Speaker 1: Hey there, it's me Ruby Jones. All week we're sharing
Speaker 1: our favorite episodes from our sister podcast, Read This. It's
Speaker 1: the show where the editor of the monthly, Michael Williams,
Speaker 1: talks to some of the best and most respected writers
Speaker 1: from Australia and beyond. Today we're hearing from award winning
Speaker 1: Australian author Evie Wilde. Michael Williams is here with me now, Hello, Michael.
Speaker 2: Oh, Hi there, Ruby Jones. Hi Michael.
Speaker 1: So, Evie Wilde's novels they're known to be quite dark.
Speaker 2: Aren't they. Yeah, there is definitely a kind of recurring
Speaker 2: thread in Evie's novels about intergenerational trauma, about grief, about secrets,
Speaker 2: and about pain. They are trauma informed novels and that's
Speaker 2: part of why she's built this loyal following. But Evie
Speaker 2: is also incredibly smart and very funny.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: The books are still kind of joyous celebrations of human
Speaker 2: connection one way or the other, even when they do
Speaker 2: have somewhat dark themes. And her new book, The Echoes
Speaker 2: straddles that kind of divide really well. In part looks
Speaker 2: at questions of nostalgia of the things that we remember
Speaker 2: and romanticize from our past and wear that intersects with
Speaker 2: trauma and unspoken things. But it's a quirkier book than
Speaker 2: that too.
Speaker 1: It's a ghost story, isn't it.
Speaker 2: The echoes it is. It's a kind of love story.
Speaker 2: But one of the main characters is already dead and
Speaker 2: I don't mean that. And and Patrick Swayze they sit around
Speaker 2: a potting wheel. Sense, but you're going to hear in
Speaker 2: the story Evie thinks says something very interesting about ghost stories,
Speaker 2: and we end up having what is I think, quite
Speaker 2: a lively and fun conversation about some pretty dark themes.
Speaker 2: She even has her own story about a haunted house
Speaker 2: that she and her husband lived in when they had
Speaker 2: a newborn baby. Oh yeah, it's great. I mean, I
Speaker 2: do put forward the theory that all babies are haunted,
Speaker 2: and she doesn't disagree with that. So there's a lot
Speaker 2: in this episode. It's a heaps of fun.
Speaker 1: Can't wait to listen, Michael, thank you so much. Coming
Speaker 1: up in just a moment, Evie Wilde is having more fun.
Speaker 3: Than you think.
Speaker 2: In a sense. Stories about intergenerational trauma and grief, novels
Speaker 2: about history, artistic representations of colonialism, and dispossession. Always ghost stories.
Speaker 2: They are a form of literature that's inevitably haunted by
Speaker 2: what has come before, a way that we might reckon
Speaker 2: with loss and silences and all of That's true of
Speaker 2: what Evie Wilde is doing in The Echoes. But this
Speaker 2: book is a ghost story in a far more literal
Speaker 2: sense too. Max and Hannah's relationship, but the heart of
Speaker 2: the book is in many ways typical of a couple
Speaker 2: in their late thirties, debates around marriage and children, niggling
Speaker 2: doubts and anxieties, tensions they can't talk about. But Max
Speaker 2: is dead, he says, I do not believe in ghosts, which,
Speaker 2: since my death, has become something of a problem. What
Speaker 2: follows is a novel not just about how difficult it
Speaker 2: is to ever truly know someone, but about what it
Speaker 2: means to try to hide from your past. And for
Speaker 2: Evie Wilde, thinking about her own past begins inevitably with
Speaker 2: thinking about Australia.
Speaker 4: When I was a kid, I was just like I
Speaker 4: am Australian, and I would affect a bad accent. But
Speaker 4: obviously you can tell from talking to me. I live
Speaker 4: in London. I was born in London. A lot of
Speaker 4: my bios seem to say was born in Australia but
Speaker 4: lives in London, And I think that's just because it's
Speaker 4: just easier for people to understand I am technically half Australian.
Speaker 4: My mum came over when she was twenty one. She
Speaker 4: lived in a pie shop in Paramatta, and she came
Speaker 4: over in quite an unusual way, went traveling. She's very
Speaker 4: working class, and she met my father, who was very
Speaker 4: very British and couldn't deal with Australia at all, got
Speaker 4: absolutely slated whenever he went over there, and very burnt
Speaker 4: and bitten, and so there was never any possibility really
Speaker 4: of us moving over there. And I think what I
Speaker 4: picked up on as a kid was, you know, apart
Speaker 4: from the beauty of Australia where my family subsequently moved to,
Speaker 4: which is a sugarcane farm in northern New South Wales,
Speaker 4: like the freedom of that place and the smell and
Speaker 4: the birds and all of that stuff. That was something
Speaker 4: that I thought about constantly as a child, and I
Speaker 4: dreamt about it so much so that when I was there,
Speaker 4: I would be really panicked that I was just having
Speaker 4: a dream.
Speaker 3: I was going to wake up.
Speaker 4: And I think that comes from my mum's homesickness, you know,
Speaker 4: really seeing her in a park in London, find a
Speaker 4: gum tree and just like scrunch up the leaves and
Speaker 4: really inhale it for me that you know, that kind
Speaker 4: of got passed on and you know when she came
Speaker 4: over it was it was a thirty six hour flight,
Speaker 4: and you know, the idea of doing that more than
Speaker 4: once every two years, and the expense and all of
Speaker 4: that stuff, and also you know, she didn't have a landline.
Speaker 4: I think just being cut off from your family in
Speaker 4: such a way when you're so young, it kind of
Speaker 4: really built up this quite heavy homesickness that I kind
Speaker 4: of inherited. As for like, do I feel more or less,
Speaker 4: I don't know. I lived in Australia in my twenties
Speaker 4: in Sydney, and I think by that point I was
Speaker 4: kind of I mean, I was really feckless. I ended
Speaker 4: up living in a flat share with some people from
Speaker 4: Portsmouth in the UK because that was the only place
Speaker 4: I could find and it was on BONDI and it
Speaker 4: was all really just embarrassing. And I got a job
Speaker 4: working for the Red Cross, like going door to door
Speaker 4: in the suburbs and I got a dollar every time
Speaker 4: somebody bought something of it was completely hopeless, and I'm
Speaker 4: sure that added to my feeling of you know, maybe
Speaker 4: this isn't my home, but yeah, it just I didn't
Speaker 4: have any direction and I didn't feel the roots that
Speaker 4: I wanted to feel. And I think that is that's
Speaker 4: part of being from two places that when I'm here
Speaker 4: in London, I really I yearn for Australia.
Speaker 3: But it's the same the other way around.
Speaker 2: What's the relationship between that part of your identity and
Speaker 2: your imaginative, creative self.
Speaker 4: I think, apart from my last book, The Best Rock,
Speaker 4: I think all of my books have started from a daydreaming,
Speaker 4: like a sort of nostalgia.
Speaker 3: It's easier for me to.
Speaker 4: Write about place I'm not in and to kind of
Speaker 4: in sort of April in London think myself into December
Speaker 4: in New South Wales. I think that is like it's
Speaker 4: like a yearning and it's kind of the collection of
Speaker 4: all of those family stories that I was listening to
Speaker 4: when I.
Speaker 3: Was a kid.
Speaker 4: There is a deep nostalgia for me and my favorite
Speaker 4: thing to do is like go through the photo albums
Speaker 4: of just snapshots of you know, when we were kids,
Speaker 4: and they're all grainy and everyone's covered in zinc, and
Speaker 4: it just you can smell it and you can hear it,
Speaker 4: Like whenever I hear a butcher bird or a magpie,
Speaker 4: it's like instant transportation. Or the Pakistani mangoes are in
Speaker 4: season at the minute, and just like I go down
Speaker 4: to our local shop and walk back just smelling one
Speaker 4: like a lunatic.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I love the fact identify that one of
Speaker 2: the kernels of your books is nostalgia as a starting point.
Speaker 2: How does the line go so swiftly from nostalgia to
Speaker 2: trauma just out of curiosity?
Speaker 4: I think everyone's got both in them. I mean, I'm
Speaker 4: a big horror fan. That's probably what's going on. I
Speaker 4: think every beautiful setting is vastly improved by a monster
Speaker 4: or a ghost. So I think for English people in particular,
Speaker 4: Australia does hold like some of the last monsters, you know,
Speaker 4: like that, whether it's snakes or spiders or sharks.
Speaker 3: I think there's stuff.
Speaker 4: That when you're in England, being English, you feel very
Speaker 4: very afraid of, and actually when you're in Australia you
Speaker 4: forget about it and you go swimming in the river
Speaker 4: and it's all fine, but well, most of the time
Speaker 4: it's fine, but yeah, I think my family live on
Speaker 4: a river that has sharks in and it floods every
Speaker 4: now and then, and so that the house is up
Speaker 4: on stilts, and I think just the concept of sharks
Speaker 4: underneath your house is like such a beautiful, horrific thing.
Speaker 4: And I find there are so many of those things
Speaker 4: available in Australia.
Speaker 2: While intergenerational trauma and echoes of the past themes that
Speaker 2: run through all of your work, this is perhaps the
Speaker 2: one that most explicitly, most overtly ties some of those
Speaker 2: ideas to the colonial experience in Australia. And I'm curious
Speaker 2: about whether there was an anxiety about going down the
Speaker 2: barrel of that big, tricky conversation.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's a huge anxiety, and I think, you know,
Speaker 4: by this point in my career, I feel like when
Speaker 4: you're anxious about something, you kind of have to head
Speaker 4: towards it a bit. My main anxiety about it is
Speaker 4: I'm not articulate on it, but I think that was
Speaker 4: the point that I started from, and then I realized
Speaker 4: that one of the big problems is we're not articulate
Speaker 4: about it because woods cannot express what happened and what
Speaker 4: the English have done. So like, there was definitely a
Speaker 4: stage in the writing of The Echoes where one of
Speaker 4: my editors was like really anxious about it, and she
Speaker 4: was like, Oh, should we just take out all of
Speaker 4: the stuff about the Indigenous school for girls and and
Speaker 4: you know, should we just play it safe? And I
Speaker 4: felt like there was a real moment of like a
Speaker 4: part of me really wanted to do that, but I
Speaker 4: think it is really important to fumble your way through
Speaker 4: to some kind of acknowledgment of what went on and
Speaker 4: the you know, talking about inherited trauma, like certainly not
Speaker 4: the biggest trauma of what happened, but the experience of
Speaker 4: being a white Australian and having whatever your ancestors did
Speaker 4: in the past is you know, that's really really heavy,
Speaker 4: and I feel like it's important to scramble around and
Speaker 4: try and find words or images or something that express
Speaker 4: that feeling of just like horror and.
Speaker 2: It is you know, I think the best novels, the
Speaker 2: most powerful novels, grapple with that question about how to
Speaker 2: depict something that goes beyond what can be articulated. I
Speaker 2: mean I remember the I think it was Nick Hornby's
Speaker 2: review of Saturday by Ian McEwen, where he went to
Speaker 2: town on that novel because he said, odd's a cop
Speaker 2: out from McEwen, because all the characters are poets and
Speaker 2: brain surgeons and expressly kind of engineered to be able
Speaker 2: to articulate their every thought and their every emotion, and
Speaker 2: a true novelist doesn't make that easy for their characters.
Speaker 2: They depict them without them having the power to articulate it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think that's a good point, and I don't find
Speaker 4: that there's much. I'm not that interested in people who
Speaker 4: have succeeded in life that well and what their idea
Speaker 4: is on the world, because it's not it's kind of
Speaker 4: in the cracks that the interesting people live. And I
Speaker 4: think it's really important that you don't finish the book
Speaker 4: with an answer, because obviously I don't have an answer,
Speaker 4: and I don't think there is an answer. I think
Speaker 4: it's just I don't know if you're allowed to swear
Speaker 4: on your podcast, but I think it's fucked. He can
Speaker 4: be put out. I think it's about trying to kind
Speaker 4: of lock into that feeling that you get when that anxiety,
Speaker 4: like you picked up on that kind of feeling of
Speaker 4: like in your chest when the subject comes up, and
Speaker 4: trying to form it into some kind of shape and
Speaker 4: that's never going to look pretty. And there were drafts
Speaker 4: where I had Uncle Tone be a lot more articulate
Speaker 4: about it, and they just didn't work because they weren't him,
Speaker 4: and it was you know, I was Ian mcewning. I
Speaker 4: was trying to get my thought what's across. But I
Speaker 4: think what is more interesting and more pertinent is that
Speaker 4: people don't know what to say and they're not It's
Speaker 4: all about looking away, really.
Speaker 3: Isn't it.
Speaker 4: So we have a standard set of things we can
Speaker 4: say and we stick there, and I think any trying
Speaker 4: to kind of reach out into the darkness of what
Speaker 4: surrounds those safe words is really frightening, certainly for me anyway,
Speaker 4: And I'm always afraid of putting a foot in it.
Speaker 4: But I'm also really afraid of being silent. So ultimately
Speaker 4: I think the book is looking at who gets to
Speaker 4: tell stories. Well, I know that I would never, for example,
Speaker 4: tell a story from an indigenous person's point of view,
Speaker 4: but it seems madness to me to not admit the
Speaker 4: white Australian experience of living on indigenous land and choosing
Speaker 4: to look away or choosing to look in front of it.
Speaker 2: No, it absolutely does. And I'm glad you mentioned uncle
Speaker 2: tone because seems to me the significant thing about that
Speaker 2: character isn't whether he has the language to express this disquiet,
Speaker 2: these ideas, whatever, but he does have the tenacity, the pugnaciousness,
Speaker 2: the drunkenness as well to not have barriers to what
Speaker 2: he feels he can comment on. You know, as a character.
Speaker 2: He must be liberating as a writer because he is
Speaker 2: someone who is not inhibited in sounding up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was kind of important to me to give
Speaker 4: that kind of voice to someone who's also not what
Speaker 4: we would call a goodie. I mean, I wrote him
Speaker 4: as somebody who I wanted you to be kind of
Speaker 4: charmed by him in a way and feel real grief
Speaker 4: at what he eventually does. And I was sort of
Speaker 4: thinking about within the Me Too movement, the in particular
Speaker 4: comedians that accused of correctly of doing terrible things, and
Speaker 4: how how their friends like stood up for them and
Speaker 4: then were shouted down, and that discomfort of there's someone
Speaker 4: you love and they've done a terrible thing. It doesn't
Speaker 4: mean you don't love them anymore, and that awkwardness. So
Speaker 4: I really wanted to give him the mic for talking
Speaker 4: about those things, because he's not some pious, right thinking person.
Speaker 4: He's just scrabbling around in the dirt with the rest
Speaker 4: of us.
Speaker 2: He does memorably say, there's no unfucking it is there?
Speaker 2: Once you've sucked it up, there's no unfucking it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: do you believe that?
Speaker 4: I think there's trying to unfuck it, which is important.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't.
Speaker 4: Think that things that we have done are unfuckable.
Speaker 3: There you know, what would we do? Yeah? I just
Speaker 3: can't figure out what that would be.
Speaker 4: Once we've silenced a whole language and a whole I
Speaker 4: don't know.
Speaker 3: We just put a muffler over everything.
Speaker 2: I don't feel like British politics is robust enough for
Speaker 2: the colonial experiment to be rejected in all colonial Australians
Speaker 2: to return to Britain. I feel like that might we
Speaker 2: wouldn't be well received.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, we'd have to open up the Isle
Speaker 3: of Wight. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: When we return. Evie reveals the story behind her own
Speaker 2: haunted house and why. Writing from the perspective of a
Speaker 2: ghost can be a whole lot of fun. We'll be
Speaker 2: right back. You mentioned before that you wouldn't write from
Speaker 2: the perspective of an Indigenous character, but the recognition of
Speaker 2: that history, the recognition of that schism in the Australian
Speaker 2: contemporary lived experience, is really important to you, and I'm
Speaker 2: curious about how how how you approach that, how you
Speaker 2: approach as you said, so, I mutually the echoes is
Speaker 2: about who gets to tell a story. Are there points
Speaker 2: where you found yourself with the limits of a story
Speaker 2: that you felt you should tell.
Speaker 4: Yes, definitely, I think I've walked the line, but I
Speaker 4: would be absolutely open to hearing where I haven't. I
Speaker 4: felt awkward talking about death of Indigenous people and I
Speaker 4: was like, but I can't leave that out because that
Speaker 4: is what we did, and I feel the landscape of
Speaker 4: Australia is so steeped in blood that it felt embarrassing
Speaker 4: to leave it out. But yeah, I think I'm absolutely
Speaker 4: sure that I have blundered into things unknowingly and I
Speaker 4: would be delighted to know what they are.
Speaker 2: It strikes me one of the things that raises the
Speaker 2: degree of difficulty for you in being sensitive to those
Speaker 2: questions about how to handle death and belief and spirituality
Speaker 2: and other cultures. Is The Echoes is a book that
Speaker 2: has fun with for lack of a bitter way of
Speaker 2: putting a questions of mortality in the afterlife, and then
Speaker 2: you know it's a ghost story at its heart. Do
Speaker 2: you believe in ghosts?
Speaker 4: I believe that people see ghosts. The Echoes, The London
Speaker 4: parts of The Echoes is set in a house that
Speaker 4: me and my husband fled because it was haunted. But
Speaker 4: at the same time, you know, I don't really believe
Speaker 4: in afterlife, so I believe it is.
Speaker 3: You know, we had a new baby. I believe babies
Speaker 3: are haunted, are.
Speaker 2: Deeply haunted, absolutely little fleshy haunted houses.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, But so like you know, we both experienced
Speaker 4: sort of some weird things happening, and all of them
Speaker 4: on their own totally explainable.
Speaker 3: You know, there was a swarm of bees in our bathroom.
Speaker 4: That's because there was a swarm of bees swarming and
Speaker 4: they found a hole and came into our bathroom. But
Speaker 4: because it was happening at the same time as I
Speaker 4: was not quite hallucinating, but I could see with my
Speaker 4: eyes that there was no woman there. But I could
Speaker 4: picture a woman in the doorway looking at me, and
Speaker 4: she looked like no one I've ever seen before. And
Speaker 4: it had such a feeling to it, and there were
Speaker 4: smells and there were noises, and you know, I don't
Speaker 4: I don't know. It's a funny thing to look at
Speaker 4: your partner and go, shall we go and live with
Speaker 4: my mother? Because with the ghost here and for them
Speaker 4: to go, yes, take the baby, let's go. And now
Speaker 4: we look back on it and we laugh about it.
Speaker 4: And I'm sure you know, I was terrified because I
Speaker 4: had a new baby. I was sleep ap, I was
Speaker 4: you know, who knows what the sort of drugs SO
Speaker 4: was on for the cesarean we're doing, and you know,
Speaker 4: we were both just having daily meltdowns. And the noise
Speaker 4: of a crying baby is haunting itself. I come from
Speaker 4: like a background of like there's loads of ghost stories
Speaker 4: in my family, and you know they're those really great
Speaker 4: ones that have no neat ending.
Speaker 3: They're just horrifying.
Speaker 4: They're just like I opened a box there was an
Speaker 4: old man in there in which and then you know,
Speaker 4: and that's it.
Speaker 3: There's no closure.
Speaker 2: It's just like ugh, I mean, first the close the box,
Speaker 2: I forget put the lead back on that.
Speaker 3: Box throw I matching.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I think I believe that we are very
Speaker 4: strange creatures and that one of our coping mechanisms is
Speaker 4: is ghosts.
Speaker 3: I feel like it's really it was really.
Speaker 4: Interesting in writing the book, like having to kind of
Speaker 4: set down on paper what what rules my ghost can
Speaker 4: have and what constitutes it?
Speaker 3: Guys.
Speaker 4: I when my father died, I would see him everywhere,
Speaker 4: you know, but it would be a real human being
Speaker 4: walking down the street and I'd be walking behind them
Speaker 4: and they would be walking just as my father did
Speaker 4: in his clothes, and I hadn't seen their face, but
Speaker 4: I was. I would follow them, and I'd be like,
Speaker 4: that's just him, And what's the difference between that and
Speaker 4: you know, somebody sitting on the end of your bed
Speaker 4: at night, or like, you know, having a dream about
Speaker 4: them where they say some stuff to you. Might be
Speaker 4: complete nonsense, might be something that you've been really worrying
Speaker 4: about that was unfinished. And that's kind of like that,
Speaker 4: you know, the unfinished business of ghosts. I feel like
Speaker 4: it's all so tangled up with who the living are.
Speaker 2: How much fun has it been as a writer to
Speaker 2: introduce an element that is sits beyond what we know
Speaker 2: or what we're believing. You just say, I'm going to
Speaker 2: say a new set of rules for the story I'm
Speaker 2: telling you is that it doesn't have to adhere to
Speaker 2: the things that I know in the world or the
Speaker 2: kind of story I've told before. I get to wipe
Speaker 2: the slight clean and say, Okay, in this world, in
Speaker 2: this world, Max's did and Max is going to talk
Speaker 2: to us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was great fun. I had a lot more
Speaker 4: fun than you can see in the book. I think
Speaker 4: the only super weird thing he can do, apart from
Speaker 4: still being around and being dead, is his size changes
Speaker 4: depending on what he's feeling like. But I did have
Speaker 4: versions where you know, he was part of he like
Speaker 4: when you die, you sink into the brickwork of the house,
Speaker 4: you know, and then he could see all the other
Speaker 4: people who'd died there, and it just it became wild
Speaker 4: and mad and really difficult to find the story within.
Speaker 4: So in the end, the most interesting version of him
Speaker 4: turned out to be someone he just feels a bit impotent, like,
Speaker 4: you know, they hadn't finished what they were going to
Speaker 4: say and they can't say it, and seeing the parts
Speaker 4: of his girlfriend Hannah that he hadn't seen before. You
Speaker 4: know that she can sing, that she talks to herself
Speaker 4: who she is when she talks to herself when she's
Speaker 4: entirely alone, and he can't have any input in it.
Speaker 4: I feel like it's such a massive fun thing to write,
Speaker 4: And actually all of the other I had several weird
Speaker 4: monsters that were floating around at some point, and I
Speaker 4: really enjoyed them, but they just weren't the story I
Speaker 4: was trying to tell.
Speaker 2: I love the recurring thread of you having father and
Speaker 2: they're producing something that's traumatizing fathers that I'm having a
Speaker 2: great time when I'm playing, and it comes from a
Speaker 2: place of joy and nostalgia, and it's like, that's just
Speaker 2: where the fun is.
Speaker 4: It is, I do think it is. I think it's
Speaker 4: just it's exciting, isn't it. I think I'm not Death's
Speaker 4: biggest fan, but there is a part of me that's
Speaker 4: like to be on that cusp and to go, I'm
Speaker 4: going to find out the thing that nobody knows is
Speaker 4: kind of amazing.
Speaker 2: You know. It comes back a bit to that idea
Speaker 2: of the inarticulate again, is in a relationship, there are
Speaker 2: things we can or don't say to one another. And
Speaker 2: by building a relationship, by describing a relationship to us
Speaker 2: through the lens of death, through the lens of it
Speaker 2: being over, gives you an opportunity to to sketch out
Speaker 2: the things that could never be said between them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think there's this really interesting thing that happens in
Speaker 4: long term relationships where you assume you know that person
Speaker 4: really well and that knowing them is an important part
Speaker 4: of your relationship.
Speaker 3: It's like, I know you and who you are, and
Speaker 3: you never do.
Speaker 4: And also there's that thing you know when you're breaking
Speaker 4: up with someone and the thing that you say is, oh,
Speaker 4: you changed, and it's like, well, yeah, every selling my
Speaker 4: body and I took on two decades worth of information
Speaker 4: and the world changed, and you know, we change constantly,
Speaker 4: and the idea of that being a bad thing. And
Speaker 4: I think within relationships it's very easy to get a
Speaker 4: sort of pinpoint in a person and go, this is
Speaker 4: where I want you to stay, and that's my comfort zone.
Speaker 4: And when they move out of that, it becomes very
Speaker 4: uncomfortable and you miss the old version.
Speaker 3: It was very like having a kid, you know.
Speaker 4: I look back at photographs of my son who's now
Speaker 4: nearly ten, and I don't recognize the little sort of
Speaker 4: cherubie person and it's a really strange feeling and you
Speaker 4: kind of grieve that, you grieve who they were. I
Speaker 4: think there's something like that that goes on in romantic
Speaker 4: relationships that you're just like you kind of hook onto
Speaker 4: them and you're like, oh, please don't change, this is perfect,
Speaker 4: and then you both go off in different directions. And
Speaker 4: inability to acknowledge that is I think really sad.
Speaker 2: So just before I let you go to clarify, are
Speaker 2: you willing to try your childhood Australian accent on us
Speaker 2: now before you leave? Shows how bad it is.
Speaker 3: All right, let's think, what would I say? There's a
Speaker 3: shark in the.
Speaker 2: Park Strom strong choice and you went straight back to hallucinating. Oh,
Speaker 2: that's that's great, That's that's not bad. I've got a
Speaker 2: whole new interview of questions about why hallucinating is the
Speaker 2: word that gets you into your Australian self. But that
Speaker 2: makes sense. That was perfect. I can't I can't fault that.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Ivie Wild, Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 3: Oh it's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 2: Ivy Wilde's latest novel, The Echoes, is available at all
Speaker 2: Good bookstores now.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of
Speaker 1: Read This. We'll be back tomorrow with another episode, and
Speaker 1: you can hear all of Read This by searching for
Speaker 1: it wherever you listen to podcasts.