Then she breaks it all apart.

Plastic Budgie questions how our memories and families form us, in a way that is both unapologetically sentimental and eternally surprising. It is full of itchy Y2K nostalgia, curses and glimpses of birds.