Alannah puts pain on pages

FROM afar it looked like a fairytale trajectory, but for fashion designer Alannah Hill it sometimes felt more like a life or death proposition as she climbed to dizzying heights of success after fleeing Tasmania as a troubled teenager.

Next week the Melbournebased 55-year-old renowned for her dramatic, ultra-feminine creations and personal style will return to Tasmania to launch her searing memoir, Butterfly On a Pin.

Subtitled A Memoir of Love, Despair and Reinvention, the book catalogues some of the traumatic childhood events from which Ms Hill believes she will never fully recover, and her determination to reinvent herself through clothes.

At the height of her success, Ms Hill’s eponymous label was sold in leading department stores internationally as well as in destination stand-alone boutiques in Australia. She left the business that produced her luxurious ranges in 2013.

Ahead of her visit to Fullers Bookshop in Hobart on Tuesday, Ms Hill said that though she had been writing the book in her head for 30 years, it was a shock to see it on bookstore shelves.

“It’s confronting and alarming, and I have thought, ‘What have I done?’” she said.

“It takes a lot of nerve to write a memoir. But it’s out of my control now.”

Ms Hill said she was embracing the reader response to her candidly expressed life story.

“It is the comfort of strangers that has pulled me through, people coming up and telling me they love my clothing and they love my book.

“Many of the girls at a signing yesterday were like me — struggling, paddling beneath the surface, keeping secrets. They were crying. I was crying.” Read more about Alannah Hill’s tumultuous life story in

today.