Fifty Shades of Chick Lit at the 2013 Perth Writers Festival, ABC Big Ideas
Anita Heiss, Zoe Foster and me discussing why there is no such thing as men’s writing. Was Jane Austen the world’s first chick lit writer? (Answer: no). Why was Sylvia Plath’s merciless novel THE BELL JAR given a lipstick print cover for its 50th anniversary? The Stella Prize, the ranking of women’s fiction and other matters all get a look in….
Mingus, one of Pam's hundred lovers
Inspired by the beautiful photographs that readers have sent me regarding their own hundred lovers, I’m inviting anyone who cares to send to me a pic of a lover, and I’ll post it here.
And here’s the first pic, which Pam Bourke of Brisbane kindly sent me. She reckons it’s two loves with the one stone: her cat, Mingus, named for her other love, the jazz musician Charlie Mingus.
Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Pam’s two loves, Mingus and Mingus! Please keep ‘em coming!
Edwina Shaw on Helen Garner\’s THE SPARE ROOM
Very chuffed to get mentioned in the same breath as Helen Garner in last weekend’s THE AUSTRALIAN. I’ve been belatedly alerted to Brisbane writer Edwina Shaw writing on her favourite novel. She chose the miraculous THE SPARE ROOM by Helen Garner.
I know that, at another time, Tegan Bennett Daylight has also written in the Oz’s literary pages about the influence of Helen Garner. Now, as it happens, just recently I’ve had reason to read my first ever piece of published fiction, in the women’s liberation journal HECATE, published by the esteemed Carole Ferrier out of the University of Queensland English Department.
The year was 1985 and the story was titled GETTING THINGS DONE and if there was ever a better homage to early Helen Garner I’ve yet to read it. It’s a weird, echoey, sort of piece, like it might have been written by a distant relative (ahem) or at least someone who had been taught to write English by an English teacher by the name of Helen Garner.
Garner, as well as being the most tremendous stylist, has a oh-oh-I-think-I’ve-just-fallen-in-love quality. You love her characters, everything about them: the way they talk, the way they move, especially the way they love children. I was completely in love, as evidenced by that story. No-one does does small children the way Garner does and I remember that in the movie MONKEY GRIP I thought the people were all wrong — the actors playing the characters I mean — Noni Hazelhurst? REALLY? — but I thought Garner’s daughter Alice was heartstoppingly, blazingly, WONDERFUL in the film version of MONKEY GRIP. I loved the whole thing — the real daughter playing the fictional daughter playing the cinematic daughter. I love the way that REAL LIFE is captured so finely, so intimately and so well in every single thing that Garner does, and I just do not get this criticism of her work that she has no understanding of the difference beween life and art. I think she understands PERFECTLY.
I can honestly say that no other Australian writer has influenced me as much as Garner. Even though I adore Stead and White and Malouf (well, parts) and of course Carey’s OSCAR AND LUCINDA was so very, very wonderful and somehow illuminating for a whole raft of Australian writers who came after him. I am in debt to Kylie Tennett and Miles Franklin and Sumner Lock Elliot and George Johnston (and, most especially) to Charmian Clift, but no other Australian writer made me think not just — I want to do this! But — I’m going to have a crack at this!
So, thank you Edwina Shaw (whose own novel is in my lurching TBR pile — shamefully, shamefully, all these months later). I am going to read it now because any writer who admires Helen Garner is a writer who cares.
I might just pen a piece myself on the influence of Helen Garner’s fiction on a generation of Australian women writers. She makes you want to talk like her. She makes you want to be her friend so you can live in a Helen Garner book all the rest of your days and have her steely, flinty, loving eye forever cast upon you.
FOR A WHILE now I’ve had this little private theory that writers experience time differently to other folk. Not in a better way, or a superior way, just in a different way.
My theory goes that, unlike most, writers (and I would hazard a guess all creative artists) are born with a sort of inner clock, already ticking. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, exist to be filled, that is, filled by something made.
Every artist I know seeks to create meaning from what he or she sees before his or her eyes. If not meaning, then call it form from formlessness, messages from chaos, a recording of beauty, horror, or of the ordinary, struggling days. An artist seeks the essence of the thing, the passing light, the fleeting moment, to speak out loud the pieces of the puzzle.
Every writer I know is compelled by time. Many years ago I was struck by an interview with AS (Toni) Byatt, speaking of her own artistic maths, in that she had worked out some mystical formula involving her age, divided by her working practice/model, giving her a pretty exact approximation of how many books she had left in her. Ditto, Donna Tartt, a notoriously slow writer, who has also figured out the time/book equation.
Like King Canute sitting in his throne, waves lapping around his feet, writers write as a way of holding back the tide. Of course, unlike King Canute they know the tide is coming and even their vanity tells them that they too – like Canute and every other human soul born into consciousness – will be washed away. But, for me and I suspect for many other writers, writing is a way of holding back the tide.
Writing is a way of fixing life to the page. So, this is life! This is us, passing, more than a collection of cells. We lived! We breathed! We passed this way! If time is the vessel in which life is carried, then every hour, every day, every second counts.
I have a friend, a writer and an artist who, when he was a boy, used to write himself a letter. An ordinary letter, describing his day, his feelings, his life to that moment. Then he would climb on a chair and, reaching as high as he could, toss it on the top of the highest wardrobe. He then placed an arbitrary date in his diary, say, six months to the day, when he would allow himself to climb back up onto the chair – using cushions and piles of books – to retrieve his letter to himself.
He opened it with wonder. Who was he now, reading his letter? Was he the same boy who had stood on a chair and threw up his letter? Where had he gone then, his old self? Was time captured in the ink of the pen he once held? I think I may have used this as a scene in a book somewhere.
I remember being twenty-four, twenty-five years old, and thinking: “I don’t have time to waste. I must write!” I was conscious of time then, of every passing day. I already knew then that life is fleet, so swiftly passing, the seconds, the moments, and that I wished to put out my hand and cry: Stop!
In that impulse to shout Stop! lies the artistic compulsion. Time is the reason I write books: to witness life’s passing, to record the ordinary agonies of ordinary existence, to make a sort of time capsule for the future. I don’t mean writing for posterity (Ahem – only time decides which writer achieves artistic immortality, so it can’t be for that). I don’t mean writing as a huge fat exercise in narcissism (although – double ahem – all writers must have a dose of that to even begin to think anyone might be interested in what they have to say).
I mean writing because one has a life in which to create meaning. Every one of us has a life to shape, to give meaning to, to use as we wish. For writers, there is never any One day I am going to write an amazing book. For writers, there is only writing the book, even if – alas! – it doesn’t prove to be as amazing as one originally hoped. For me, life would have a strange futility if I couldn’t seek to puzzle out meaning, to make use of the days. I don’t wish to merely record my own puzzlement (I’m not vain enough to think anyone would be interested in that). I want to record this particular moment, this puzzlement, this time we collectively swim in.
Yesterday another writer friend sent me some images of long-ago Paris (above). What impulse caused me to weep looking into the faces of the dead? Once alive, with washing up to do, a house to sweep, money to earn. How alive they look! Yet how many years dead they are! I had the same wounded, tender feeling walking around Victor Hugo’s apartments in Place des Voges in Paris, or in the tiny ramshackle house where Balzac lived, with a special escape hatch so he could run away from his creditors.
Life! Create! Aim to be like Balzac and create your hundred characters, every one of them alive, and breathing! Life, do your worst, keep that tide coming, but, please, please, let me write just one more book.
“The story does not exist as a story until the writer makes it.” Helen Garner
A story is not lying there on the ground like a pebble, waiting to be picked up.
Reasons to love Helen Garner, or why a life is simply a life and not a book. A book is a story, made by the bare hands and mind and heart and soul of a writer.
These are my streets, BrizVegas. And click on The Go Betweens to listen to the songs of those streets.
Doris Lessing copyright Eamonn McCabe, with thanks
I see I am not the only one to find Pamela Stephenson’s comments on the ABC’s Q and A panel this week so fascinating. An actor, sex therapist, comedian and wife of Billy Connolly, I heard a long time ago — through a bizarre series of personal links — that she had chosen to have breast implants and I had also read about her choice to have plastic surgery, and to use Botox.
But the other night on Q and A, in answer to a question from a young woman in the audience about why someone would choose medical intervention rather than simply accept the ageing process (I’m paraphrasing here) she replied that it was because she “wanted to be a babe.”
The other members of the panel felt compelled to add the PC line that surgery/intervention is up to each individual woman, and that no woman (or man) should diss another woman for having it etc etc. But can I say here that actually there is a very real argument for supporting women so that they can make the choice NOT to have such surgery or intervention?
I know all the arguments: but you use lipstick don’t you? Hairdryers and skin lotions and face powder and all those other things that constitute artiface? Humans — men and women — have been adorning, adding, subtracting, tatooing, extending their lips or their ears with rings or plates or whatever, ever since humans had bodies.
Well, yes. Each of us is probably engaged, to a greater or lesser extent, with presenting our best physical self to the world. And every woman — no matter how plain or how beautiful or how ugly – can tell you a story about how the way she looks has resulted in certain outcomes. When I was writing ON BEAUTY, I catalogued what happened to humans who are beautiful and the effects of beauty are often very real rather than symbolic. A beautiful woman — an exceptionally beautiful woman I mean, not just a pretty one — has to get around her own beauty, so to speak, and so does an ugly one.
Every one of us, too, has a rough idea of where we fall on the beauty scale. I have the kind of appearance that appeals to a certain kind of man, but another kind of man finds no appeal whatsoever in my face. I am still recovering from the wound of being told that I most resemble Rowan Atkinson in his Mr Bean persona.
And every one of us is vain, to a greater or lesser degree. For instance, when I was in my early 40s, I wrote a hot-hearted defence of grey hair and in a flame of self-righteousness I declared that I, Susan Johnson, would NEVER dye my hair. I listed all the women in the public eye who are still not grey –Susan Sarandon, Madonna, Hilary Clinton, Quentin Bryce, Hilary McPhee — and I could hardly name any who had eschewed the dye bottle (Emmy Lou Harris is the pin up silver haired girl).
But now I am 55 years old, and I had to return to the workforce recently. I am working with people not only ten years younger than me but twenty years and thirty years younger. So — in a typical slinking-out-the-back-door compromise — I use wash-out six-weekly rinses (NOT dye!! NOT dye) to colour my hair, trying to convince myself that since I am not DYEING my hair it is not artificially coloured. Yeah, right.
Look, no way around it: I am dying. I am on the train that is going in only one direction, and what dyeing your hair or Botoxing your face or getting a surgeon to pull up the skin of your sagging jaw is trying to do is pull the emergency stop cord.
But, hey, folks, the train aint going to stop! It’s going one way, and what the grey hair and the sagging and the wrinkles are telling you is that your time with dark hair and no sags and no wrinkles is over. Move over! Let the unlined youth climb aboard! Unclutch your hands! Let life pass over you, let the trajectory of birth to death continue on its way.
Mourn your unblemished, smooth skin. Mourn your glossy curls. Yes, it’s a grief, no way around it: it’s a grief because it’s about loss. Loss feels like all the other losses that have come before, all the losses like Russian dolls packed inside you.
But, sweetie, sweetie, you can’t be a babe at sixty. You just can’t, no matter how sexy you feel. For the record I feel sexier now, at 55, than I have felt in a long, long time, and possibly part of that is because I know my physical self is altering. I know my face is passing away, and that hurts.
Don’t think I haven’t noticed that Helen Garner is still dying her hair. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how bright, crazy-red the hair on Kate Grenville’s head is now, and how it keeps getting brighter and brighter. Don’t think I haven’t seen Lily Brett’s dark, curled head, the beautiful kohl-rimmed eyes.
We are all going on that necessary journey, as Colette once said. But let us travel like Doris Lessing, who said that when she finally understood that she had entered the terrain of the invisible older woman she felt grief, yes, but she also felt strangely free, as if she finally stood revealed, without her carapce, as if she was at last herself. I want that, too: I have a lot of fears about how I am going to get there from here but I am not enough afraid to yearn, still, to be a babe.
Ahead of my Melbourne Writers’ Festival events this weekend, and the Brisbane Writers’ Festival the following week, I thought I’s re-post the excellent Ms Sandra Hogan’s interview in Perilous Adventures It’s about writing, and life, and the art of fiction, which is a version of the art of life….
Where to start? Haven’t had a chance to catch my breath, hence dearth of blog posts…apologies.
Well, let’s start with last weekend at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival. I hear that previous festivals have been waterlogged and muddy but, hey, someone was choreographing the sun, the sky, the feel of the very air so that whichever way the eye fell there was something lovely. I had my first winter swim in the Pacific and I couldn’t even begin to describe the glory of it.
The fesitval itself went off like clockwork — amazing team of lovely volunteers pointing hapless writers in the right direction, manning the coffee machine like barristas, holding up the 10 MINUTES sign as sessions neared their end, generally making sure that everything was effortless. The crowds were great — big, noisy, INVOLVED people, never short of a word, always interesting. Not one question where I wished I had a water pistol.
All the panels were brilliantly thought out — great mix of chairs and what is known as “the talent”. For me, this was the highlight — getting to meet so many of my fab-co-panellists, as well as getting to meet actual readers, some of whom go back to A BETTER WOMAN (including a woman GP who regularly deals with patients with birth traumas who sometimes refers women to this memoir).
The co-panellists were astonishing. BIG fem crush on Jane Caro (who knew she was such a knock-out? I suppose I should have suspected when she became the first woman on Oz TV to say “vagina” out loud). The gorgeous Dr Bella Ellwood-Clayton, sexual anthropologist, did the panel on sexual desire with me and was SO interesting. I got to meet in the flesh the wonderful Ailsa Piper (whose memoir SINNING THROUGH SPAIN — about carrying sins for friends to walk off — is brilliant) and I also got to meet the wonderful Danielle Miller, who writes terrific books — and works in schools — helping young women and girls build their confidence.
I felt like I was in this glorious little bubble of goodwill. Terrific writers — Charlotte Wood, Gail Jones (who I didn’t get to meet) — actually, more women than men, come to think of it, and several people remarked about the number of Godesses walking around. That might sound like a bit of hippy-chick talk but, hey, I am a bit of a sucker for hippy-chick talk…
Anyway, fantastic. Congratulations to Jonathan, for pulling the whole thing off so wonderfully — his first time too.
Also, wanted to say that because I had a week off, I’ve been READING. Yes. Can I just say that Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides have a kind of hallucinatory genius for detail, for the one true thing. Contemporary American fiction is where it is at, in my opinion. Leaves all the Brit restrained mannerliness dead in the water….as much as I admire Ian McEwen etc, I LOVE LOVE LOVE the rich, meandering, off-the-wall weirdness and emotional truth of those Yankee boys. Go, Franzen. Go, Eugenides. Respect.
