Speaker 1: Hello again. It's Daniel James and I'm here to share
Speaker 1: another episode I read this Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast,
Speaker 1: hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
Speaker 1: conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
Speaker 1: and around the world. In this episode, Michael is chatting
Speaker 1: with London based Australian writer Jessica Stanley. As always, Michael
Speaker 1: joins me to share a little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2: Hi, Michael, Daniel James.
Speaker 1: Hello, So, Michael, you make a bit of a mission
Speaker 1: in this episode that if you go to someone's house,
Speaker 1: you're definitely going to spend time scaring their bookshelves.
Speaker 2: Correct, Yes, doesn't everyone. Isn't that just a basic thing
Speaker 2: you do when you go into someone else's house. I
Speaker 2: am one hundred percent having a furtive perv at what's
Speaker 2: on every bookshelf, and I am passing judgment all the
Speaker 2: way through. This week's guest, Jessica Stanley says that she
Speaker 2: does it, but she doesn't pass judgment, and I believe
Speaker 2: she's lying. We all look at it and we all
Speaker 2: have very strong opinions. And then the other thing is
Speaker 2: like I'm partnered up I know you are too, Daniel,
Speaker 2: But if you're single, I would encourage people to use
Speaker 2: people's reading lists, their book recommendations as the ultimate dating determinant.
Speaker 2: You know, let's forget dating apps. Let's just say, give
Speaker 2: me your top three books. And if someone doesn't pass muster,
Speaker 2: they can get stuffed.
Speaker 1: It really can reveal a lot a better person, can't it.
Speaker 1: And the idea of what's on someone else's bookshelves plays
Speaker 1: a bit of a key role in Jessica Stanley's new
Speaker 1: novel City Yourself Kissed. Tell me a little bit about it.
Speaker 2: No, you're absolutely right. The thing that spurred me onto
Speaker 2: that particularly unkind diatribe is that this novel that we're
Speaker 2: talking about today begins with all the kind of beats
Speaker 2: and expectations of a conventional rom com. You know, there's
Speaker 2: a meat cut, a grand gesture, someone falls in a
Speaker 2: lay human connection. But Jessica Stanley is a really smart writer.
Speaker 2: She's much more interested in the question of kind of
Speaker 2: human connection and in what comes next. This is a
Speaker 2: book about the decade after the World Romance. She follows
Speaker 2: her two characters, Coralie and Adam, as they go through
Speaker 2: children and renovations and jobs and extended families and friends
Speaker 2: and disappointment and corrosion and compromising, just all the grit
Speaker 2: and grist of everyday life, which could be a trudge
Speaker 2: in the hands of a lesser writer, but a writer
Speaker 2: like Jessica Stanley turns it into something graceful and playful
Speaker 2: and funny and dare I say it even romantic. It's
Speaker 2: quite the feat and it's lovely to chat to her
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment. What's on Jessica Stanley's bookshelves?
Speaker 2: Where I want to start is an element of the
Speaker 2: meat cut in your book, which is the swapping of
Speaker 2: apartments and the looking at other people's bookshelves. And I
Speaker 2: want to know, when you visit someone's house for the
Speaker 2: first time, how nosy are you on the question of
Speaker 2: what's on their bookshelves?
Speaker 3: Well, I'm interested, but as with most things, I'm observing,
Speaker 3: but I'm not judging. So I'm interested to see what
Speaker 3: people are reading. But by the time I've made it
Speaker 3: into someone's home, I'm probably intimate with them anyway, so
Speaker 3: I'm certainly not judging. And also I find a lot
Speaker 3: of people in their thirties I'm not in my thirties.
Speaker 3: I'm forty three, but a lot of people in their
Speaker 3: thirties have moved around so much anyway that maybe they
Speaker 3: would think their shelves weren't really reflective of them, so
Speaker 3: to be judged on them would be upsetting. Whereas I'm
Speaker 3: one of those people who I started amassing my books
Speaker 3: when I went to the Lifeline, book Fair and Camera,
Speaker 3: and I've taken them from every house to every house
Speaker 3: my entire life.
Speaker 2: Would someone know a lot about you from your bookshelves?
Speaker 3: I think so. One thing that I've done since I
Speaker 3: was really young I probably wouldn't do it now is
Speaker 3: that my books have always been separated into women authors
Speaker 3: and then male authors, and I always put the women
Speaker 3: authors in a special in a special place, and the
Speaker 3: male authors I put, you know, in a secondary location
Speaker 3: outside the bathroom or something like that.
Speaker 2: Are they books on a shelf that would disqualify a
Speaker 2: person for you?
Speaker 3: I think I would feel frightened and concerned if someone
Speaker 3: had a top Gear book.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, good, yeah, nan out the door.
Speaker 3: But apart from that sort of thing, no, because who
Speaker 3: knows someone might have a book because they're reviewing it
Speaker 3: or writing a nusty essay about it. Yeah, I just
Speaker 3: I couldn't be sure.
Speaker 2: Are there books for you that you would insist that
Speaker 2: someone read if you wanted them to understand you?
Speaker 3: Wow? Well, in consider a soft kissed I have Adam
Speaker 3: say to Coraley that he loves the Don Watson book
Speaker 3: about Paul Keating, and that makes sense for him because
Speaker 3: he is a political journalist. And Coraly notices that the
Speaker 3: spine of that book is corduroy. It's been read, so.
Speaker 2: I love that sscription. When I came across it on
Speaker 2: the page, I was like, I'd never heard it before,
Speaker 2: and a corduroy spine denoting a much loved book really
Speaker 2: tickled me.
Speaker 3: And that's funny because I made my husband read that
Speaker 3: book when we first met, as well as Watch the
Speaker 3: Castle and What's the Murder of Old Chopper?
Speaker 2: Oh, there you go, Chopper, The Castle and Memoirs of
Speaker 2: a Bleeding Heart? Yeah, that's a good cultural three. Was
Speaker 2: that the Australia that you needed him to understand?
Speaker 3: That's exactly it. Yeah?
Speaker 2: Did he have equivalent titles he felt that you needed
Speaker 2: to understand?
Speaker 3: Gosh, I feel really bad. Well, if he did, I'm
Speaker 3: not across them.
Speaker 2: You're very literate already though. I imagine your love of
Speaker 2: Allan Hollinghurst, for example, would mean that a particular strata
Speaker 2: of London society you had a pretty good understanding of.
Speaker 3: Yes, but that wasn't my husband's strata of society. What
Speaker 3: is Northern Irish? Because he's Northern Irish. So he is
Speaker 3: very insistent that I regularly watch a meme which is
Speaker 3: a guy from Northern Ireland saying this is a wonder day,
Speaker 3: a wonder day because it's sunny.
Speaker 2: There you go, that's a good thing to understand about,
Speaker 2: that kind of Northern Irish energy. So tell me about
Speaker 2: love and romance on the page. How crucial is it
Speaker 2: to your reading history? How much is it something that
Speaker 2: you relish, and how actively did you decide to subvert
Speaker 2: those beats when writing Consider your Self Kissed.
Speaker 3: It's strange because when I began writing this book, I
Speaker 3: had just published a previous book that hadn't gone very well,
Speaker 3: This is a Great Hope, which came out in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty two. It had been reviewed really nicely but hadn't
Speaker 3: made any sort of splash, and people who knew me
Speaker 3: really liked it, but no one else seemed to notice it,
Speaker 3: And I couldn't even come over to launch it because
Speaker 3: of the strange timing. But I had got to a
Speaker 3: stage where I thought, Okay, writing a book isn't going
Speaker 3: to change my life, And then I thought, well, am
Speaker 3: I even going to try again? And I really felt
Speaker 3: as if there was only one reason to try and
Speaker 3: write another book, and that was for the love of
Speaker 3: actually writing. And I had also come to a point
Speaker 3: in my life where care and love feel like everything
Speaker 3: to me, not just personally but in the political environment.
Speaker 3: It feels like the most natural and intuitive response to
Speaker 3: what's going on more generally, which I would characterize as
Speaker 3: being quite hateful. And so, even though in the past
Speaker 3: most of my most favorite books have been about families,
Speaker 3: I wanted to combine that with a classic love story,
Speaker 3: someone meeting someone and that feeling of falling in love,
Speaker 3: but then to also follow that love for the next
Speaker 3: ten years when things started to get hard. And one
Speaker 3: of the books that I modeled it on, apart from
Speaker 3: the Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, was American Wife
Speaker 3: by Curtis Sittenfeld, where she follows fictionalized Laura Bush as
Speaker 3: incredibly wildly. She falls in love with a fictionalized George W. Bush,
Speaker 3: and I think you maybe follow them for twenty years,
Speaker 3: and for some reason, she really gets you to care
Speaker 3: about these two people. And so I thought, how can
Speaker 3: I watch two people fall in love and convey that
Speaker 3: to the reader, but also help people in a time
Speaker 3: when it's pretty hard to concentrate on long form content
Speaker 3: of any kind, and especially fiction. Maybe how can I
Speaker 3: get them to fall in love with the experience of
Speaker 3: reading about them.
Speaker 2: One of the things I love so much about this
Speaker 2: book is its approach to time. It's as much a
Speaker 2: book about the passing of time as it is about love.
Speaker 2: That actually, when we hit what we think of as
Speaker 2: kind of rom com beads tends to be a kind
Speaker 2: of constrained and kind of almost instrumental way of telling
Speaker 2: a story that the point at which you get together
Speaker 2: and you fall in love, that's the end of the
Speaker 2: interesting bit, and what comes afterwards is just the kind
Speaker 2: of day to day of life. Was it always going
Speaker 2: to be that kind of sweeping decade long view.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I go around with a lot of material
Speaker 3: in my mind, things that I think are funny or interesting,
Speaker 3: funny things that people have said, and I sort of wait,
Speaker 3: until I can come up with a structure or sort
Speaker 3: of line my buckets up in a row to toss
Speaker 3: the toss the content into, you know, like someone feeding
Speaker 3: the penguins at the zoo. And this tenure structure came
Speaker 3: to me right after the joint fortieth birthday party I
Speaker 3: had with my husband. I had moved to London when
Speaker 3: I was twenty nine, and I already knew him then,
Speaker 3: but we got married pretty quickly afterwards, and so by
Speaker 3: the time we were at our joint fortieth we had
Speaker 3: had three children, and we had spent ten years together
Speaker 3: as a married couple. And if I could have seen
Speaker 3: when I was twenty nine, if I could have seen
Speaker 3: this lovely party, my amazing husband, my lovely children, our friends,
Speaker 3: my friend's children, all hanging out together and celebrating us,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't have believed my luck. It was incredible and amazing.
Speaker 3: But the actual emotional experience of having spent that ten years,
Speaker 3: having reached the age of forty and been married for
Speaker 3: so long, I really felt run over by a truck.
Speaker 3: And the time, especially my experience of time, was incredible,
Speaker 3: where days when you're on your own with a baby
Speaker 3: can feel about twenty years long, and then something lovely
Speaker 3: is happening to you and it just washes by and
Speaker 3: is almost a dream afterwards. And so obviously, when I
Speaker 3: was covering the ten years in the book, I was
Speaker 3: trying to mimic that sense of time by zooming in
Speaker 3: on some very special, deep emotional moments and then zooming
Speaker 3: out and showing how time just runs away from you.
Speaker 2: When we returned, Jessica shares how being an outsider helped
Speaker 2: her shape the main character, Coraly, and why she only
Speaker 2: ever reads exactly what she wants to do.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: Your protagonist, Coraly, for her as for yourself. In being
Speaker 2: an outsider, that thing about starting your life over again
Speaker 2: in another place and having roots elsewhere, How important to
Speaker 2: you was it that Coraly was also an outsider in
Speaker 2: the community that she was building.
Speaker 3: Well, a lot of my favorite books feature an outsider
Speaker 3: to a community, and I think it's the best standpoint
Speaker 3: to analyze anything from. And of course, my favorite book
Speaker 3: of all times, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Speaker 3: and Nick is the ultimate outsider. He embeds himself with
Speaker 3: a family that is completely different to his own, and
Speaker 3: he just notices every single thing about them, and that's
Speaker 3: sort of what I want to do with Crawley, because
Speaker 3: I am obsessed with being from Australia. It's a major
Speaker 3: part of who I am. And I moved to London
Speaker 3: for love, not necessarily to be in London, and since
Speaker 3: then I've come to really love and appreciate it. But
Speaker 3: I've also been noticing what's strange and funny about it,
Speaker 3: and I want to write the book so I could
Speaker 3: put everything that I'd noticed into a book.
Speaker 2: One of the things about that which I think you
Speaker 2: capture so beautifully is the way in which any family
Speaker 2: or any community is an accretion of different traditions and
Speaker 2: different value sets, and an Australian amongst a bunch of Londoners.
Speaker 2: It does seem an important counterweight to certain expectations around class,
Speaker 2: around who's connected to who, and how that that Australianist
Speaker 2: does seem to be a key element in the boog.
Speaker 2: Have you had early readers in the UK? Do they
Speaker 2: warm to Coraley's australianis? Do they recognize it?
Speaker 3: It's funny because when I went around to bookshops, you know,
Speaker 3: before books come out, you get taken around to you
Speaker 3: try and interest booksellers in what you're selling, and I
Speaker 3: was too shy to do the kind of pitch the
Speaker 3: intro and when my publicists started off with it's about
Speaker 3: an Australian in London, I internally cringed. I thought, these
Speaker 3: people are not going to care. And that has been
Speaker 3: my personal experience of living in the UK for such
Speaker 3: a long time, is that when people hear that you're
Speaker 3: from Australia, or when people hear an Australian voice, they
Speaker 3: zone out. So I was anxious about how the book
Speaker 3: would be received, especially if the australianist was foregrounded. But
Speaker 3: everyone has responded really beautifully, although it's interesting to me
Speaker 3: that no one has responded about her being Australian. I
Speaker 3: think they have just responded to her as a person,
Speaker 3: which is the most you can hope.
Speaker 2: For, I think. So. I mean, the other thing you
Speaker 2: have going for you is that telling a story of
Speaker 2: the UK during that particular decade is one of massive
Speaker 2: kind of social change, social anxiety, political turmoil. Do you
Speaker 2: always know that Adam was going to be in the
Speaker 2: political media sphere? Was that a useful tool for making
Speaker 2: everything from Brexit to COVID to Boris Johnson a key
Speaker 2: element of the story.
Speaker 3: Yes, that was the only way I could think of
Speaker 3: to bring it in a way that was natural, because
Speaker 3: when I moved over, maybe because I come from a
Speaker 3: colonial mindset, I had this vast reserve of knowledge about
Speaker 3: British politics that I was keen to show off, and
Speaker 3: making Adam a political journalist seemed like the best and
Speaker 3: most natural way to shoehorn it into a book. And
Speaker 3: I also just had spent so much time. I think
Speaker 3: it's hard to explain to people who weren't there the
Speaker 3: way Brexit gripped the UK, because we really didn't know
Speaker 3: from one minute to the next if we would have
Speaker 3: a government, if we'd have a prime minister, or even
Speaker 3: if we would have the ability to import toilet paper
Speaker 3: or the chemicals for clean drinking water, and so watching
Speaker 3: the news at ten o'clock became almost a matter of
Speaker 3: life and death, and so I thought making Adam a
Speaker 3: political journalist could really vivify that for the readers.
Speaker 2: It also carries with it that thing love external pressures
Speaker 2: on a marriage and on a relationship, because that's his
Speaker 2: professional sphere. It's very clear that at any moment, you
Speaker 2: know as you're reading it you have this kind of anxiety,
Speaker 2: you understand the pressure they're under. You understand how close
Speaker 2: at times to the edge Coralli is feeling. And you know,
Speaker 2: if you have a passing acquaintance with UK politics, that
Speaker 2: just around the corner is going to be something else
Speaker 2: that means that Adam is not going to be present
Speaker 2: in their marriage.
Speaker 3: Again, yeah, exactly. And I think that the news environment,
Speaker 3: whether we are really following news in depth or whether
Speaker 3: it just comes to us through our feeds or in snippets,
Speaker 3: it does have the ability to change our entire state.
Speaker 3: And I have had the experience of being at home,
Speaker 3: having a lovely time with my children, then glancing at
Speaker 3: my phone and suddenly my life is ruined, or at
Speaker 3: least my day, because of some horrible political thing that's
Speaker 3: happened to me. And I felt that rather than that
Speaker 3: being something secret or private that happens to everyone in
Speaker 3: their house every day, why not bring that out through
Speaker 3: Coraly's experience and make it something that we can talk
Speaker 3: about and notice in ourselves the way that politics can
Speaker 3: really have a real world impact on people that it's
Speaker 3: being done too. Because I think politics is something that
Speaker 3: some people do and mostly it's something that we have
Speaker 3: done to us, and I really wanted to show that
Speaker 3: from the perspective of someone having politics done to them.
Speaker 2: You said before that your starting point wasn't really so
Speaker 2: much the traditional rom com. But it's interesting how quickly
Speaker 2: that shift between a meat cured, a grand romantic gesture,
Speaker 2: a kind of rescue child from upon all those beats
Speaker 2: that are so familiar to us from pop culture. There
Speaker 2: is something about the life long aftermath of that that
Speaker 2: feels relatively unwritten about.
Speaker 3: I agree. Maybe I'm just blanking, but I don't feel
Speaker 3: as though there are many in depth domestic strife novels
Speaker 3: where two people are good, conscientious, thoughtful people who don't
Speaker 3: have some kind of dramatic issue in their relationship. They're
Speaker 3: just two people struggling to do their best. And that's
Speaker 3: really what I wanted to show if I could.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's no false drama in there. There's no gender Bokay,
Speaker 2: this person has suddenly done this massive act of betrayal
Speaker 2: or whatever. It's just it's kind of hard to get
Speaker 2: on with life and work and a creative life or
Speaker 2: a kind of independent, imaginative life and parenting and all
Speaker 2: that other stuff. How important to you is the conception
Speaker 2: of yourself as a writer. Have you always thought ultimately
Speaker 2: you would write books.
Speaker 3: Actually, when I was young, reading was such a huge
Speaker 3: part of my life, and I really clearly remember when
Speaker 3: we lived in Parkville. My parents would take me to
Speaker 3: the library all the time. But there was a night
Speaker 3: when the North Carlton library stayed open late, and so
Speaker 3: I would go in my pajamas and dressing gown and
Speaker 3: get my books for the week. And it was just
Speaker 3: an absolutely mandatory part of my life to escape into
Speaker 3: a book. It was almost like a life support system.
Speaker 3: And in my house, books were venerated and authors were
Speaker 3: as important as God's and so I just didn't consider
Speaker 3: that I could take my kind of love of reading
Speaker 3: and my love of writing and actually turn that into
Speaker 3: a book. So I spent so long kind of trying
Speaker 3: to earn money on the basis of it by being
Speaker 3: a copywriter and that sort of stuff. And I didn't
Speaker 3: start writing until I was about thirty, and my first
Speaker 3: book didn't come out until I was forty, And so
Speaker 3: that's a lot of life where I haven't conceptualized my
Speaker 3: as a writer. And so now when I'm filling in
Speaker 3: the card when I come into Australia to say what
Speaker 3: I do. I write novelist and that makes me very happy.
Speaker 3: But no, I wasn't one of those people who thought, yes,
Speaker 3: that will be me someday. And I take a lot
Speaker 3: of inspiration from people who came to it very late
Speaker 3: and make it their life.
Speaker 2: But I'll be.
Speaker 3: Fitzgerald who didn't start writing until she was about sixty.
Speaker 3: I need a Bruckner people like that. So there are
Speaker 3: role models that I could look to.
Speaker 2: It's funny many of those examples, many of those role
Speaker 2: models of writers who come to it later are women.
Speaker 2: That women's lives by and large don't allow for the
Speaker 2: kind of space needed to give over to creative practice.
Speaker 2: And so again and again you'll hear in these interviews
Speaker 2: women who need to make that choice later rather than earlier.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and I have had to grow as a person
Speaker 3: to be able to communicate to people who love me
Speaker 3: that four hours a day minimum needs to be put
Speaker 3: aside for me to be perfectly alone. And a lot
Speaker 3: of women can't do that for a long time, whether
Speaker 3: for personal reasons or just how their life is set up.
Speaker 3: And so everyone who is struggling to do that, I
Speaker 3: really feel for them. And I was that person for
Speaker 3: a long time, so I get it.
Speaker 2: Much like the rhythms in Consider your Self Kissed, There
Speaker 2: is something too about time and being able to kind
Speaker 2: of you know, I quite like the conception of not
Speaker 2: really starting to write until you're thirty, not having a
Speaker 2: first book till you're forty. Is if you can write
Speaker 2: and write for pleasure and hone your craft and work
Speaker 2: out the stories you want to tell them, the things
Speaker 2: you want to capture, not having that sense of being
Speaker 2: in a hurry, I think can only be a good thing.
Speaker 3: Maybe, yeah, I agree, I think so.
Speaker 2: The thing for me, part of the important part of
Speaker 2: it was that sense of being an active reader from
Speaker 2: an early age like that reading was very important to me,
Speaker 2: but it wasn't just a passive experience that to read
Speaker 2: something was to add something to the world. Part of
Speaker 2: that is, yet, how is reader a job? I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: I hope it is.
Speaker 3: Well. For me, reading was pure freedom, and so I
Speaker 3: would go into the library, get my ten or twenty books,
Speaker 3: and I would deal with the words as they came
Speaker 3: into my body and became emotions and images. And even
Speaker 3: now I tend to read in a way that is
Speaker 3: extremely agentic, so I never feel as if there's a
Speaker 3: book I must read. I only read what I want,
Speaker 3: and when words are coming into me, I can let
Speaker 3: them wash over me. It is just the area of
Speaker 3: my life where I feel totally on solid ground, totally
Speaker 3: able to experience what the book is giving. It's something
Speaker 3: I don't have anywhere else in my life, but it
Speaker 3: makes me feel strong and happy.
Speaker 2: Jessica Stanley's new novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, is available at
Speaker 2: all Good bookstores now.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to another episode. I've read
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