Speaker 1: The last time I was lucky enough to visit the
Speaker 1: heaven on Earth that is the Strand Bookshop in New
Speaker 1: York City. Amongst the much vaunted eighteen miles of books,
Speaker 1: I came across a line of merch tote bags and
Speaker 1: tea towels, coffee cups, and bucket hats that were all
Speaker 1: emblazoned with a quote from American filmmaker John Waters. It
Speaker 1: simply read, if you go home with somebody and they
Speaker 1: don't have books, don't fuck them. Delightful. In all the
Speaker 1: conversations about romance and modern dating, about searching for a connection,
Speaker 1: be it love or friendship or sex, too little is
Speaker 1: made of the books that people read. I'm going to
Speaker 1: be completely honest. If I visit your house, I'm one
Speaker 1: hundred percent having a furtive perv at what's on your bookshelves.
Speaker 1: Everything I want and need to know could be answered
Speaker 1: if I see the pile on your bedside table, the
Speaker 1: most stunned, most love books in your collection. Forget dating apps.
Speaker 1: If you want a connection, provide a recommended reading list.
Speaker 1: My partner, who is brilliant and wonderful and an excellent
Speaker 1: reader with impeccable tastes, lied to me on our first
Speaker 1: date about loving an author she knew I was excited about.
Speaker 1: I was utterly convinced and completely charmed. London based Australian
Speaker 1: author Jessica Stanley's second novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, opens with
Speaker 1: all the beats of a classic romantic comedy, a meet, cute,
Speaker 1: grand gesture, human connection. But she's too smart a writer
Speaker 1: and too curious a thinker about the nature of human
Speaker 1: relationships to leave it there. Instead, she's written a book
Speaker 1: about the next bit after Coraline Adam's White Hot Courtship,
Speaker 1: What does the next decade look like? Children and renovations
Speaker 1: and jobs, extended families and friends, disappointments and corrosions, arguments
Speaker 1: and compromises, the slog of the day to day reality
Speaker 1: of just living. But she writes it with grace and
Speaker 1: wit and compassion, finding them romans in the what comes
Speaker 1: next when two people decide to be together. If I
Speaker 1: saw this book on somebody's bookshelf, I'd know there was
Speaker 1: someone I wanted to talk to. I have no doubt
Speaker 1: it would be a fun conversation, lively, embracingly honest. Great
Speaker 1: qualities in a book, even better qualities in a person.
Speaker 1: I'm Michael Williams, and this is Read This the show
Speaker 1: about the books we love and the stories behind me.
Speaker 1: Where I want to start is an element of the
Speaker 1: meat could in your book, which is the swapping of
Speaker 1: apartments and the looking at other people's bookshelves. And I
Speaker 1: want to know, when you visit someone's house for the
Speaker 1: first time, how nosy are you on the question of
Speaker 1: what's on their bookshelves.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm interested, but as with most things, I'm observing,
Speaker 2: but I'm not judging. So I'm interested to see what
Speaker 2: people are reading. But by the time I've made it
Speaker 2: into someone's home, I'm probably intimate with them anyway, so
Speaker 2: I'm certainly not judging. And also I find a lot
Speaker 2: of people in their thirties. I'm not in my thirties.
Speaker 2: I'm forty three, but a lot of people in their
Speaker 2: thirties have moved around so much anyway that maybe they
Speaker 2: would think their shelves weren't really reflective of them, so
Speaker 2: to be judged on them would be upsetting. Whereas I'm
Speaker 2: one of those people who I started amassing my books
Speaker 2: when I went to the Lifeline, book Fair and Camera,
Speaker 2: and I've taken them from every house to every house
Speaker 2: my entire life.
Speaker 1: Would someone know a lot about you from your bookshelves?
Speaker 2: I think so. One thing that I've done since I
Speaker 2: was really young I probably wouldn't do it now is
Speaker 2: that my books have always been separated into women authors
Speaker 2: and then male authors. And I always put the women
Speaker 2: authors in a special in a special place, and the
Speaker 2: male authors I put, you know, in a secondary location
Speaker 2: outside the bathroom or something like that.
Speaker 1: Are there books on a shelf that would disqualify a
Speaker 1: person for you?
Speaker 2: I think I would feel frightened and concerned if someone
Speaker 2: had a top Gear book.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, good, yeah, no, no out the door.
Speaker 2: But apart from that sort of thing, no, because who
Speaker 2: knows someone might have a book because they're reviewing it
Speaker 2: or writing a nasty essay about it. Yeah, I just
Speaker 2: I couldn't be sure.
Speaker 1: Are their books for you that you would insist that
Speaker 1: someone read if you wanted them to understand you?
Speaker 2: Wow? Well, in considerous self kissed. I have Adam say
Speaker 2: to Coraley that he loves the Don Watson book about
Speaker 2: Paul Keating, and that makes sense for him because he
Speaker 2: is a political journalist. And Coraly notices that the spine
Speaker 2: of that book is corduroy.
Speaker 1: It's been read, so I love that description. When I
Speaker 1: came across it on the page, I was like, I'd
Speaker 1: never heard it before. And a corduroy spine denoting a
Speaker 1: much loved book really tickles me.
Speaker 2: And that's funny because I made my husband read that
Speaker 2: book when we first met, as well as Watch The
Speaker 2: Castle and What's the Murder of Old Chopper?
Speaker 1: Oh, there you go, Chopper, The Castle and Memoirs of
Speaker 1: a Bleeding Heart. Yeah, that's a good cultural three. Was
Speaker 1: that the Australia that you needed him to understand?
Speaker 2: That's exactly it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, did he have equivalent titles he felt that you
Speaker 1: needed to understand?
Speaker 2: Gosh, I feel really bad. Well, if he did, I'm
Speaker 2: not across them.
Speaker 1: You're very literate already, though. I imagine your love of
Speaker 1: Alan Hollinghurst, for example, would mean that a particular strata
Speaker 1: of London society you had a pretty good understanding of.
Speaker 2: Yes, but that wasn't my husband's strata of society. What
Speaker 2: is Northern Irish? Because he's Northern Irish. So he is
Speaker 2: very insistent that I regularly watch a meme which is
Speaker 2: a guy from Northern Ireland saying this is a wonder day,
Speaker 2: a wonder day because it's.
Speaker 1: There you go. That's a good thing to understand about,
Speaker 1: that kind of Northern Irish energy. So tell me about
Speaker 1: love and romance on the page. How crucial is it
Speaker 1: to your reading history, How much is it something that
Speaker 1: you relish, and how actively did you decide to subvert
Speaker 1: those beats when writing Consider your self Kissed.
Speaker 2: It's strange because when I began writing this book, I
Speaker 2: had just published a previous book that hadn't gone very well,
Speaker 2: This is a Great Hope, which came out in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two. It had been reviewed really nicely but hadn't
Speaker 2: made any sort of splash, and people who knew me
Speaker 2: really liked it, but no one else seemed to notice it,
Speaker 2: and I couldn't even come over to launch it because
Speaker 2: of the strange timing. But I had got to a
Speaker 2: stage where I thought, Okay, writing a book isn't going
Speaker 2: to change my life. And then I thought, well, I'm
Speaker 2: I'm even going to try again. And I really felt
Speaker 2: as if there was only one reason to try and
Speaker 2: write another book, and that was for the love of
Speaker 2: actually writing. And I had also come to a point
Speaker 2: in my life where care and love feel like everything
Speaker 2: to me, not just personally, but in the political environment.
Speaker 2: It feels like the most natural and intuitive response to
Speaker 2: what's going on more generally, which I would characterize as
Speaker 2: being quite hateful. And so, even though in the past
Speaker 2: most of my most favorite books have been about families,
Speaker 2: I wanted to combine that with a classic love story,
Speaker 2: someone meeting someone and that feeling of falling in love,
Speaker 2: but then to also follow that love for the next
Speaker 2: ten years when things started to get hard. And one
Speaker 2: of the books that I modeled it off, apart from
Speaker 2: the Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, was American Wife
Speaker 2: by Curtis Sittenfeld, where she follows fictionalized Laura Bush as
Speaker 2: incredibly wildly she falls in love with a fictionalized George W. Bush,
Speaker 2: and I think you maybe follow them for twenty years,
Speaker 2: and for some reason, she really gets you to care
Speaker 2: about these two people. And so I thought, how can
Speaker 2: I watch two people fall in love and convey that
Speaker 2: to the reader, but also help people in a time
Speaker 2: when it's pretty hard to concentrate on long form content
Speaker 2: of any kind, and especially fiction, Maybe how can I
Speaker 2: get them to fall in love with the experience of
Speaker 2: reading about them.
Speaker 1: One of the things I love so much about this
Speaker 1: book is its approach to time. It's as much a
Speaker 1: book about the passing of time as it is about love.
Speaker 1: That actually, when we hit what we think of as
Speaker 1: kind of rom combads tends to be kind of constrained
Speaker 1: and kind of almost instrumental way of telling a story.
Speaker 1: That the point at which you get together and you
Speaker 1: fall in love, that's the end of the interesting bit,
Speaker 1: and what comes afterwards is just the kind of day
Speaker 1: to day of life. Was it always going to be
Speaker 1: that kind of sweeping decade long view.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I go around with a lot of material
Speaker 2: in my mind, things that I think are funny or interesting,
Speaker 2: funny things that people have said, and I sort of
Speaker 2: wait until I can come up with a structure or
Speaker 2: sort of line my buckets up in a row to
Speaker 2: toss the toss the content into, you know, like someone
Speaker 2: feeding the penguins at the zoo. And this ten year
Speaker 2: structure came to me right after the joint fortieth birthday
Speaker 2: party I had with my husband. I had moved to
Speaker 2: London when I was twenty nine, and I already knew
Speaker 2: him then, but we got married pretty quickly afterwards. And
Speaker 2: so by the time we were at our joint fortieth
Speaker 2: we had had three children, and we had spent ten
Speaker 2: years together as a married couple. And if I could
Speaker 2: have seen when I was twenty nine, if I could
Speaker 2: have seen this lovely party, my amazing husband, my lovely children,
Speaker 2: our friends, my friend's children, all hanging out together and
Speaker 2: celebrating us, I wouldn't believed my luck. It was incredible
Speaker 2: and amazing. But the actual emotional experience of having spent
Speaker 2: that ten years, having reached the age of forty and
Speaker 2: been married for so long, I really felt run over
Speaker 2: by a truck. And the time, especially, my experience of
Speaker 2: time was incredible, where days when you're on your own
Speaker 2: with a baby can feel about twenty years long, and
Speaker 2: then something lovely is happening to you and it just
Speaker 2: washes by and is almost a dream afterwards. And so obviously,
Speaker 2: when I was covering the ten years in the book,
Speaker 2: I was trying to mimic that sense of time by
Speaker 2: zooming in on some very special, deep emotional moments and
Speaker 2: then zooming out and showing how time just runs away
Speaker 2: from you.
Speaker 1: When we returned, Jessica shares how being an outsider helped
Speaker 1: her shape her main character, Coraly and why she only
Speaker 1: ever reads exactly what she wants to do. We'll be
Speaker 1: right back your protagonist Coraly for her as for yourself.
Speaker 1: In being an outsider, that thing about starting your life
Speaker 1: over again in another place and having roots elsewhere. How
Speaker 1: important to you was it that Coraly was also an
Speaker 1: outsider in the community that she was building.
Speaker 2: Well, a lot of my favorite books feature an outsider
Speaker 2: to a community, and I think it's the best standpoint
Speaker 2: to analyze anything from. And of course, my favorite book
Speaker 2: of all time it's The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst,
Speaker 2: and Nick is the ultimate outsider. He embeds himself with
Speaker 2: a family that is completely different to his own, and
Speaker 2: he just notices every single thing about them. And that's
Speaker 2: sort of what I want to do with Crawley, because
Speaker 2: I am obsessed with being from Australia. It's a major
Speaker 2: part of who I am, and I moved to London
Speaker 2: for love, not necessarily to be in London, and since
Speaker 2: then I've come to really love and appreciate it, but
Speaker 2: I've also been noticing what's strange and funny about it,
Speaker 2: and I wanted to write the book, so I could
Speaker 2: put everything that I'd noticed into a book.
Speaker 1: One of the things about that which I think you
Speaker 1: capture so beautifully is the way in which any family
Speaker 1: or any community is and accretion of different traditions and
Speaker 1: different value sets an Australian amongst a bunch of Londoners.
Speaker 1: It does seem an important counterweight to certain expectations around class,
Speaker 1: around who's connected to who and how that that Australianist
Speaker 1: does seem to be a key element in the boog.
Speaker 1: Have you had early readers in the UK? Do they
Speaker 1: warm to Corally's Australianists? Do they recognize it?
Speaker 2: It's funny because when I went around to bookshops, you know,
Speaker 2: before books come out, you get taken around to try
Speaker 2: and interest booksellers in what you're selling. And I was
Speaker 2: too shy to do the kind of pitch the intro,
Speaker 2: And when my publicist started off with it's about an
Speaker 2: Australian in London, I internally cringed. I thought, these people
Speaker 2: are not going to care. And that has been my
Speaker 2: personal experience of living in the UK for such a
Speaker 2: long time, is that when people hear that you're from Australia,
Speaker 2: or when people here in Australian voice, they zone out.
Speaker 2: So I was anxious about how the book would be received,
Speaker 2: especially if the australianess was foregrounded. But everyone has responded
Speaker 2: really beautifully. Although it's interesting to me that no one
Speaker 2: has responded about her being Australian. I think they have
Speaker 2: just responded to her as a person, which is the
Speaker 2: most you can hope for.
Speaker 1: I think so. I mean, the other thing you have
Speaker 1: going for you is that telling the story of the
Speaker 1: UK during that particular decade is one of massive kind
Speaker 1: of social change, social anxiety, political turmoil. Do you always
Speaker 1: know that Adam was going to be in the political
Speaker 1: media sphere? Was that a useful tool for making everything
Speaker 1: from Brexit to COVID to Boris Johnson a key element
Speaker 1: of the story.
Speaker 2: Yes, that was the only way I could think of
Speaker 2: to bring it in in a way that was natural
Speaker 2: because when I moved over, maybe because I come from
Speaker 2: a colonial mindset, I had this vast reserve of knowledge
Speaker 2: about British politics that I was keen to show off,
Speaker 2: and making Adam a political journalist seemed like the best
Speaker 2: and most natural way to shoehorn it into a book.
Speaker 2: And I also just had spent so much time. I
Speaker 2: think it's hard to explain to people who weren't there
Speaker 2: the way Brexit gripped the UK, because we really didn't
Speaker 2: know from one minute to the next if we would
Speaker 2: have a government, if we'd have a prime minister, or
Speaker 2: even if we would have the ability to import toilet
Speaker 2: paper or the chemicals for clean drinking water, and so
Speaker 2: watching the news at ten o'clock became almost a matter
Speaker 2: of life and death, and so I thought making Adam
Speaker 2: a political journalist could really vivify that for the readers.
Speaker 1: It also carries with it that thing love external pressures
Speaker 1: on a marriage and on a relationship, because that's his
Speaker 1: professional sphere. It's very clear that it any moment, you know,
Speaker 1: as you're reading it you have this kind of anxiety.
Speaker 1: You understand the pressure they're under, You understand how close
Speaker 1: at times to the edge Coraley is feeling. And you know,
Speaker 1: if you have a passing acquaintance with UK politics, that
Speaker 1: just around the corner is going to be something else.
Speaker 1: That means that Adam is not going to be present
Speaker 1: in their marriage again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And I think that the news environment, whether
Speaker 2: we are really following news in depth or whether it
Speaker 2: just comes to us through our feeds or in snippets.
Speaker 2: It does have the ability to change our entire state.
Speaker 2: And I have had the experience of being at home,
Speaker 2: having a lovely time with my children, then glancing at
Speaker 2: my phone and suddenly my life is ruined, or at
Speaker 2: least my day, because of some horrible political thing that's
Speaker 2: happened to me. And I felt that, rather than that
Speaker 2: being something secret or private that have happens to everyone
Speaker 2: in their house every day, why not bring that out
Speaker 2: through Coraly's experience and make it something that we can
Speaker 2: talk about and notice in ourselves the way that politics
Speaker 2: can really have a real world impact on people that
Speaker 2: it's being done too, because I think politics is something
Speaker 2: that some people do, and mostly it's something that we
Speaker 2: have done to us, and I really wanted to show
Speaker 2: that from the perspective of someone having politics done to them.
Speaker 1: You said before that your starting point wasn't really so
Speaker 1: much the traditional rom com. But it's interesting how quickly
Speaker 1: that shift between a meat cured, a grand romantic gesture,
Speaker 1: a kind of rescue child from upon all those beats
Speaker 1: that are so familiar to us from pop culture. There
Speaker 1: is something about the long aftermath of that that feels
Speaker 1: relatively unwritten about.
Speaker 2: I agree, maybe I'm just blanking, but I don't feel
Speaker 2: as though there are men any in depth domestic strife
Speaker 2: novels where two people are good, conscientious, thoughtful people who
Speaker 2: don't have some kind of dramatic issue in their relationship.
Speaker 2: They're just two people struggling to do their best. And
Speaker 2: that's really what I wanted to show if I could.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's no false drama in there. There's no gender Bokay,
Speaker 1: this person has suddenly done this massive act of betrayal
Speaker 1: or whatever. It's just it's kind of hard to get
Speaker 1: on with life and work and a creative life or
Speaker 1: a kind of independent, imaginative life and parenting and all
Speaker 1: that other stuff. How important to you is the conception
Speaker 1: of yourself as a writer. Have you always thought ultimately
Speaker 1: you would write books?
Speaker 2: Actually, when I was young, reading was such a huge
Speaker 2: part of my life, and I really clearly remember when
Speaker 2: we lived in Parkville. My parents would take me to
Speaker 2: the library all the time. But there was a night
Speaker 2: when the North Carlton library stayed open late, and so
Speaker 2: I would go in my pajamas and dressing gown and
Speaker 2: get my books for the week, and it was just
Speaker 2: an absolutely mandatory part of my life to escape into
Speaker 2: a book. It was almost like a life support system.
Speaker 2: And in my house, books were venerated and authors were
Speaker 2: as important as God's and so I just didn't consider
Speaker 2: that I could take my kind of love of reading
Speaker 2: and my love of writing and actually turn that into
Speaker 2: a book. So I spent so long kind of trying
Speaker 2: to earn money on the basis of it by being
Speaker 2: a copywriter and that sort of stuff. And I didn't
Speaker 2: start writing until I was about thirty, and my first
Speaker 2: book didn't come out until I was forty. And so
Speaker 2: that's a lot of life where I haven't conceptualized myself
Speaker 2: as a writer. And so now when I'm filling in
Speaker 2: the card when I come into Australia to say what
Speaker 2: I do, I write no list And that makes me
Speaker 2: very happy. But no, I wasn't one of those people
Speaker 2: who thought, yes, that will be me someday. And I
Speaker 2: take a lot of inspiration from people who came to
Speaker 2: it very late and make it their life. Pelbie Fitzgerald,
Speaker 2: who didn't start writing until she was about sixty. I
Speaker 2: need a Bruckner people like that. So there are role
Speaker 2: models that I could look to.
Speaker 1: It's funny many of those examples, many of those role
Speaker 1: models of writers who come to it later are women.
Speaker 1: That women's lives by and large don't allow for the
Speaker 1: kind of space needed to give over to creative practice.
Speaker 1: And so again and again you'll hear in these interviews
Speaker 1: women who need to make that choice later rather than earlier.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I have had to grow as a person
Speaker 2: to be able to communicate to people who love me
Speaker 2: that four hours a day minimum needs to be put
Speaker 2: aside for me to be perfectly alone. And a lot
Speaker 2: of women can't do that for a long time, whether
Speaker 2: for personal reasons or just how their life is set up.
Speaker 2: And so everyone who is struggling to do that, I
Speaker 2: really feel for them. And I was that person for
Speaker 2: a long time, so I get it.
Speaker 1: Much like the rhythms in Consider your Self Kissed, there
Speaker 1: is something too about time and being able to kind
Speaker 1: of you know, I quite like the conception of not
Speaker 1: really starting to write until you're thirty, not having a
Speaker 1: first book till you're forty. Is if you can write
Speaker 1: and write for pleasure and hone your craft and work
Speaker 1: out the stories you want to tell them, the things
Speaker 1: you want to capture. Not having that sense of being
Speaker 1: in a hurry, I think can only be a good thing.
Speaker 2: Maybe, yeah, I agree, I think so.
Speaker 1: The thing for me, part of the important part of
Speaker 1: it was that sense of being an active reader from
Speaker 1: an early age like that. Reading was very important to me,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't just a passive experience. That to read
Speaker 1: something was to add something to the world. Part of
Speaker 1: that is yet, how is reader or a job? I'm
Speaker 1: not sure. I hope it is. Well.
Speaker 2: For me, reading was pure freedom, and so I would
Speaker 2: go into the library, get my ten or twenty books,
Speaker 2: and I would deal with the words as they came
Speaker 2: into my body and became emotions and images. And even
Speaker 2: now I tend to read in a way that is
Speaker 2: extremely agentic, so I never feel as if there's a
Speaker 2: book I must read. I only read what I want,
Speaker 2: and when words are coming into me, I can let
Speaker 2: them wash over me. It is just the area of
Speaker 2: my life where I feel totally on solid ground, totally
Speaker 2: able to experience what the book is giving. It's something
Speaker 2: I don't have anywhere else in my life. But it
Speaker 2: makes me feel strong and happy.
Speaker 1: Jessica Stanley's law consider yourself kissed is available at all
Speaker 1: good bookstores. Now, before we go, one last value judgment
Speaker 1: about what's on your bookshelves. If I come into your house,
Speaker 1: I am not a fan of the color coded bookshelf.
Speaker 1: I know it's pretty, I know it's ornamental. But for me,
Speaker 1: there is a deliciousness to random happenstance when it comes
Speaker 1: to how you around your bookshelves. Maybe by author, maybe
Speaker 1: by when you bought them. But I like to stand
Speaker 1: and browse endlessly, not to see that this book's read,
Speaker 1: that book's blue, and that one's green. But that's just me.
Speaker 1: Your mileage may vary. You can find all the books
Speaker 1: we mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it
Speaker 1: for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
Speaker 1: your friends read and review us, share your favorite episode,
Speaker 1: write about us on your blog, spread the word however
Speaker 1: you can Next week and read this I'm chatting with
Speaker 1: New York Times best selling author Wilson about his brand
Speaker 1: new novel Run for the Hills, and Kevin reveals why
Speaker 1: he wanted to become a writer.
Speaker 3: I loved reading so much, and I think it's just
Speaker 3: like anything. If you love something enough like your your
Speaker 3: experience of it, you love it so much that you
Speaker 3: want to see if it's possible to make something not
Speaker 3: to be better than or as good as, but to
Speaker 3: just feel it touch up against the things that inspired you.
Speaker 1: Read this as a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
Speaker 1: the general support of the IRA Group. The show is
Speaker 1: produced an edited by Clara Aams, with mixing by Travis
Speaker 1: Evans and original compositions by Zolton Fetcher. Thanks for listening,
Speaker 1: See you next week.