A psychic told Lally Katz she could have it all – there was just one thing in her way

If there was a prize for best book title, Lally Katz’s new memoir would win hands down. The playwright and screenwriter has just published My Cursed Vagina, a memoir of her search for love – and, by extension, her vagina. It’s not as sordid as it might sound, but it is extraordinarily candid. And very funny.

When Katz appears on my screen over Zoom from LA (born in the US, she moved to Australia as a child, and relocated to LA several years ago), I open our interview with a question I’ve never asked anyone before.

How is her vagina? “You know what? It’s going pretty well,” she says. “They’re all going to conk out eventually, but for now, the vagina is going pretty good.”

A prolific playwright, Katz has long mined her personal life for her creative output. Among the 50 or so plays she has written, including A Golem Story and Neighbourhood Watch, two have earned her the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize, and she’s earned several Green Room awards. She wrote the libretto for Kate Miller-Heidke’s Helpmann Award-winning 2015 opera The Rabbits, and she’s written for television – everything from Wentworth to the recent adaptation of Shaun Tan’s Tales From Outer Suburbia and the comedy-crime series Sunny Nights – and has sold several TV pilots to US studios.

But whatever she’s working on, Katz is collecting stories from her own life – no matter how intimate or embarrassing. The impetus for the memoir came from her 2013 one-woman show Stories I Want to Tell You In Person, which toured extensively and was adapted for an ABC TV production. She wrote “about a third” of it before other projects overtook it.

In 2016, she relocated to LA for fresh adventures, hoping to find her soulmate and make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood. When her agent discovered the contract for the memoir a couple of years ago, they asked Katz if she wanted to get out of the deal.

“I was like no, I want to do it! And they still wanted it, 12 years later,” she says. And by this time, Katz had even more material – 15 years’ worth of adventures and anecdotes. The embodiment of “doing it for the anecdote”. Katz will go with many situations in service of the plot, and once said, “everything I do, I do to get a story, learn about a character or have an experience that I can write about”.

She doesn’t keep a diary, per se, but she does write everything down. Everything. “And with things I’ve done that with, I remember everything, detail for detail.”

Stories I Want To Tell You in Person was autobiographical, but very gentle compared to the tales in My Cursed Vagina. “The first third of it is stuff I had in the stage show and then life keeps going – and the stage show was much more wholesome,” says Katz.

Katz re-tells the story of the curse at the centre of that show. In 2010, while in New York on a Churchill Fellowship for playwriting, she visited a shopfront psychic, Cookie, who told Katz her love life was cursed. The curse, Cookie said, was keeping Katz from having it all, but she could thwart it with large sums of (her Fellowship) money. On that visit, she’d already blown through most of her grant and didn’t have enough cash, so the curse remained. Katz came back to Australia, immortalising Cookie in Stories I Want To Tell You In Person.

On a subsequent visit to New York, Katz went back to Cookie (don’t worry, she knows psychics aren’t real; she just can’t help herself) who revealed that it wasn’t just her love life that was cursed, it was, in fact, her vagina, which “smells like rotting corpses to all men”.

Naturally, Katz paid to lift the curse.

Already a self-confessed neurotic though, she began to frame her romantic misadventures – and other aspects of her life – through the curse.

There’s her slightly cringe-inducing relationship with a Melbourne partner (most of the names in the book are changed), her illness from an ovarian cyst (surely the curse), and her creative journey as a writer.

But mostly the memoir is a tour of Katz’s dating life, the minutiae of which she compulsively records. Even as she’s breaking up with someone, she’ll snap some photos to remember the details. One-night stands are memorialised on her phone – pictures of the bedside tables, the messy bed.

When her show took Katz to Mexico, she stopped over in Texas, bought some hotpants on a whim, and joined Tinder. After meeting a man, and desperately hoping it would evolve into true love (again), a plot twist emerges.

Hilariously, Katz whispers it now, so her husband, who is working at home, won’t hear. “The herpes”.

Her husband, whose name is changed in the book, hasn’t read the memoir, but does know about the herpes. As does anyone who encounters Katz. Within minutes of a doctor telling her she needn’t tell anyone about her virus, Katz immediately tells her brother. A week later, she’s “told most people I know that I have herpes. And some people I don’t know.”

“I’ve always, always been an oversharer,” Katz says. When we talk, her mum is still reading the book. “It’s hard for her,” Katz says with a laugh, but her dad read it in one day and loved it.

“My dad is surprisingly fine. He’s always been very blasé about that stuff. As soon as I got herpes, I called my parents. They were like, ‘oh, it’s no big deal’, and they were Googling it and like, ‘oh interesting, you’ve got the kind that’s usually cold sores’. They were totally involved in the journey of it – there’s nothing that’s news to them.”

The virus doesn’t stop Katz’s search for true love and the “three children and success” that Cookie predicted.

“That there was no way I didn’t want to tell this as the truth, as it had been for me. Once I got herpes I was telling every single person and so many people had it! I realised, oh, there’s so much shame around it. If we all just sort of talked about that, it wouldn’t be this big thing,” Katz says. “I felt like there was no way to tell (this memoir) without … explicit detail. But it is like … the first part of the book is like, ‘oh, ok’ – and then bang. It’s on!’

Eventually, Katz’s search for love is fruitful, and there’s even a Vegas wedding (with some drama, of course.)

And married life did not quash her need to overshare; when she and her husband try for a baby, there are two miscarriages, and Katz details in visceral detail how she examined what she expelled from her body.

“The publishers sent me a couple of reader reviews, and they were … OK with it, but it is graphic. When I read it now I’m like … I’d definitely do it again, but I was in a state,” she says. “Maybe not all women do that,” she says, laughing. “But maybe some do? You’ve had this thing in your body, this thing that you’ve got such a connection with, and then it’s … coming out. I was just compelled to find out.”

Now living in LA’s suburbs with her husband and seven-year-old son – “I think my next book will be called ‘soccer mom’” – Katz is working on a play for MTC, co-writing a romcom with comedian Josh Thomas, still writing for TV and finding stories in everyone she meets. “The neighbours now tell me when they have a story about someone.” she says.

Surely she’s considered a TV adaptation of My Cursed Vagina? “I would love that! I’d love the book to have as much life as possible,” Katz says. And given she’s already sold a pilot in the US called Herpes, Hollywood should cope with the title of this one.

“I’m not sure how the title would go down here, but you know what? I’m going to do it.”

My Cursed Vagina (Allen & Unwin) by Lally Katz, is out now.

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