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Is it hits you want, anyway? Is a writer's blog simply a marketing device aimed at selling more books, or is it a way of engaging with readers, as Angela of the entertaining Literary Minded blog suggested when for a short time I stopped blogging?

I must admit that sometimes blogging is a bit of a chore: it takes up time and I don't really have the spare hours to spend linking this blog to all the things I should be linking it to, or to be doing guest posts, or reading all the things in cyberspace I should be reading or attending to. I don't have enough hours in my days.

I must admit, too, to finding the anonymous aspect of cyberspace slightly creepy. Anyone could be reading this! Disgruntled former lovers, husbands, friends, your mother. It is true that once I had an email from a man I met twenty-five years ago who kindly remembered how young and hopeful my eyes once were.

The best part is how this blog shows people are still passionate about books. The world may indeed be going to hell in a handcart but it's going with people holding books in their hands. Let this quote from Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet speak for us holding them: 'Art gives the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of living. Whilst feeling the slings and arrows of Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we do not feel our own...Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art or rather elementary forms of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all bring with them their own disappointments. One grows sated or disillusioned with love. We wake from sleep and whilst we slept, we did not live. The price of drugs is the ruin of the very body they were used to stimulate. But there is no disillusion in art because its illusory nature is clear from the start. One does not wake from art because, although we dream it, we are not asleep.'

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to post comments, or to email me privately. It's been a very happy experience getting to meet so many interesting people, albeit in cyberspace. Happy birthday, blog!
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This is the view from the desk in Dieppe where I just spent a very productive time working. I went to write, undisturbed by the needs of two children, house, dog, partner, aka the whole catastrophe (Zorba). (Thanks to kindness of said partner in giving me leave though).

Got a lot of work done, about another 7,000 words of MY HUNDRED LOVERS.
One of the most thrilling things to happen while I was there was that my visit happened to coincide with the American election. I was staying in a fisherman's cottage in the old part of the port, with French TV, and the French went absolutely crazy about Obama. To hear chanting outside in the streets of 'Yes, we can!', in heavy French accents, while watching on televsion elderly black American women celebrating in Paris was a strange, exhilarating experience.

The French have a long and honourable tradition of supporting black Americans, artists mainly, from Josephine Baker to James Baldwin to many others in between (of course the less said about the French treatment of its Jewish and Algerian citizens the better...) French television ran a series of documentary/montage/interviews, some overlaid with Billie Holiday's STRANGE FRUIT, one of the finest anti-racist songs ever, eerie, plaintive, mesmerising, and there was also footage of King's unforgettable I Have A Dream speech.

The morning of the actual election I raced to the television to see if the results had been announced. It was so moving to see black Americans in tears, and white Americans, and Latinos and Italian-Americans, live from all across America, and in Paris, and all around the world. There were celebrations in Kenya, North Africa, Hawaii, and I sat there in a little kitchen in Dieppe, miles from home, weeping with joy.
]]> http://www.abetterwoman.net/sphpblog_0511/index.php?entry=entry081029-071118 The European English Messenger journal, by English literature academic Carmen Rosillo from the University of Granada.

Q1: Life in Seven Mistakes reached number three on new entries list of the bookseller last August when you attended the Melbourne writer’s festival. Can you explain what your experience was like?

A: I always find writers’ festival rewarding, because it connects writers with readers in a very intimate way. You can sometimes feel very shut off from readers – writing a book for two or three years, in a room, alone --- and meeting your readers is like a shot in the arm, a joyful thing that sends you scurrying back to your room, renewed. It is exhausting though because I think temperamentally most writers are introverts, but it is good for introverts to pretend to be extroverts sometimes!

Q2: The idea of a writer struggling to combine the demands of creation with a child and husband is a common floor in some of your books such as A Better Woman, The Broken Book and Life in Seven Mistakes. Can it be seen as a gleam of your own life?

A: Most definitely. I read an article by the Irish writer and Booker Prize winner Anne Enright recently in which she said that she didn’t understand writers who felt children were the enemies of promise, and she felt that the pram in the hall was a fine thing for a writer. Well, yes, I agree emotionally – having children is the ultimate way of engaging with the world in a very hands-on, visceral way, and it stretches you emotionally in very challenging ways (Fay Weldon says you can believe you are a nice person until you have children!) However, it is also exhausting, time-consuming, expensive and very, very hard.
I have discovered that, deep-down, I believe in a very unreconstructed, antediluvian way that a ‘real’ artist gives her life over to art, and doesn’t compromise her art by having children! In some ways I DO think that having children slowed me up, and profoundly compromised me for all times. And yet having children also engaged me with life on the deepest level, and who knows if my writing might be a more sterile, impoverished thing if I hadn’t had them? I think all writers are quite good at giving reasons why they are as never as brilliant as they might have been, and perhaps the having/not having of children argument is simply another version of that! (Arguably the world's deepest, richest, most wonderful books have been written by childless women, so having a child is therefore not a passport into a 'better' or deeper emotional state, or resonance: having a child does not automatically make you a 'better' person, or indeed a better writer).
I do know my life is enriched by my children, but I am not entirely sure my art is….it is very, very hard for me to combine writing with running a household, having children, and a marriage. Most of the world’s greatest women writers did not have children. This is not an accidental fact.

Q3: Using a quote form Shakespeare’s As You Like It as an epigraph of your novel, it is obvious you share the vision of people as players using the world as their stage. From your point of view, does this imply justifying the entire irrational things people come trough?

A: What I meant by using that quote is that life is indeed an act in seven stages, from infant to old person, sans teeth, and all of it is largely played out in the most blind, irrational way. We live our lives in essence as one long mistake, because our lives are not known things but a stumble into the dark, and everything we do is in a sense a mistake, in the sense of the Oscar Wilde quote of ‘experience being the name we give to our mistakes.’ I believe, deeply, that human beings are more irrational that they are prepared to believe.

Q4: Reviewers have labelled your novel as: “a black comedy about a dysfunctional Queensland family”, “a window into ordinary suburban life”, or “black family comedy” But it is important to reveal to the non-Australian readers that the roots of your novel are the problems of baby boomers in Australia. What comes to your mind when you hear that word? Do baby boomers represent a challenge for their previous generation?

A: Yes, the main character of Elizabeth is a baby-boomer, and by that I mean she is a member of the great swollen generation of children born in the years immediately following the second world war, those soixante-huiters who through their sheer numbers had an enormous social, political and economic effect on the world (and the world will start paying once they hit retirement!). I chose this character because one of the most cherished beliefs of baby-boomers is that they can ‘have it all’, that ‘you’re worth it’ and that self-definition is everything. But here, in this novel, Elizabeth is confronted by a choice between duty and self. Duty hardly exists as a concept any more, and I wanted to illustrate what might happen when a baby-boomer comes face to face with it.


Q5: There are three main narrative voices in the novel, Elizabeth the adult daughter, her father Bob and her mum Nancy. Each alternately expresses their personal feelings, attitudes and reaction during the Christmas reunion. Did any voice prove more challenging than the others? Why?

A: I suppose that Bob was the most difficult, being so very far removed from my own experience. But once I found a way inside him, if you like, once I understood him to be a kind of Biblical father figure, or at least that was how he understood himself, as saviour, protector and head of his family, that I could do it. I came to love all these characters and saw that it is really true that once you understand the world from another person’s experience, it is easier to forgive and far, far harder to be absolute about anything. That is the great gift of fiction.

Q6: I am also curious about how you can achieve three such distinct voices (quite far from an easy task but one you accomplish beautifully) using just what you call an intimate voice, which people tend to confuse with autobiographical facts.

A: Yes, see my other answers. I try very hard for this intimacy, and wish to present a voice as close to life as possible, which is why I will often use my own lived emotional truths in my fiction. I want to ‘hear’ someone’s private, in-the-head voice, the voice in which they speak to themselves, and which the rest of the world cannot hear. I really believe in Edith Wharton’s maxim that fiction must show us the ‘back of the tapestry’ – that the world sees the front of the tapestry but what the world of fiction shows us is the ‘real’ world within, the world unimpeded by social convention, good behaviour, public standing. That to me is often a truer world than the public world.

Q8: I know you reject the claim that you use your personal life to write your novels. What do you think about critics saying that we are living in the memoir era?

A: I think it is true that there is a great thirst for truth. I think there is so much lying, fakery and Vaseline-over-the-camera out there in our celebrity-soaked world that people really want someone to tell the truth, and books that reflect real lives. So that’s why memoir is so popular I think.
And I do try really hard to keep my fiction truthful, as close to the real, lived, quotidian world as possible. So this is why it sometimes reads as autobiography --- and it is true that I use my own emotional truth, my own life of the emotions in my work. I don’t shirk from saying that – I know it is unfashionable to write from an emotional base, to be called ‘sentimental’ is the worst thing a writer called be called. But, actually, I would prefer to be called sentimental over a lot of things: sentiment to a reviewer can sometimes mean emotional truth to a reader.

Q9: It is obvious that Life in Seven Mistakes is not autobiographical but it reflects superbly a reality where, in some way, many readers can feel identified
with some of your characters. Can I say that Susan Johnson has gone a step further in her writing as in her marketing?

A: Well, thank you! There have been different responses to LIFE IN SEVEN MISTAKES from some readers (my books have always elicited strong responses from readers – they either love them or can’t stand them!) and this book is no different. Some readers prefer THE BROKEN BOOK, for being more ‘original’ but in many ways LIFE IN SEVEN MISTAKES is a more complex book because of its multiple voices. It was a more difficult book to write because of this and I would agree that it does take my writing a step further, in that it required a certain technical mastery that really stretched me. It took a long time to get right.
As to the autobiographical content, yes, I have always elicited that interest because my work does grow from a lived emotional truth. In other words, I write out of my emotional life, and obviously some of what I write about comes from lived events. BUT, and this is a big BUT, if I simply wrote down what happened to me in my life, no-one would be interested. You have to turn feeling into story, life into drama, experience into event.

Q10: Every writer has certain key topics and preoccupations. Could you summarize yours?

A: Exploring the gap between our imagined worlds and the real world; relationships between men and women; human yearning towards the numinous; the dynamics of the family; the role of the artist in society; exile and home; the changing role of women.

Q11: Many times you have been asked to review one of your novels and you always find it hard to describe what your book is about. Why is it so hard for you? Do you need to distance yourself from your writing and that’s the reason?

A: I think because any writer hopes to write the most complex, absorbing, world-within-a-world book, because we hope to get EVERYTHING in, then it becomes impossible to summarise the universe of a book in a line. A book should be about many things, don’t you think? To compress it to one thing trivialises a book in some way I think.

Q12: For you to be a writer is “to be a witness, in some way, to existence” but have you ever considered writing as a way to imagine another reality, because you are not living the life you wish or because you feel disappointed with the world you live in?

A: Oh, of course! I think most writers find life hard in a way, hence they are driven to reshape the world. Many, many writers were strange children, isolated from other children through illness, personality, desires. I think to be a writer essentially means to be someone who is solitary by nature – even though there have been lots of partying writers, the Hemingways and the Capotes and the Dorothy Parkers etc., there is some essential loneliness I think in most writers. I certainly prefer the life inside a book to the outside world sometimes…

Q13: In your youtube video you describe the novel as “a page turner” What makes you say that?

A: I was conscious of the complaints of some readers over THE BROKEN BOOK – ie the different time sequences, the chopping and changing from one scene in the main character’s life to another, and also the relative lack of plot. So I wanted this to be a plot-driven book, and by page-turner I simply mean I wanted the reader to be in a fever to turn to the next page, to find out what happens next!

Q14: It is hard to get Australian books in Europe. Why is so limited the distribution of books outside Australia?

A: I think the English language market is dominated by America. I am not completely au fait with book distribution politics but I think because of the sheer number of books – print runs of books – published in the States means that the world is sort of swamped by America. Culturally, as well. English novels are also more likely to be published in Europe than Australian novels, partly because of publishing territories.



]]> http://www.abetterwoman.net/sphpblog_0511/index.php?entry=entry081028-120030 What do you believe is the role of a 'critic' or reviewer? How does reviewing or criticism affect your work (if at all?)

Answer: 'Just this week I was reading a review of the UK’s Poet Laureate Andrew Motion’s new book (WAYS OF LIFE: ON PLACES: PAINTERS AND POETS, Faber) in the TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT and there was this quote from Motion’s forward to the book: ‘Reviewers stand at the gate between the solitary creator and the wide world: their response to a book not only affects its short-term life, but plays a pivotal part in the establishment or otherwise of its long-term future.’ I think Motion is largely right here, in that the books that we celebrate are very often the books celebrated by critics (think Peter Carey, Tim Winton, David Malouf, whose literary reputations are indivisible from their critical reputations – they have been reviewed by all the ‘serious’ critics in Australia for many years – Andrew Reimer, Peter Craven, Peter Pierce mainly – which subsequently enhances an author’s literary standing, and hence literary prizes, readerships etc. And yet it might also be argued that sometimes the occasional wild, unfettered, surprising book – and author -- somehow fails to be caught by the critical net, and a reputation is only built years after an author’s death (I’m thinking Christina Stead here). It is easier to see the effect of criticism given a decent period of time: George Gissing, for example, was generally critically underrated during his lifetime (he was well reviewed for only a short period) but since his death his literary reputation has grown.

I remember reading somewhere that most novelists pass out of cultural memory within fifty years, sometimes even the most popular novelists of their day (in the second half of the nineteenth century R D Blackmore was one of the most popular novelists in the English speaking world, with a huge readership, and he is now virtually forgotten). So, yes, while reviewers play a pivotal part in the establishment or otherwise of a book’s reputation, but it is actually time which is the final judge.’

‘In answer to the second part, yes, I think writers do respond to reviewers, either consciously or unconsciously. I used to read every single one but now I don’t: a bad review can knock the stuffing out of you, and since writers are working alone, often for many years, you have to maintain a kind of confidence or nerve. I find I can very easily lose that, although paradoxically I think a lot of writers also respond like Patrick White did: ‘I’ll show ‘em!’ If this sounds that, psychologically, a writer is a kind of wounded, narcissistic teenager, I wouldn’t argue: writers are big babies. Have I ever written something differently because of a review? I can’t think of any example but I know I wrote A BIG LIFE as a straight ahead birth-to-death story because my dad said he didn’t like the chopped-up time-change structure of FLYING LESSONS.’

]]> http://www.abetterwoman.net/sphpblog_0511/index.php?entry=entry081020-100804
I have a lot of images in my head to do with writing a novel. So excuse the mixed metaphors for a minute. One of the images is that in writing a book I need to feel like a swimmer, kicking my legs up around the nice sunny top of the water, but knowing that below me are the cold dark depths. I need to feel supported as it were by these waters, to know that there are miles and miles of water beneath my kicking legs and the ocean floor...that's the moment when you know a book is going to hold up, when you know that the water beneath you is endless.

Also, this: you need to turn yourself into a kind of tuning fork. I need to get everything extraneous out of my life, so that I can get a good, clear run at it, so that myself the fork can hear everything I need to hear. Eudora Welty writes of a writer collecting everything she needs using the 'geiger counter of the imagination'.

So, depthless oceans, geiger counters, running, tuning forks: all these images mean I am going to be away, concentrating on a book. Thanks for the interest, and I will check in for comments from time to time, and return to blogging when I cease to be a tuning fork. ]]> http://www.abetterwoman.net/sphpblog_0511/index.php?entry=entry081016-104547 Geraldine Brooks, an old colleague and friend from Sydney Morning Herald days, at the wonderful Joseph's Bookstore in Temple Fortune, near Golder's Green in North London last night.

She was her usual witty, intelligent and poised self (I know she has spoken elsewhere about having been a shy kid but for as long as I've known her -- since the early 80s -- she has had the most wonderful air of preternatural self-possession). She spoke about People of the Book, the novel she wrote after her Pulitzer Prize winning March. Geraldine, Anna Maria Dell'osso and me were the three feature writers on what used to be the Good Weekend section of the paper under the brilliant Valerie Lawson, but even then Geraldine was a star.

Last night the bookshop was filled with what I took to be local Jewish customers, mostly women, and every single person in the crowd had the most wonderful face. Lively, full of expression, any one of them could have come from a sixteenth century painting. As Geraldine spoke, I mused on the richness of the Jewish intellectual and cultural life, on the many thousands of astonishing painters and artists and filmmakers and writers the world has been lucky to know.

In answer to a question from the audience, Geraldine spoke about how she chooses her subjects. The idea for the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, the medieval manuscript saved rescued from the war in Bosnia, had its genesis when she worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Yet it was many years before she came to write it and she had a lot of trouble working out exactly how to tell it.

It struck me that some books are harder to write than others, and that it is our temperaments, our sensibilities, our experience of life that lead us to choose this subject over that. I could not write Geraldine's books in a million years, and she could not write mine (nor would she probably want to!). More than anything I admire the great humanity at the heart of Geraldine's work, its wonderful reach towards intelligent understanding.

My own book seemed suddenly small in comparison. The book I am working on is a fleeting, furtive thing, and I have to sneak up on it. To mix metaphors further, in the bath this morning I thought that writing a book is like making a fire: you start with a spark and you have to keep blowing and blowing. You hope to Christ that it is going to burn.

I've been reading Stephen King's memoir. He is a million times cleverer than I ever believed (and I sound just like one of those poncey lit. crit. types he so loathes because they are so patronising to him). He has the most wonderful image: he says that a writer is like Frankenstein, who hopes for the moment when the monster finally opens its watery yellow eyes. ]]> http://www.abetterwoman.net/sphpblog_0511/index.php?entry=entry081014-063922 Bookshow. I've been so impressed by the quality of reviewing this time around -- and after being such a scaredy cat about reading my reviews too....

Apologies about the erratic nature of the blogging. I'm trying to work on MY HUNDRED LOVERS, plus I have the essay ON BEAUTY to do for the MUP series, and suddenly I feel under pressure. I try and dash off this blog -- hence I spend endless time worrying about the wisdom of shooting my mouth off, or my foot off??? -- anyway, even dashed off things take time, and I'm wondering if I might stop writing it...NOT a plea for everyone to tell me not to stop (really!) just a shot from the bow (or whatever the expression is...)

Lots of people start blogging, and then stop, don't they? Anyhoo, back to work -- I've been up since four and it's now quarter to seven and children will soon be up...]]> http://www.abetterwoman.net/sphpblog_0511/index.php?entry=entry081009-132044
Nothing like the odd tourist shot to brighten up a blog, eh what? But which one is the statue?

Paris was a surprise. First, the Longchamp races, and the premier race event in the European season, apparently. I believe the Aga Khan's horse won the Prix de L'Arc de Triomphe but I know nothing about horses. All I could tell was that unlike Ascot, this was a race for the people, and ordinary Parisians turned out in their droves, as well as the rich of Europe. I am going to find out whether Proust ever went to Longchamp: it seems like his kind of place.

Then dinner in the exquisite Cafe de la Paix (this was a press trip, I hasten to add, and I will write more seriously for a newspaper later). But the real surprise of the trip was Cafe Oscar, where some of the other British journalists were going, because someone knew someone else etc.

Given the world economic meltdown with bankers about to throw themselves from buildings, this cabaret night in a beautiful old cafe with tiles and an old wooden bar and red velvet curtains felt like the epicentre of decadence, circa Berlin, 1931. Camp routines hosted by an Englishman in Paris, Toby Rose (who also happens to host the illustrious Cannes Palme Dog award) and song-sheets, then tumbling out into the autumn dawn to walk the deserted streets back to the hotel.

All in all the most shamelessly romantic, frivolous weekend I have spent in a long, long while. While Rome - er Paris - burns, eh...


POSTSCRIPT: My hunch was right about Proust and Longchamp. According to Wikipedia, Proust's Swann was a member of the Jockey Club de Paris (Proust himself was Jewish and would never have been admitted as a member). The Prix de l'Arc du Triomphe race was inaugurated by the Jockey Club in 1863 as the Grand Prix de Paris, and run at the Hippodrome de Longchamp. (The racecourse was painted by Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Pablo Picasso, among others.)
Wouldn't you know it: you try to fiddle while everything burns and still the smell of prejudice and rot reaches your nostrils.
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