Copy of article appearing in Mt Druitt/St Marys Standard 1 December 2004
Copy from Mt Druitt/St Marys Standard – 1 December 2004
Chat rooms exposed
ADDICTED: Vena McGrath has become a chat room fiction author.
EMILY SMITH
VENA McGrath always wanted to
be an author but she never
dreamed she would end up writing
about the seedy underworld of
internet chat rooms.
The Erskine Park resident admits
she was ‘‘addicted to the
intimacy’’ of internet chat rooms,
to the extent that she withdrew
from family and friends.
Now the 59 year-old has written
a book about her experiences on
the internet and the people she
met.
Entitled Secrets, Lies and Chat
the ‘‘warts and all’’ book is set for
pre-release in January and took
her a year to complete.
‘‘I had written all these stories
but it wasn’t until I showed them
to a friend that he suggested I
write a book,’’ Ms McGrath said.
The book is classified as fiction,
names and places are changed in
order to protect the identities, but
Ms McGrath said it was completely
autobiographical.
‘‘I felt I needed to get this story
out there about what can happen
when you are naive and vulnerable
and you discover chat
rooms.’’
Ms McGrath first discovered the
internet in 1997 when her son
helped her to set up a home
computer.
It was 11 years after her marriage
broke up, her children had
left home and she was working for
a Government Department.
‘‘At first I was tentative, then I
saw these chat rooms, it was very
enticing to someone living on her
own,’’ Ms McGrath said.
‘‘I got addicted to the interaction
and the feeling that when you
come from work you are not
alone.’’ Ms McGrath would spend
over eight hours a day on chat and
all weekend.
She formed a number of relationships
and flew to cities
around Australia to meet people
she had befriended over the
internet. ‘‘I met men who were
living double lives, men who were
married or who weren’t who they
said they were,’’ she said.
Ms McGrath hopes her book
will help others to avoid the
pitfalls of the internet and to
encourage parents to monitor
their children. ‘‘The anonymity is
so dangerous, people get sucked in
and ripped off and children are the
most vulnerable.’’
Secrets, Lies and Chat will be
available through Bedtime Books
from March next year. For more
information go to:
w w w . a u t h o r s d e n . c o m /
venamcgrath
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