Speaker 1: There are many types of unreliable narrator as a narrative device.
Speaker 1: The idea that we shouldn't blindly follow our protagonist or
Speaker 1: the person who's telling us the story is I'd argue
Speaker 1: a singular, delicious treat for a reader, the un self
Speaker 1: aware narrator or the duplicitous narrator, the narrator blinded by
Speaker 1: their own perspective who's incapable of seeing the truth of things.
Speaker 1: Literature is dotted with flawed lead characters and authorial trickery.
Speaker 1: Some personal favorites are Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, or
Speaker 1: Michel decretz Is The Hamilton Case, even Christos Chulkis's The Slap.
Speaker 2: These are all.
Speaker 1: Examples of the kind of book where a shifting perspective
Speaker 1: completely changes the way you feel about what you've read
Speaker 1: in the pages before. But there are other ways that
Speaker 1: an author can play with your expectations as a reader.
Speaker 1: One of them is when they share the worldview and
Speaker 1: thoughts of a character whose own experience of life is
Speaker 1: fractured or a skew in some way. Think of all
Speaker 1: those books you've read with a precocious child narrata who
Speaker 1: doesn't understand what they're seeing or describing for us, the
Speaker 1: unaware witness. So let's add to these ridly tricks one
Speaker 1: more complex task of empathy and depiction. How do you
Speaker 1: tell the story of someone whose connection to their own memories,
Speaker 1: their very sense of self is breaking, even broken beyond repair.
Speaker 1: How a might a work of art do justice to
Speaker 1: the experience of dementia? A couple of years ago, the
Speaker 1: film The Father with Olivia Coleman and Anthony Hopkins did
Speaker 1: a powerful job of it. Closer to home read this
Speaker 1: alumni Nonie Hazlehurst was in a film called June Again
Speaker 1: and was also terrific. Both of those films used a
Speaker 1: trick that so effectively got you into the experience of
Speaker 1: the dementia sufferer. At random points, they'd be having conversations
Speaker 1: with loved ones, and the films would change the actor
Speaker 1: who was playing the secondary characters. The new person, without
Speaker 1: missing a beat, would say the words that hold the conversation,
Speaker 1: and our protagonist would face them with utter confusion and
Speaker 1: a sense of dislocation. The new novel You Must Remember
Speaker 1: This by Melbourne based author Sean Wilson, employs the literary
Speaker 1: equivalent of this device. It follows Grace, a woman suffering
Speaker 1: from dementia, and moves between slippery memory and present day confusion,
Speaker 1: sharing her story, but also sharing the sense that that
Speaker 1: story is slipping away. Because the book begins with chapter ten,
Speaker 1: then follows it with chapter seven, then eleven, the whole
Speaker 1: book shifts and twists as Grace tries to find purchase
Speaker 1: in her own reality. It's deeply effective, a deeply moving approach,
Speaker 1: a tragedy of forgetting, and a story of hanging on
Speaker 1: to one's humanity as the illness strips it away. I'm
Speaker 1: Michael Williams, and this is read this to show about
Speaker 1: the books we love and the stories behind them. Did
Speaker 1: I read somewhere that you must remember this had one
Speaker 1: iteration where it was written for performance rather than for
Speaker 1: the page.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we're going back over a decade now. I
Speaker 3: originally wrote it for the stage, and it got a
Speaker 3: bit of attention from some theater companies, didn't ultimately make
Speaker 3: it on stage. And not long after I'd written it
Speaker 3: and was talking to theater companies, I saw The Father
Speaker 3: the play on stage because it was a play before
Speaker 3: it was a film, and quickly realized that my play
Speaker 3: was a little bit too close to that play, and
Speaker 3: it was very unlikely I was ever going to get
Speaker 3: it on main stage, so put it away, and then
Speaker 3: at a certain point I just thought, you know, let's
Speaker 3: have a go out rewriting it as a novel. And
Speaker 3: so a lot of the elements in the stage version
Speaker 3: aren't relatable to the novel. In the stage version, there's
Speaker 3: Graces on stage the whole time, there's no blackout, people
Speaker 3: are coming in and out from President Pass, and so
Speaker 3: there's probably a little bit more bleed in the President
Speaker 3: Pass in the stage version in order to get across
Speaker 3: that message in a different way. But some of the elements,
Speaker 3: some of the scenes, remain and have just sort of
Speaker 3: rewritten them for the page instead.
Speaker 1: It really surprised me, partly because the book is so
Speaker 1: accomplished on what I think of as particularly literary terms
Speaker 1: rather than theatrical terms. You know that the fragmentary nature
Speaker 1: of Grace's relationship with her reality and her past means
Speaker 1: that you have to have a very deft hand with metaphor,
Speaker 1: with how to express something that she might not be
Speaker 1: able to express, and that relationship between kind of knowing
Speaker 1: and not knowing that seems particularly well suited to the novel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the fact that you can get into Grace's
Speaker 3: head and to a certain extent, show the confusion that
Speaker 3: you wouldn't be able to get across on the stage,
Speaker 3: or as you know, the constraints on the stage is
Speaker 3: just dialogue in some scene description and bit of action.
Speaker 3: You haven't got anything else, and so you can only
Speaker 3: tell that stuf sorry, through the interactions that are happening
Speaker 3: on stage. So it opens up a lot more possibility
Speaker 3: to do it as a novel. I think it was
Speaker 3: in some senses an easier process writing as a novel
Speaker 3: compared to as a play. But as you said, it
Speaker 3: gives you a bit more opportunity to explore the condition
Speaker 3: itself through metaphor.
Speaker 1: So a story that you first tried to tell ten
Speaker 1: years ago men couldn't let go of and came back
Speaker 1: to in a different form. Was it your grandmother that
Speaker 1: drove you to know that you wanted to tell this story?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I felt like I had a responsibility as
Speaker 3: a writer but also as a grandson to try to
Speaker 3: understand her experience. So at a certain point in her
Speaker 3: life with dementia, I could tell that she was starting
Speaker 3: to live between present and past, so she would be
Speaker 3: interacting with us in the present, sometimes knowing who he was,
Speaker 3: sometimes not.
Speaker 2: But she would talk about her parents, who.
Speaker 3: Are long dead on the other side of the world,
Speaker 3: as if they were about to visit. And she talk
Speaker 3: about her age care worker in the same moment as
Speaker 3: if that person was her best friend. And so it's
Speaker 3: very difficult. Once a person reaches that point of cognitive decline,
Speaker 3: they can't tell you what it's like, And so I
Speaker 3: suppose it lends itself to a story, to exploring through
Speaker 3: fiction what that experience might be like.
Speaker 1: Was she your mom's mum or your dad's dad's mum?
Speaker 1: And were you close?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, really close.
Speaker 3: She's quite a remarkable person in a quiet way. She
Speaker 3: grew up poor in Manchester, lived through the Blitz, the family,
Speaker 3: got on a ship three months across to the other
Speaker 3: side of the world in the fifties and sort of
Speaker 3: raised her family over here without any assistance. You know,
Speaker 3: someone requires a lot of fortitude to do something like that,
Speaker 3: and it is tragic that at the end of her
Speaker 3: life she gets to a point where she loses all
Speaker 3: of those memories, all of the part that made her her,
Speaker 3: And it's very difficult to watch a person go through that,
Speaker 3: But then it's very difficult to see yourself disappearing in
Speaker 3: their eyes at the same time, which I suppose is
Speaker 3: one reason why there are so few accounts of dementia
Speaker 3: in fiction, because it's a difficult thing if you have
Speaker 3: experience with it, to see yourself, to watch yourself disappear,
Speaker 3: and to see your love on going through that.
Speaker 1: How like for your family, the management of the dementia
Speaker 1: and the kind of slow motion loss of this important figure.
Speaker 1: How did that play out for you guys? Was it
Speaker 1: something you talked about freely? Was it something you know?
Speaker 1: My family definitely, Gallows humor is almost the only way
Speaker 1: of coping with any of that stuff. But I'm curious.
Speaker 1: One of the things I love so much in this
Speaker 1: book is Grace's daughter Liz and how that plays out.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious for you and your family.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I just dialed up in Liz some
Speaker 3: of the reactions that we all had. And so Liz
Speaker 3: has some moments of frustration with Grace, and she has
Speaker 3: some moments of compassion and acceptance, and I think the
Speaker 3: intensity of those.
Speaker 2: Are just dialed up.
Speaker 3: It's probably a little bit less in our experience, but
Speaker 3: there was very much I witnessed in myself and other people.
Speaker 3: There's moments where you want to try and tether them
Speaker 3: to the present, and you almost want to fight against
Speaker 3: the condition. And in those moments, sometimes when you do that,
Speaker 3: it can create some distress for the person because you're
Speaker 3: trying to correct them constantly and they are aware, in
Speaker 3: a vague kind of sense in some cases of shame
Speaker 3: and embarrassment about what they're saying and the fact that
Speaker 3: they're not remembering. And so I think another path that
Speaker 3: you can take, a more compassionate path where you just
Speaker 3: sort of go along with things a lot of the time,
Speaker 3: where you just even though they might be saying something
Speaker 3: completely wrong, you just go along with the thread and
Speaker 3: you continue, and you can kind of calmly and slowly
Speaker 3: try to bring some of their memories out, but if
Speaker 3: it doesn't happen, then you just sort of let it
Speaker 3: go gently. And I think that that in the relationship
Speaker 3: between Liz and Grace in the book, when the point
Speaker 3: that it gets to, I think is a point where
Speaker 3: Liz has started to come to terms with that and
Speaker 3: what you mentioned about Gallow's humor, I think I tried
Speaker 3: to get across in the book that there is a
Speaker 3: tragedy going on, but I didn't want to make it
Speaker 3: a tragedy pile on. There are moments of levity as well,
Speaker 3: just as there are in life. Sometimes you reach for
Speaker 3: dark humor and you can bring some parts of your
Speaker 3: own life into the situation and try and make it
Speaker 3: a little bit fun.
Speaker 2: I think that's important, Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: But the other part of that, I think, which I
Speaker 1: think you do so well is and I should say here,
Speaker 1: you're very clear in the acknowledgments in the book that
Speaker 1: Grace isn't your grandma. Our experiences have echoes of that,
Speaker 1: a drawn from that, but she's a different human being.
Speaker 1: But you don't let yourself lose track of Grace the
Speaker 1: human being. She's not completely subsumed by her confusion or
Speaker 1: by her situation. Part of why the book works is
Speaker 1: that it is the story of a woman who has
Speaker 1: lived a life and dealt with disappointments and delights and
Speaker 1: all manner of things.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I wanted her to have a strength, and that was
Speaker 3: important to me in the book because my grandmother was strong.
Speaker 3: Although as you said, she's not the same person as
Speaker 3: Grace in terms of who she was, the way she
Speaker 3: behaved and her experiences. The rest is fictional, but she
Speaker 3: had a strength to her character as well, and I
Speaker 3: didn't want Grace to sort of be a very passive
Speaker 3: and meek individual in this book. I wanted her to
Speaker 3: be fighting against the condition in the early parts of
Speaker 3: the book and trying to hold onto her identity as
Speaker 3: much as possible, because I think that that's that's the
Speaker 3: natural way that she would react in that situation.
Speaker 1: What struck me when I was reading this was that
Speaker 1: it's one thing to write about a difficult experience, but
Speaker 1: it's a complete other thing to find a way to
Speaker 1: embody it, you know, to demonstrate genuine empathy for what
Speaker 1: your character is going through. And I think you do
Speaker 1: that really powerfully, and you must remember this.
Speaker 3: I think that's the most one of the most difficult
Speaker 3: things about trying to portray a protagonist with dementia is
Speaker 3: that they are going through cognitive declient. So you have
Speaker 3: to if you're going to have close third person or
Speaker 3: even first person. I'm not quite sure how you would
Speaker 3: do first person. I think that would be a little
Speaker 3: bit too difficult towards the end of the chronology, but
Speaker 3: even close third person.
Speaker 2: You've got to.
Speaker 3: Show that progression, and as they progress, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of opportunities for you as a reader to become confused,
Speaker 3: and so I think trying to get that balance between
Speaker 3: readers are a little bit confused but a little unsettled
Speaker 3: and able to sit in that. But then you still
Speaker 3: get across that kind of dislocation that the character has.
Speaker 3: It's it's a bit of a balancing act.
Speaker 1: That decision to make form agree with subject matter is
Speaker 1: one of the great payoffs of this book and one
Speaker 1: of the really moving things. I'm curious about the kind
Speaker 1: of reader you are. Are you a fan of structural
Speaker 1: play or do you like a good, straight, clear narrative.
Speaker 3: I think I like both, and I think it could
Speaker 3: call it a party trick essentially to create a fragmented
Speaker 3: narrative in this way and to, like you said, make
Speaker 3: the form match the nature of the character. I think
Speaker 3: in this instance you kind of have to do it
Speaker 3: that way unless you're going to tell it from the
Speaker 3: point of view of another character looking in, like Alice
Speaker 3: Monroez the bear came over the mountain, where it's the
Speaker 3: spouse looking in at the person with dementia. So I
Speaker 3: don't think I had much of a choice in this case.
Speaker 3: But I think in terms of my reading, I like
Speaker 3: it both ways. I think what I'm looking for primarily
Speaker 3: when i'm reading something is a good story and good writing,
Speaker 3: and if you can tick those boxes for me, I
Speaker 3: don't really mind about the rest of it. And I
Speaker 3: mean in terms of a good story that you can
Speaker 3: take me on a journey from A to B of
Speaker 3: character growth and relationship change, but then also that there's
Speaker 3: some art involved in the expression, that there's some beauty
Speaker 3: on the page. And if I can get both of
Speaker 3: those things, I really don't mind what.
Speaker 2: Else you do.
Speaker 1: That question about telling a story and the structure of
Speaker 1: a story and our expectations around the convention. So much
Speaker 1: of that is tied up with chronology, with cause and effect,
Speaker 1: with actions and consequences, and your decision, or as you
Speaker 1: put it, the kind of inevitable fact that this story
Speaker 1: had to be told in a fractured way kind of
Speaker 1: robs you of that at first glance. Yeah, Instead, it's
Speaker 1: almost akin to a collection of interconnected short stories about
Speaker 1: a life where the threads and the echoes and resonance
Speaker 1: has become clear as you go long. But you don't
Speaker 1: necessarily get that path to satisfaction or joy or redemption.
Speaker 3: I think that there is a through line in the story,
Speaker 3: and maybe it takes a little while to get to it,
Speaker 3: but the through line really is the relationship change throughout
Speaker 3: the story, and you get the flashbacks which contribute to
Speaker 3: the relationship change in the present, and that's really what
Speaker 3: I was trying to go for. I was thinking a
Speaker 3: lot about Philip Larkin's anti natalist poem This be the
Speaker 3: Verse when I was writing this, and not that I'm
Speaker 3: an anti natalist because my wife and I have a
Speaker 3: three month old son, but the last stanza, there's a
Speaker 3: couple of lines in their man hands on misery to
Speaker 3: man it deepens like a coastal shelf. And I was
Speaker 3: thinking about how if we're not careful, and if our
Speaker 3: parents aren't careful, we can pick up some of the
Speaker 3: traits from them, and they picked up from their parents,
Speaker 3: and we can embody those and we can bring those
Speaker 3: into our relationships with our children. And some of those
Speaker 3: traits may not be ideal, and some of the behaviors
Speaker 3: they lead to may not be ideal. And what would
Speaker 3: it take to go against the current in changing your
Speaker 3: behavior and if at the same time as my main character,
Speaker 3: Grace is in this story, she's reliving some of the past.
Speaker 3: She's living simultaneously between this past key moments with her
Speaker 3: relationship with her mother and then living in the present
Speaker 3: and sort of slipping in and out of those timelines.
Speaker 3: She's sort of experiencing those traits that she's picked up
Speaker 3: with her mother as she's in a sense, with the
Speaker 3: ticking clock of dementia in the present, trying to change
Speaker 3: before it's too late, and trying to change her relationship
Speaker 3: with her daughter. So I think that's what I was
Speaker 3: trying to get at. That's the through line through the story.
Speaker 3: Even though the chronology, as you said, is really fragmented
Speaker 3: because she's slipping in and out of present and past,
Speaker 3: there is a through line, and that's that change that
Speaker 3: happens in her relationship with her daughter.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I take your point about that through line, But
Speaker 1: I think part of what's so fascinating and effective about
Speaker 1: the way you approach it in this book is the
Speaker 1: impossibility of either forgiveness or repair when it comes to
Speaker 1: a broken relationship like the one between Grace and her mother.
Speaker 1: The ways in which the kind of residual, lifelong traumas
Speaker 1: of that unreconcilable after a certain point, and those questions
Speaker 1: about how we do right by the people we love
Speaker 1: and how we make things right when they're broken seem
Speaker 1: to me to be almost as important to this book
Speaker 1: as questions of memory.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that I'm dealing with two things.
Speaker 2: Both.
Speaker 3: Grace is changing because of the condition, and so really
Speaker 3: all we are instincts and memories, and if our memories
Speaker 3: are starting to break down, some of those stories that
Speaker 3: we have about ourselves that lead to kind of a
Speaker 3: cohesive self who we were, who we are, and who
Speaker 3: we hope to be, she's starting to lose those. So
Speaker 3: she's changing through the condition as she's going along. But
Speaker 3: I think she's trying to change at the same time
Speaker 3: against the current of change through the dementia, to change
Speaker 3: a relationship with her daughter, And she does that through
Speaker 3: the recollections she's having about her past, about her relationship
Speaker 3: with her mother. And although the relationship with her mother
Speaker 3: is fixed, that's changed, that's done. It does by reliving them,
Speaker 3: does inform her relationship in the present.
Speaker 1: When We're returned, Seawan discusses how his relationship with reading
Speaker 1: and writing has changed since becoming a published author. We'll
Speaker 1: be right back, even though you must remember, this is
Speaker 1: the first book I've read by Sean Wilson. I first
Speaker 1: heard his name back in twenty twenty two. His debut
Speaker 1: novel came out. It was called Gemini Falls, and several
Speaker 1: people thrust it upon me and told me I should
Speaker 1: read it, and I just got around to it. But
Speaker 1: looking at it now, in light of having read his
Speaker 1: second book, it strikes me how much of a departure
Speaker 1: he's made. His Debut's a genre novel, for one thing.
Speaker 1: It's set in the Great Depression, and it's probably best
Speaker 1: understood as Australian rural noir, a kind of plot driven
Speaker 1: murder mystery that's revealing a darker story about Australian society's evolution,
Speaker 1: or lack thereof. I'm always fascinated by writers that can
Speaker 1: transition between genres, so I wanted to know more. I'm
Speaker 1: curious about your second book, and your first book is
Speaker 1: a genre novel, like it is a novel that actually
Speaker 1: does very much kind of follow the beats of convention
Speaker 1: in order to tell the story it wants to tell.
Speaker 1: Did this feel like a completely different set of muscles
Speaker 1: you're flexing.
Speaker 3: No, the Gemini Falls felt like more of a departure,
Speaker 3: and I was trying to achieve something very specific with that.
Speaker 3: This feels more like it's in my wheelhouse. And I
Speaker 3: actually wrote the manuscript you must remember this before Gemini
Speaker 3: Falls out right, And so in a sense, this is
Speaker 3: my first book, although it's gone through some editing and
Speaker 3: rewriting Gemini Falls. I wanted to tell a particular story
Speaker 3: about financial crisis and housing displacement in an unregulated market
Speaker 3: economy and what that does to people in the community
Speaker 3: and who sort of helps and who raises a fist,
Speaker 3: And because I think there are some parallels between now
Speaker 3: and the Great Depression in that sense, I said, it
Speaker 3: is a historical novel in the Great Depression. And then
Speaker 3: after that I decided, how how am I going to
Speaker 3: tell this story keep people engaged in this topic. I
Speaker 3: decided to have a crime in order to turn the
Speaker 3: heat up on the community and explore those themes.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 3: Just naturally it sort of went into a genre that
Speaker 3: I'd had no experience with.
Speaker 1: So when you say it didn't come naturally or you
Speaker 1: didn't know that genre, did you find yourself reading a
Speaker 1: lot of historical crime fiction in order to feel like
Speaker 1: you could fit the conventions, or did you kind of
Speaker 1: avoid it and happily go in naive.
Speaker 2: I probably should have read more.
Speaker 3: I read a little bit, but I think my guiding
Speaker 3: light for that story was to kill a Mockingbird in
Speaker 3: the sense that to Kill a Mockingbird could be a
Speaker 3: crime novel or a courtroom drama if you were.
Speaker 2: Reductive in that sense.
Speaker 3: But really it's about racism in the South and the
Speaker 3: depression States rights gender roles. So I felt like I
Speaker 3: had enough with that story to guide me, and then
Speaker 3: from then on it was really just about I think
Speaker 3: what's important in stories and what we always go back
Speaker 3: to is the relationship change that happens in the novel.
Speaker 3: So although I wanted to explore those themes and that
Speaker 3: was important to me, as not enough just to have
Speaker 3: a story about financial crisis and how displacement and all
Speaker 3: of those issues that I wanted to explore. You've got
Speaker 3: to have the relationships that they're changing. And so the
Speaker 3: main character and the way he relates with his father
Speaker 3: and his sister, those are really the important parts of
Speaker 3: the story, and that's what keeps us coming back to stories.
Speaker 1: So what did writing in a mode that was if
Speaker 1: you'll forgive this way of putting it a little bit
Speaker 1: reverse engineered, what did that teach you about the writing
Speaker 1: that you want to do next? Having done something that
Speaker 1: from the sounds of things flows out organically because of
Speaker 1: the personal elements of the story and because the structure
Speaker 1: presented itself once he worked out what the project was,
Speaker 1: what do you know now, two books under your belt,
Speaker 1: what does number three book like?
Speaker 3: I think I would like to try something new for
Speaker 3: their third book, and maybe not the third book, or
Speaker 3: maybe the fourth book if I get that far better.
Speaker 3: I think it's a shame when people write the same
Speaker 3: book over and over again. From an artistic sense, I
Speaker 3: can understand from a financial point of view, if a
Speaker 3: book is a success.
Speaker 1: Why, I think Philip Roth said, every writer just writes
Speaker 1: the same book again and again, hoping as they hone
Speaker 1: in that eventually they get it right.
Speaker 3: I've seen that happen, sure, But I've also seen you know,
Speaker 3: Margaret at would write a speculative fiction and then go
Speaker 3: to historical fiction. And although it's the same kind of
Speaker 3: themes that she might be exploring, she's using very different
Speaker 3: muscles as you mentioned in terms of structuring, I mean,
Speaker 3: it would be a shame if the Beatles just made
Speaker 3: Love Me Do over and over again. You never get
Speaker 3: to Dear Prudence or Octopus's Garden, So in that sense.
Speaker 1: There's a choice crescendo with Octopus's Garden. I was with
Speaker 1: you all the way through Dear Prudence, so then you
Speaker 1: just had to be silly.
Speaker 2: And maybe I'll gave my own Octopus's Garden moment. You
Speaker 2: never know.
Speaker 1: I don't doubt your capacity to do it. I'm curious
Speaker 1: because there is a deliberate to the way you talk
Speaker 1: about your writing, like there was a sense of purpose
Speaker 1: and a sense of kind of internally imposed discipline on
Speaker 1: how you want to approach it. Do you always know
Speaker 1: you wanted to write? Was this something that you worked
Speaker 1: your way towards.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've wanted to write for a long time. I
Speaker 3: think when I was younger, in terms of where I
Speaker 3: grew up, there weren't any examples of writers around me
Speaker 3: growing up in the suburbs, So it took me a
Speaker 3: long time to get to the point where I thought
Speaker 3: I had enough to say in order and sort of
Speaker 3: fit in that mold. But I think it took me
Speaker 3: a little while to work up to it, but I
Speaker 3: guess I've had a long time to think about it
Speaker 3: and be deliberate in that sense.
Speaker 1: What kind of reader are you and how has that
Speaker 1: changed since you've been writing your own books.
Speaker 3: I'm definitely more forgiving reader, I think, and this is
Speaker 3: why I don't slag off other people's books, because I
Speaker 3: understand to hard it is to write a book now
Speaker 3: after we're writing too, and I understand how hard it
Speaker 3: is to hold onto the vision through the editing and
Speaker 3: publishing process as well, So I have more understanding, I
Speaker 3: think for writers, if I feel that something's not working,
Speaker 3: then I can sort of think back to some challenges
Speaker 3: that I've had. So it's definitely made me more forgiving
Speaker 3: in that sense. But I still am looking for those
Speaker 3: moments where I feel that they're in so much control
Speaker 3: that I can switch off and join in the fun.
Speaker 3: I think one of the problems when you take on
Speaker 3: a craft, and I think it's probably the same way
Speaker 3: for musicians as well. If you're a drama you're probably
Speaker 3: just listening to the drumming in any particular song and
Speaker 3: understanding how it works in the mechanics of it. And
Speaker 3: you find it hard to lose yourself in the song.
Speaker 3: In the same sense, I do find it hard to
Speaker 3: lose myself in fiction. And the only times that I
Speaker 3: really do, where I really start to fall in to
Speaker 3: the spell and have that kind of hallucinatory experience that
Speaker 3: we all do in the best times when we're reading
Speaker 3: is when I feel like the writer is really in control.
Speaker 3: And I've had a few of those moments lately, and
Speaker 3: it's been a pleasure when I'm able to sort of
Speaker 3: switch off my analytical part of the writer reading and
Speaker 3: just be a reader.
Speaker 2: That's a real joy.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2: Thank you, it's been a pleasure. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Sean Wilson's new novel. You must remember this is available
Speaker 1: at all good bookstores. Now before we go, I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know what I've been reading this week,
Speaker 1: And I remember as a teenager someone gave me a
Speaker 1: copy of the Penguin Classics edition of Thomas Mallory's Lamote
Speaker 1: the Arthur. I read it, and then I immediately read
Speaker 1: H White's Once in Future King, and then I read
Speaker 1: Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. I went on
Speaker 1: quite the King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Speaker 1: Table kick. I was a very cool teenager, as you
Speaker 1: can imagine. I loved it, and then I kind of
Speaker 1: forgot about it entirely. But when it was announced that
Speaker 1: Lev Grossman, who wrote this terrific book a few years
Speaker 1: ago called The Magicians, was doing his own take on
Speaker 1: the Arthurian legend, I thought I'd give it a shot.
Speaker 1: The product is a lot of fun and definitely cast
Speaker 1: my mind back to that teenage reading. He's got a
Speaker 1: modern sensibility and an eye for queer and divergent versions
Speaker 1: of those classic stories, and Grossman's created quite the romp.
Speaker 1: You can find it and all the others we've mentioned
Speaker 1: in this episode and your favorite independent bookstore. That's it
Speaker 1: for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
Speaker 1: your friends about it and rate and review us. It
Speaker 1: helps a lot. Next week I'm read this I'm speaking
Speaker 1: with the novelist Andrea Goldsmith about her gorgeous latest, The
Speaker 1: Buried Life.
Speaker 4: Like uncertainty, which is common to us all, so is death,
Speaker 4: and for most of my life I've been captivated by
Speaker 4: the mysteries of death, but also that so many people
Speaker 4: are frightened of death read.
Speaker 1: This is a SHORTZ media production made possible by the
Speaker 1: generous support of UR Group. The show is produced and
Speaker 1: edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and
Speaker 1: original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you
Speaker 1: next week.