So she chooses emotional candour over being an emotional wreck. “When an experience has been maybe too hurtful or aggressive or something, I’ve tried to make it poetic and interesting in some way,” she says, “and try and connect with some inner truths that hopefully resonate with people.”

If the writing can be harrowing, performing the songs is more celebratory (“You don’t want to just watch someone falling apart!” she quips), with the applause she receives completing a therapeutic loop.

“I always liked the stage, and singing made me feel good – even though it also made me feel terribly insecure … But that becomes less as time goes on because you just accept who you are,” she says.

“So it’s a little ecosystem that’s ticking along that I don’t really want to let go of. It’s magical but it’s also necessary now because I support my family and I don’t really want to do anything else.”

Perhaps it was inevitable she’d end up in this particular ecosystem, her divorced parents being the revered singer-songwriters Loudon Wainwright III and the late Kate McGarrigle, and her brother the genre-bending composer/singer Rufus Wainwright.

In preparing Stories I Might Regret Telling You, she checked with Rufus about such matters as how she’d depicted their mother’s disappointment in his homosexuality, but she showed her father nothing.

“I didn’t think it was a good idea because I didn’t want to feel edited,” she says, “and because he didn’t ask me when he wrote his book!”

Wainwright had just survived a high drama when her father, having read her book, phoned.

“I was on a mountain, and it was very icy, and I slipped and almost fell to my death. As I was slipping down the hill, my partner grabbed my foot, and then the other person that we were walking with grabbed his foot, and they pulled me back, and it was this crazy moment,” she says.

“Then my dad called me and said these nice things. He was really moved and he loved it.”

If he quibbled about her version of some events, he came to an acceptance. “It was like this very beautiful, loving moment,” she recalls.

He later came to a launch show, comprising readings and songs, and it hit him hard. “So we went through it,” she says. “We always do this, the Wainwrights: we talk it out, yell it out, cry it out or whatever …

“The outcome remains a father-and-daughter relationship like many,” she continues. “But in the case of my father it’s also the passing down of a torch because it’s so obvious, especially when I sing on stage alone with my guitar – how influenced I am by him and his music, whether I want to be or not. I mean, the songwriting is not exactly the same but there are a lot of similarities, and it’s more that we have the same life.”

As she does with Rufus. Asked if the family was a competitive environment, she says her father “could have been annoyed sometimes that his children were taking up some of the bandwidth. But recently – and in some ways after this argument over the book – he’s become really proud, and is able to say that.”

She believes her obsession with truth and soul-baring has compromised her commercial success, as has her aversion to playing the stardom game of carefully primped and plotted careers. “If there’s one thing that I’ve never been, it’s strategic!” she says, laughing.

Nor in her love life, until finding her current partner in her 40s, after a messy divorce that limited access to her children. In the book she says it was only then she started to grow the thick skin her therapist recommended, even if it’s not a skin in which she feels comfortable – perhaps, I suggest, because vulnerability is the lifeblood of her art. The idea intrigues her.

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She also writes about being taught to be an outsider within her family.

“I think being a misfit of sorts was the goal! My mother was very proud of her different lifestyle. We grew up in a well-to-do neighbourhood and we stuck out like a sore thumb with our outfits and the fact that they were folk singers.”

If being an outsider goes hand-in-hand with her vulnerability, the pay-off comes on stage, “in the light, on a pair of high heels, in a position of power … Yes, I’m vulnerable,” she admits, “but I’m hopefully always winning them over – and not falling apart!”

Martha Wainwright plays at Sydney’s City Recital Hall on May 10 and at Melbourne’s Recital Centre on May 17. Australian tour details: https://marthawainwright.com/shows

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