Speaker 1: Hi there, it's Ruby Jones and it's time to settle
Speaker 1: in for another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly
Speaker 1: books podcast. It's hosted by editor of The Monthly Michael
Speaker 1: Williams and features conversations with some of the most talented
Speaker 1: writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to hear from two times Myles Franklin Award
Speaker 1: winning author Michelle du Kretze. As always, I'm joined by
Speaker 1: Michael to tell me a little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2: Hi, Michael, Ruby Jones.
Speaker 1: So, Michael. While Michelle Decretza might be a household name
Speaker 1: for many of our listeners, having won two Miles Franklin
Speaker 1: Awards and also the Stellar Prize for her previous work,
Speaker 1: for those of us who might be a little less familiar,
Speaker 1: can you tell me a bit about her career so far?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have to say, unabashad Lee, Michelle Dacretz is
Speaker 2: one of my favorite Australian writers writing today. She's Sri
Speaker 2: Lankan born and has won the Miles Franklin a couple
Speaker 2: of times. As you said, she's received all kinds of
Speaker 2: accolades for her writing, and I think at the heart
Speaker 2: of it. What people like about her books is that
Speaker 2: they're ambitious, often sweeping in scope, occasionally very focused in scope,
Speaker 2: but she's never afraid to muck around and have a play.
Speaker 1: And this latest book, Theory in Practice, has been described
Speaker 1: as her most experimental work yet. So how does that
Speaker 1: play out on the page?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Absolutely. This is her seventh novel and it definitely
Speaker 2: reinforces that idea that Michel Deecrets is not someone who
Speaker 2: sees the novel as a fixed form. She sees it
Speaker 2: as something that you should get under the hood and
Speaker 2: really have a fiddle around with and see what fun
Speaker 2: you can have. Her book before this, Scary Monsters, was
Speaker 2: two novellas that were published back to back in the
Speaker 2: same volume, and you would flip it over to read
Speaker 2: the second one, and so depending on the order you
Speaker 2: read them, and you might have quite a different reading experience.
Speaker 2: Theory in Practice isn't quite that radical, but in other
Speaker 2: ways it definitely wants to challenge our expectation of what
Speaker 2: a novel is and what it can do. It in
Speaker 2: many ways feels like a memoir, It feels like an
Speaker 2: essay at different points, but at its heart it's a novel.
Speaker 2: About a young woman in the early eighties who is
Speaker 2: definitely not the author.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment. This is not Michelle
Speaker 1: Dee Kratze.
Speaker 2: I love this novel, and its sense of intellectual curiosity
Speaker 2: and structural playfulness only enhance the human story at its heart.
Speaker 2: But that cheekiness about category about how it should be read.
Speaker 2: Those aren't incidental pleasures. They're front and center of how
Speaker 2: the book's were been published, and the obvious starting point
Speaker 2: is its front cover, the striking design by Text Publishing's
Speaker 2: designer Chong Wing Ho, and the book's author looking out
Speaker 2: at us as we begin, I thought I might begin
Speaker 2: by asking when you knew you were going to be
Speaker 2: comfortable with or you wanted your own photo on the
Speaker 2: cover of this novel.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, Cheong asked me for photos of the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 3: I sent him a selection, a small selection, because I
Speaker 3: don't have many photos full stop. He came back with
Speaker 3: that one and said, how would you feel if I
Speaker 3: made this famous? I said frightened. He said why. I said, well,
Speaker 3: I don't want this novel to be taken for a memoir,
Speaker 3: and he said, no, we'll take care of that. Don't
Speaker 3: worry while he was working on the layout, I was,
Speaker 3: of course still frightened of that misreading, and I was
Speaker 3: talking it over with my partner, who met the very
Speaker 3: best salient pointer, as he often does that whenever a
Speaker 3: woman writes a novel with a first person narrator, it's
Speaker 3: taken as sort of biographical. So he said, you know,
Speaker 3: you could put a photo of anything on the cover
Speaker 3: and it would still be read as autobiography. And I
Speaker 3: certainly had this experience with my last novel, one half
Speaker 3: of which had a young female narrator. So I thought
Speaker 3: that that was a good point. And when the cover
Speaker 3: came back, well, of course, under the photo were the
Speaker 3: words that new novel underlined twice, and I, as I
Speaker 3: looked at it, I thought it gestured at the hybrid
Speaker 3: nature of the novel. It was saying, this is not
Speaker 3: straight fiction, but it's not memoir either, And the more
Speaker 3: I looked at it, it all fell into place for
Speaker 3: me when I looked at the photo and it reminded
Speaker 3: me of Margrid's famous photo realist painting of a pipe
Speaker 3: captioned this is not a pipe. In other words, reality
Speaker 3: and its representation and art are not the same thing.
Speaker 3: I don't know whether that was what Chong was channeling,
Speaker 3: but I do know that certainly towards the end of
Speaker 3: the novel a character specifically warns against mistaking realism for reality,
Speaker 3: so perhaps that also played its part in Chong's decision.
Speaker 3: And I am really pleased we went with that cover
Speaker 3: because I think it's very striking visually, and I think
Speaker 3: it has meant that a lot of young women in
Speaker 3: particular have picked up the novel, and that is of
Speaker 3: course extremely gratifying.
Speaker 2: You mentioned several times about the reading that it invites,
Speaker 2: and it seems to me that it invites a particular reading,
Speaker 2: but perhaps more than that, and not just to cover,
Speaker 2: but moving into some of the choices made within the
Speaker 2: book itself, it provokes a particular reading more than it
Speaker 2: invites it that there is a sense of challenge and
Speaker 2: play here that is designed not just to passively let
Speaker 2: the reader come to it on their own terms, but
Speaker 2: actively to unsettle or to just just to force them
Speaker 2: to do a little bit more work.
Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely, I quite like unsettling readers. Why not. I
Speaker 3: like novels set on set on me my expectations that
Speaker 3: play with my expectations, and so yes, absolutely I think
Speaker 3: that's fair to say that it does, let's say, strongly
Speaker 3: encourage a certain reading which is not necessarily followed through.
Speaker 3: We don't want to have any spoilers.
Speaker 2: But I love it, and there is a palpable sense
Speaker 2: that I have felt this across your entire body of work.
Speaker 2: Your appetite for play and your desire not to allow
Speaker 2: the constraints of convention to hold you back seems to
Speaker 2: be more acute with each book. Is that a reasonable summation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you. I'm flattered by that, of course, But
Speaker 3: I would say that, for instance, my second novel, The
Speaker 3: Hamilton Case, very much plays with the expectations set up
Speaker 3: by the conventional who done it. So I guess that's
Speaker 3: a fair way. That kind of interest in form and
Speaker 3: narrative convention certainly with this one. And I you know,
Speaker 3: as you say, I've had this interest in destabilizing the
Speaker 3: realist novel, and so I wanted to write what I
Speaker 3: have come to call the hyperrealist novel, the novel that
Speaker 3: doesn't read like a novel, and hence the start of
Speaker 3: Theory and Practice, which presents a completely conventional realist novel.
Speaker 3: And if I might say so without sounding vostful or anything.
Speaker 3: I think quite efficiently, for given the length it is,
Speaker 3: sets up an intrigue, a plot, a miscarriage of justice,
Speaker 3: a possible romantic entanglement. In quite a few pages. It
Speaker 3: does that efficiently, and then it changes completely. And the
Speaker 3: reason for doing that is it's you know, it's like
Speaker 3: placing black and white, and both colors come up shopper
Speaker 3: when they are placed next to their antithesis. So I
Speaker 3: wanted what followed to seem as the narrator. So she
Speaker 3: wishes to be telling the truth to seem utterly and
Speaker 3: completely truthful and not like a novel. And one of
Speaker 3: the other reasons for or secondary reason I suppose for
Speaker 3: having that realist extract at the start, is that you know,
Speaker 3: the narrator is a novelist, and when you get to
Speaker 3: the end of the novel you see how little events
Speaker 3: and little details that have happened to her in her
Speaker 3: life are reconfigured in the fiction that proceeds that starts
Speaker 3: theory and practice, so it's kind of like the theory
Speaker 3: and practice of the novel as well. I had in
Speaker 3: mind that instruction you get in Matt's exams to show
Speaker 3: your workings. So if you like the whole of of
Speaker 3: the hyperrealist novel is kind of the workings showing how
Speaker 3: those little bids make it into fiction in disguised form, transformed,
Speaker 3: made fictional, often out of recognition. So that was of
Speaker 3: interest to me as well, you know, how to demonstrate
Speaker 3: how little facts from one's life get turned into fiction.
Speaker 2: When I finished reading, I went out and got myself
Speaker 2: a copy of Virginia Wolf's The Years, which I have
Speaker 2: to confess I had never read. I mean, Wolf obviously
Speaker 2: is very important to this book and to you as
Speaker 2: a writer, but could you talk for a moment about
Speaker 2: The Years in particular and what it is that piqued
Speaker 2: your interest about that particular book.
Speaker 3: So in the novel, the narrator is writing a thesis
Speaker 3: on Virginia Wolf's late fiction and on the three last novels,
Speaker 3: The Waves, the Year's and Between the Acts. I'd actually
Speaker 3: read both The Waves and Between the Acts, and I
Speaker 3: hadn't read The Years. It was Wolfe's bestseller in her day,
Speaker 3: and it's really underread now. So I read it because
Speaker 3: I wanted the late fiction, because everyone writes about the
Speaker 3: you know, the missus dellaway into the Lighthouse. I wanted
Speaker 3: something different, and I read it, and I read about
Speaker 3: it in Wolfe's diaries, her composition of it. I was
Speaker 3: quite surprised when I read it, because it's a very
Speaker 3: conventional novel, largely realist really, and coming after the extreme
Speaker 3: modernist example experiment that was The Waves, it was strikingly different,
Speaker 3: and I understand a writer's wish to do something different,
Speaker 3: but this seemed almost like a return to Wolfe's first
Speaker 3: to pre modernist novels. So what I found out about
Speaker 3: her original plan for the novel was that she wanted
Speaker 3: to do something very distinctive and different. She wanted to
Speaker 3: write a novel made up of alternating chapters of fiction
Speaker 3: and nonfiction, so a novel about an English family that
Speaker 3: would cover about fifty years, and in between those fictive chapters,
Speaker 3: she would have an essay commenting on the social changes
Speaker 3: that had taken place in Britain at that time. She
Speaker 3: wrote an awful lot. She wrote about one hundred thousand
Speaker 3: words and then discarded it, which is sort of heartbreaking
Speaker 3: thing for a writer to have done. But she didn't.
Speaker 3: She discarded the plan. I should say, she used fiction
Speaker 3: to write the novel that became The Years, and she
Speaker 3: used some of the essays stick material her book Three Guineas.
Speaker 3: So I liked that idea. I thought that was a
Speaker 3: really fabulous idea, actually, the sort of mix of fiction
Speaker 3: and non fiction. But I also felt that the reason
Speaker 3: Wolf abandoned it, And I don't know why actually abandoned it,
Speaker 3: but I felt the reason must have been that it's
Speaker 3: terribly schematic, you know, chapter fiction, chapter of nonfiction, chapter
Speaker 3: of fiction, essay, and Wolf the least schematic of writers.
Speaker 3: I don't feel could have sustained that very long. And
Speaker 3: I certainly felt that if Virginia Wolf couldn't do it,
Speaker 3: I couldn't. And it seemed much more satisfactory to me
Speaker 3: to have kind of tangle of fiction and non fiction,
Speaker 3: whether that was essay or a little bit on memoir,
Speaker 3: and for the reader to not necessarily always be able
Speaker 3: to tell where one ended and the other began.
Speaker 2: I'm really glad you had that point about how schematic
Speaker 2: that plan was, because it strikes me hearing you talk,
Speaker 2: you know that desire to write a novel that doesn't
Speaker 2: feel like a novel. You know your narrator in theory
Speaker 2: and practice makes the same point. But she says, I
Speaker 2: wanted to form it allowed for formlessness and mess and
Speaker 2: I think, you know, I think part of the real
Speaker 2: achievement here is to do something that is so kind
Speaker 2: of intellectually robust and rigorous and curious on the one hand,
Speaker 2: but also messy and complicated like human beings and tells
Speaker 2: a kind of novelistic story on the other. And I wonder,
Speaker 2: did you have to consciously go in and mess it
Speaker 2: up at intervals? Did you find yourself did you find
Speaker 2: yourself going, well, no, this is too rigid, or these
Speaker 2: modes are too self evident and I have to have
Speaker 2: to just blur the edges a bit more.
Speaker 3: No, not really, not as far as form was concerned.
Speaker 3: But the mess I was interested in was much more
Speaker 3: human mess. So that you know, for the narrator as
Speaker 3: well as for many of the of the other characters,
Speaker 3: there is this messy gap between theory and practice, between
Speaker 3: our ideals and our actions. I'm always interested in that
Speaker 3: when it comes to character. And I would say that
Speaker 3: art really is energized by that mess because it's complex
Speaker 3: and contradictory, and those are things that art feeds on.
Speaker 3: Those are things that the novel feeds on, or maybe
Speaker 3: just I feed on them as a writer and reader,
Speaker 3: and so that was the kind of mess I was
Speaker 3: interested in. And as for the formlessness, well, just because
Speaker 3: sometimes you can't tell what is fictive and what isn't.
Speaker 2: When we return, Michelle discusses sexual jealousy, feminism, and what
Speaker 2: it means to be a writer in the public eye,
Speaker 2: we'll be right back the gulf between theory and practice,
Speaker 2: between who we want to be and who we are.
Speaker 2: It might be best served by the novel artistically. Is
Speaker 2: that best embodied by our twenties in a life? Is
Speaker 2: that what that period of big a university in your
Speaker 2: twenties is for?
Speaker 3: Not really, I think, you know. I mean, I'm sure
Speaker 3: I'm still quite out of mess between my theories and
Speaker 3: my mind.
Speaker 2: No, you're reconciled as a human being at this point.
Speaker 3: But I do think that, you know, in one's early twenties,
Speaker 3: one is asking the question, you know, how should a
Speaker 3: person be? So it's an attractive period for a novelist
Speaker 3: because you're still trying to figure out what life is
Speaker 3: for and what it will hold for you and how
Speaker 3: you can get there and what you should do. So
Speaker 3: I think there is a lot of energy and a
Speaker 3: lot of mess when you are in your early twenties
Speaker 3: as the narrator is I think that you know, Wolf,
Speaker 3: for instance, there's someone who went on being contradictory and
Speaker 3: messy right to the end of her life, and we
Speaker 3: all do that.
Speaker 2: I think, do you think culturally we're at a low
Speaker 2: point for capacity to process those contradictions in the people
Speaker 2: and in particular in the artists who we admire.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's such a good question, isn't it. I mean,
Speaker 3: it is a very topical one what we do with
Speaker 3: the failings and flaws of writers. And the emblematic writer
Speaker 3: for me when that comes up isn't Wolf, it's Visnipole.
Speaker 3: I mean, the man was a monster. You know what
Speaker 3: can you say? Racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, Brahminist, you name it.
Speaker 3: He's been there, he's done that, He's got it on
Speaker 3: a T shirt. And yet an extraordinary, brilliant writer, really
Speaker 3: brilliant and really really important for hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 3: diasporic writers. So you know, there's the man and there's
Speaker 3: the work. I really understand someone who's young and hasn't
Speaker 3: read on Ipol and says I don't want to read
Speaker 3: those people. I really understand that. I really get that
Speaker 3: or an older person it says, I don't want to
Speaker 3: read this people totally, but for me, you know, I
Speaker 3: did read them and they are part of who I am.
Speaker 3: So well. Remember McCaulay, you know, he says judgment is
Speaker 3: simply trying to reject a part of what we are
Speaker 3: because it hurts. The living cannot call the dead collect
Speaker 3: they won't accept the charge, and it reverts.
Speaker 2: Oh that's fantastic.
Speaker 3: I don't expect artists of any kind to be saints,
Speaker 3: you know, to be without feelings and flaws and shortcomings.
Speaker 3: But I think it is part of our moment that
Speaker 3: artists are so much in the public gaze now because
Speaker 3: of social media, for instance, and so there is increasingly
Speaker 3: this request, one might almost say, a demand that the
Speaker 3: artist's private life, I must conform to an ideal in
Speaker 3: the work, that if the artist is a prominent person,
Speaker 3: that then their private life must be equally flawless. I mean,
Speaker 3: if what am I trying to say? I think if
Speaker 3: they're getting accolades for their work, then their selves should
Speaker 3: also deserve accolades.
Speaker 2: It's also the point that you make so well in
Speaker 2: theory and practice about truth about the artist who professes
Speaker 2: to tell law, share a truth, or illuminate a truth
Speaker 2: that otherwise goes unremarked upon. Is that then that holds
Speaker 2: them to some kind of moral standard, if they're an
Speaker 2: arbiter of truth.
Speaker 3: Oh? Absolutely, And I say I mean for Wolf, obviously,
Speaker 3: she wrote quite brilliantly about women's lives and took the
Speaker 3: patriarchy to tusk on that score. And therefore, you know,
Speaker 3: there's the expectation that she has to also be virtual
Speaker 3: when it comes to matters of race, for instance, or
Speaker 3: anything else. And really she wasn't, you know. I mean,
Speaker 3: she was horrible about pretty much everyone in her diaries,
Speaker 3: which are great, wonderful literary documents. And she was gossipy,
Speaker 3: she was often hatty, and she was human.
Speaker 2: I do like the way in which, in theory and
Speaker 2: practice you do put forward a case that it's perhaps
Speaker 2: in sexual jealousy that we best see the illustration of
Speaker 2: our idea of ourself and how we live our lives
Speaker 2: being diverging. You know, it's particularly a cute example, particularly
Speaker 2: for a young feminist, to identify sexual jealousy in oneself.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Sure, I mean, I think in the world there
Speaker 3: are many ways in which the gap becomes evident politically,
Speaker 3: for instance. But you know, writing about a young woman
Speaker 3: in any young person's life, you know, sex, desire, romantic
Speaker 3: entanglesments loom particularly large at this point in one's life.
Speaker 3: And so that was the narrative I chose to tell.
Speaker 3: There is the wish on the narrator's behalf to be
Speaker 3: a good feminist and her inability to follow through when
Speaker 3: it comes to the woman she constructs as her rival,
Speaker 3: who is her lover's official. And I thought it was
Speaker 3: good to write about jealousy because it is such a
Speaker 3: source of shame, and shame is an interesting emotion because
Speaker 3: it has tremendous silencing power. And what is being silenced,
Speaker 3: what cannot be expressed, is always of interest to a novelist,
Speaker 3: isn't it. Yeah, you know, you want to express it just.
Speaker 2: At a technical level, at a level of form and process.
Speaker 2: The sense of play and the sense of fun in
Speaker 2: this book runs all the way through it. And I'm
Speaker 2: curious about whether that was the experience of writing it
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I look, it undertook me a
Speaker 3: year to write, which is probably on average, half the
Speaker 3: time it takes me to write a book. But it's
Speaker 3: half as long. There were many times of just work
Speaker 3: and you know the kind of dart that visits any writer, thinking,
Speaker 3: I don't know where this is going, who will want
Speaker 3: to read this rubbish, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, all the
Speaker 3: things that you know wake you up at three in
Speaker 3: the morning. But I would say that when I have
Speaker 3: finished the first draft, actually even when I've finished the book,
Speaker 3: I mean, there's always just a sense of, you know,
Speaker 3: little adrenaline rush because you've just actually made something. So
Speaker 3: there was that, but beyond that, I think I really
Speaker 3: felt a sense of exhilaration. I felt I had made
Speaker 3: something different and that was very pleasing to me. And
Speaker 3: I would say that again without in any way trying
Speaker 3: to diminish the amount of work and revision that any
Speaker 3: novel requires. I felt with this bookcas with no other,
Speaker 3: that it was somehow already inside me and I just
Speaker 3: needed to be able to get it out there, to
Speaker 3: give it a form for it to exist in the world.
Speaker 2: Michelle Decretz's latest novel, Theory in Practice, is out now.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: of Read. This next week, I'll be sharing Michael's conversation
Speaker 1: with a American author Rachel Kong. As always, if you
Speaker 1: want to dive further into read this, you can search
Speaker 1: for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There are more
Speaker 1: than seventy episodes in the archive for you to enjoy.
Speaker 1: See you next week.