Peggy Frew's latest novel, Wildflowers, deals with the fragile love of sisterhood

Peggy Frew often wonders whether she'll ever stop writing about parenthood. Maybe once her kids have grown up and flown the coop she'll find another theme to weave into her fine-tuned domestic dramas.

The thing is, she says, you never stop being a parent, just as you're always, deep down, someone's child.

Her novels, now four in all, are completely distinct from each other, but all contain delicate and deeply nuanced portrayals of families.

In her debut, House of Sticks, a stay-at-home mother in the Melbourne suburbs is isolated and drowning in the daily demands of her young kids. In Hope Farm, a daughter grows apart from her mother as the two move between ashrams, communes and group houses - a story of the faded promises of the hippie life.

In 2020's Islands, a husband and wife too preoccupied with their own failing marriage to notice its effects on their two daughters. One disappears and the family is plunged into crisis.

And now, Wildflowers, which takes on sisterhood - three sisters whose lives haven't turned out as they'd hoped. They're as different as sisters can be, and yet they all have ambivalent feelings about their parents - their remote, imperfect, vaguely incompetent parents.

Meg, the oldest, is brittle, bossy and disappointed. Nina, in the middle, is vague, flakey and incompetent. Amber, the baby and the wild one, is a drug addict. Meg plans an intervention, and ropes Nina in, and the three travel to Far North Queensland where. There, the reality of addiction closes in. Love and resentment are blurred, and forgiveness might not be possible.

"I just find those relationships endlessly fascinating," Frew says.

"I don't set out with each book saying to myself, I'm going to write about parenthood and this time, I'm going to write about it from this angle."

In fact, she says, she planned initially to write a book about the experience of addiction, but "it ended up being about what it's like to have an addict in the family. So it just always goes back to family."

She approaches each book with a visual image. Islands, for example, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2020, was structured like a mosaic, and told out of time.

"It was the image of a sack and a table, so the experience of reading the book is that you put your hand into this sack, and you can't look in it," she says.

"It's dark inside and you rummage around and pull something out. You put it on the table and then you pull something else out and you gradually assemble all of these pieces, but you can't see where they're coming from, you don't know what's going to come next."

She wonders now whether she asked too much of the reader, in asking them to be patient as the pieces were revealed and the story began to make sense.

She took a different approach to Wildflowers, starting with an internal image that's "like this big, wide, very slow-moving - perhaps moderately paced - warm, brown river that you are just bathed in and carried along by."

Wildflowers is, for the reader, like a piece of music - a strange symphony that swells and falters, soars and plods, speeds towards a terrible, inevitable conclusion, with a long tail of ambiguity that turns into a reckoning.

Told through the eyes of Nina, the flakey one, the story has the feeling of a kind of mild and subtle thriller. We know where the characters are in their lives, but we don't quite know how they each got there. There's the dreariness of familiarity - the stock-standard behaviour of an addict, the age-old petty squabbles that so often form the backbone of sibling relationships.

But while the river is lazy and slow-moving - in keeping with Nina, the enervating, but strangely self-aware protagonist - the narrative is hurtling steadily towards a series of revelations.

It's strangely edifying that none of the sisters are particularly likeable characters, and yet by the end, you know them all so well that you can't help loving them despite their flaws.

Frew says she has little patience with criticism that is sometimes levelled at her books; her characters are often, to all intents and purposes, hard to like.

"Of course you can't please everybody, but I don't waste a lot of time thinking about it," she says.

"I certainly have never had an editor say to me, 'This character isn't likable enough.' I've always felt that I've had their backing, which means a lot.

"But as it is, I just go back to this kind of touchstone idea which is, if these characters interest me and if I am able to have a great deal of affection for them, even though I can see just what a mess they're making of things, there will be other people out there that will feel the same way as me, and they're the people that the book will really resonate with."

Forgiveness is another theme that wends through Frew's works - the notion of forgiveness as acknowledgement and acceptance of hurts - sometimes profound, and irreversible, but just as often small, niggling and hard to dislodge.

But writing about addiction didn't quite work out the way Frew had planned. In Islands, one of the characters gets into trouble and disappears; the story is about those who are left behind, and who never find out what has happened to her.

"Maybe I was kind of thinking, what could be worse than that?" she says of Wildflowers.

"Well, maybe what could be worse than that is that the person doesn't disappear. They just stay there and make your life hell. They're right there. You can't get away from them."

Amber once had a glittering future - she was wild, yes, but also magnetic, casting a shadow Nina and Meg never quite escape from, even after something goes wrong along the way and Amber becomes a drug addict.

Frew says she read up about addiction, and tried to find a way into Amber's head.

"But I rapidly realised that writing about addiction becomes boring really quickly," she says.

"It's such a boring thing to do."

And this realisation is exactly what Meg and Nina are up against when they try to force Amber to face up to and overcome her addiction. Ultimately, she's like any drug addict the world has ever seen, and does all the same things with stunning predictability. It's one of the book's bleaker revelations.

And all the while, the sisters are aware of the role their own parents have played in the way their lives have turned out, especially Amber's. Can we ever accept that our parents have done their best, even when it manifestly hasn't been enough?

In the end, says Frew, it doesn't matter. Just like in real life, people grow up and move forward and learn to forgive themselves and each other.

"It's really hard - I think I'm endlessly forgiving of my characters," she says.

"I don't hold any of their flaws against them. I just feel for them too much, I'm too empathetic."