There’s a pattern. Initially, for instance, author Carol Major suggests this story be about her publisher, Spineless Wonders, rather than herself. Then she proposes it be about her and her sister (Canadian poet Alice Major), who is releasing a new book simultaneously.

More of the pattern is found in the fact that for many years Major didn’t peddle her drawer full of manuscripts with appropriate vigour, because her late daughter was an artist, and Major wanted success for her daughter rather than herself, as if there were only so much success to go around – which there probably is.

You see it, too, in her being better known for mentoring and advising other writers than being one herself. She does this at Varuna, the National Writers’ House in Katoomba (a retreat for uninterrupted work), where she has become known as “the book whisperer”, so astute is she in helping clarify intent and meaning. The long list of her beneficiaries includes Leah Kaminsky, Vicki Laveau-Harvie, Andrew Kwong, Alice Nelson, Yvette Walker and Barry Lee Thompson.

Now, finally, she has her own first book out. Penned since she lost her daughter, it was one she had the confidence to push. The Asparagus Wars is a luminous, sometimes humorous and often harrowing memoir, interweaving many strands. One is the courage and wit of her adult daughter, who, already rendered virtually immobile by muscular dystrophy, is diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer.

Another is the distress and conflict among those trying care for this daughter (including one party resolutely prescribing blended asparagus), and a third is the parallels between war as a geopolitical eruption and war in everyday relationships.

Major partly wrote the book while visiting French towns savaged by the Great War, and she had lived through such in-the-trenches experiences as being in a surgical “tent” with her daughter while her bowel was operated on without anaesthetic (she was too weak to withstand one).

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These threads are drawn together as a series of letters penned to her daughter after she has died. One agent insisted this format would distance readers, whereas it actually creates a unique intimacy akin to eavesdropping, and has resulted in The Asparagus Wars being shortlisted for the prestigious International Beverly Prize for Literature.

Born in Scotland, Major migrated to Canada with her family as a child and then came to Australia. While completing a doctorate of creative arts at UTS, she spent time at Varuna and fell in love with the Blue Mountains, which she found “like Scotland, Canada and Australia all in one place”. She moved to Katoomba and in 2008 began consulting at Varuna.