Tanya Thompson

Thompson ran away from home at fifteen and spent the middle eighties passing herself off as a world-travelled countess, an act she sustained well enough to take in the FBI, the DEA and Interpol along with a good many people who ought to have known better. Assuming Names is her account of it, written against the newspaper reporting of the time, and the interesting part is less the deceptions themselves than how readily the adults around her supplied the details she needed to keep going. She has since written Night of the Rat and Sweet Freaks. She is not the Tanya Thompson who sits in the New South Wales parliament.