Speaker 1: Hi there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm here to introduce
Speaker 1: another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast.
Speaker 1: It's hosted by the editor of The Monthly, Michael Williams,
Speaker 1: and features conversations with some of the most talented writers
Speaker 1: from Australia and around the world. In this episode, we're
Speaker 1: going to hear from writer Andrea Goldsmith, whose latest novel,
Speaker 1: The Buried Life, has just been published. And now I'm
Speaker 1: joined by Michael to tell me a little bit more
Speaker 1: about the episode.
Speaker 2: Hi Michael, Ruby Jones. Hello, So Michael.
Speaker 1: The Buried Life is Andrea Goldsmith's ninth novel, and she
Speaker 1: might be best known for her book The Prosperous Thief,
Speaker 1: which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in two thousand
Speaker 1: and three. But for those of our listeners who might
Speaker 1: be a bit less familiar with Andrea and her work,
Speaker 1: can you tell us a bit about her?
Speaker 2: I am a huge Andrea Goldsmith fan. Her partner was
Speaker 2: the late great poet Dorothy Porter, and so Andrew was
Speaker 2: one of this kind of power couple in the Austraa
Speaker 2: literary scene. And her own work, not in poetry and prose,
Speaker 2: is really significant and consequential as well, as you say,
Speaker 2: nine novels, one of them shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.
Speaker 2: I think I first read her for her second novel,
Speaker 2: Facing the Music, which was this terrific Melbourne based campus novel,
Speaker 2: And there are too few campus novels in Australian literature
Speaker 2: for my liking. It's a great subgenre anyway. Andrea is
Speaker 2: known for this capacity to tell beautifully kind of humanist
Speaker 2: realist stories generally centered around professionals, academics, people trying to
Speaker 2: make a life for themselves in contemporary Australia.
Speaker 1: So this latest novel, The Buried Life, it follows three characters,
Speaker 1: one of them is a renowned scholar on death, which
Speaker 1: is really what this book is concerned with. First and foremost,
Speaker 1: would you say.
Speaker 2: Yes, as you'll hear in the conversation, Andrea laughs quite
Speaker 2: a bit about the idea of this as her death book.
Speaker 2: She writes beautifully about death and loss and grief throughout
Speaker 2: her work, but this is a book that is particularly
Speaker 2: interested in the question of how we die, what it
Speaker 2: means to us culturally, what it means to us personally,
Speaker 2: what the reality of it is. And as you say,
Speaker 2: one of the three protagonists of this book, Adrian is
Speaker 2: a scholar of death, so he's someone who quite readily
Speaker 2: intellectualizes the nature of death. But as the course of
Speaker 2: the book goes on, it becomes clear that there's a
Speaker 2: big gulf between what we think we know and what
Speaker 2: we genuinely experience.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment, Andrea Goldsmith finds the
Speaker 1: poetry in death.
Speaker 2: I will come to death inevitably. I mean, we will
Speaker 2: all come to death. But in this conversation today, I
Speaker 2: will come to death at some point because it exerts
Speaker 2: some centrifugal force on this book in many ways. But
Speaker 2: I don't want to start with death. I want to
Speaker 2: start with a lightning moment that one of your protagonists, Adrian,
Speaker 2: has while driving back from Adelaide to Melbourne. Could you
Speaker 2: describe that moment in the book for our listeners.
Speaker 3: So Adrian is a temperate sort of man in his
Speaker 3: early forties. He doesn't have grand passions. He's a scholar
Speaker 3: of death. Actually he's a sociologist of death. And he's
Speaker 3: driving back from a conference and it's winter, and he
Speaker 3: stops at one of those coastal towns that are dead
Speaker 3: in winter and he's sitting in a cafe and it's
Speaker 3: on the top of a cliff and there's the crashing oceans,
Speaker 3: the Southern Ocean, crashing ocean is below, and he's tired,
Speaker 3: he's really tired, but he needs carbs to keep going,
Speaker 3: to drive back to Melbourne. And suddenly he becomes aware
Speaker 3: of a piece of music. And it's even more singular
Speaker 3: than that. It's a voice, it's a woman's voice, and
Speaker 3: it seems to be coming to him from a long,
Speaker 3: long tunnel, and it captures him and it takes him
Speaker 3: to a place that he's actually never been before. And
Speaker 3: yet this place that he's never been before, it sheds
Speaker 3: light on his current life. When the music stops, he
Speaker 3: dashes over to the woman who's serving behind the counter
Speaker 3: and asks, what is this music. He's not a musical person,
Speaker 3: he really isn't. And it's the final movement of Marla's
Speaker 3: Song of the Earth. Deir upsheed the Farewell. And this
Speaker 3: is a man who, for the past twelve months has
Speaker 3: been the leave taking of his long term lover and finally,
Speaker 3: finally he's able to say farewell to her. And it
Speaker 3: was a piece of music for a man who's not musical.
Speaker 2: I love the delicacy of referring to Adrian as a
Speaker 2: temperate man, and I want to return to his emotional
Speaker 2: state and his ability or inability to articulate his own
Speaker 2: narrative about his life in a moment. But before we
Speaker 2: get to that, I want to know that lightning moment
Speaker 2: of work of art changing a person and opening them
Speaker 2: up to possibility in a way that they never knew before.
Speaker 2: Have you experienced that yourself, Andrew Goldsmith?
Speaker 3: Yes, I have a few times, in fact, quite a
Speaker 3: few times, through two particular art forms, poetry and music.
Speaker 3: Poetry which is the metaphorical arm of language, and music
Speaker 3: which I kind of think of as the metaphorical arm
Speaker 3: to life, and what they do both of them. Because
Speaker 3: of this metaphorical aspect, it seems to me they take
Speaker 3: the mind, the mind that's not being bothered by social
Speaker 3: media and various other things, takes it to a place
Speaker 3: that hasn't been before, and it seems to make connections
Speaker 3: so that you come back to the present, you come
Speaker 3: back to your life. And yes, there's illumination, something that
Speaker 3: is different. It's happened many times, and it's happened once
Speaker 3: in the visual arts and it was when I stood
Speaker 3: in a room full of roth codes.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I could say that that's a moment right
Speaker 2: to the solar plexus.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I stood in this room and tears started rolling
Speaker 3: down my face, and instead of doing what I'd normally do,
Speaker 3: which has turned my mind to it and try and
Speaker 3: work out what's going on, I said, no, just go
Speaker 3: go with this. Go with this.
Speaker 2: Do you think you're particularly open as a human being
Speaker 2: to that kind of engagement with art? Do you think
Speaker 2: that's a muscle that you develop and then once you
Speaker 2: have it, you're more open to it.
Speaker 3: It's an interesting question. I mean, I think it's very
Speaker 3: very much LinkedIn with the imagination, and from early childhood
Speaker 3: I found a home in the imagination, and it's having
Speaker 3: a ready imagination, which is to say, an open mind.
Speaker 2: You are one of those novelists who write about other
Speaker 2: art forms beautifully. Well. I think sometimes it's a hurdle
Speaker 2: that writers can't find the right words to evoke the
Speaker 2: kind of emotional response you might have to visual arts
Speaker 2: or to music, and music has always played such an
Speaker 2: important part in what you right. But I'm curious that
Speaker 2: you've identified those lightning moments for you coming from poetry
Speaker 2: rather than prose. Is that exclusively the case.
Speaker 3: No, No, poetry is all about concision. So it's not
Speaker 3: by chance that when people people are suffering, when they're
Speaker 3: in pain or they're suffering grief, that they reach for
Speaker 3: a poem and it sues, I mean, or it illuminates.
Speaker 3: And that's certainly been the case for me. And there's
Speaker 3: a lot of there's quite a lot of poetry in
Speaker 3: this new book. Not reams of it, but epigrams, because
Speaker 3: poetry manages to say in two lines what a novelist
Speaker 3: would take a chapter to do. I've always looked to
Speaker 3: poetry to help me understand the complexities of life. I'll
Speaker 3: put it that way. Fiction has taught me about people
Speaker 3: who are not me, taught me about places and feelings
Speaker 3: and responses that are not me. I escape into fiction,
Speaker 3: but maybe poetry escapes into me.
Speaker 2: I love that distinction, all right. So people who are
Speaker 2: not you who you can hide in in fiction. Agriin
Speaker 2: seems to me as a protagonist to be a prime
Speaker 2: example of that, particularly as we discover him at the
Speaker 2: start of the book. You know you use the word temperate.
Speaker 2: At one point, he reflects that his relatively recently ex
Speaker 2: partner would call him emotionally constipated. He is a man
Speaker 2: not terribly in command of his own emotional state and
Speaker 2: what drives in There's a scene very early on where
Speaker 2: one of his friends discovers for the first time that
Speaker 2: he was orphaned at a young age, that had lost
Speaker 2: both of his parents, and the friend is offended, and
Speaker 2: Adrian is a little put out by this. This is
Speaker 2: just normal to him. This is the world as he
Speaker 2: sees it, and it doesn't cross his mind that that
Speaker 2: act of sharing stuff about himself is an act of
Speaker 2: generosity or an active love. And I want to know,
Speaker 2: have you that strikes me? You are not a person
Speaker 2: who would hold back in sharing personal stories.
Speaker 3: Oh totally hold back? Oh yes?
Speaker 2: Oh are you like Adrian in that respect?
Speaker 3: No, I think I do it with more panash or
Speaker 3: what I'll do is I'll filter. I'm a great filterer,
Speaker 3: which is another reason why it's great to write. I mean,
Speaker 3: my novels are all character driven. So no, I don't
Speaker 3: see myself like Adrian at all. Adrianne's mother died when
Speaker 3: he was four. His father committed suicide when Adrian was seven,
Speaker 3: and he says this has no bearing on his life,
Speaker 3: and you can say it was buried or you can say, well,
Speaker 3: this was the sort of person he was at the
Speaker 3: beginning of the novel, and he's not at the end,
Speaker 3: and a buried life seems to surface for him. But
Speaker 3: it was enough for him to say, well, of course
Speaker 3: I haven't told you Mahindra, his friend, about my parents.
Speaker 3: This is my normal. And he actually cites a colleague
Speaker 3: whose mother had a long, long, long affair and Adrian
Speaker 3: was horrified, but the colleague said, but that was my normal.
Speaker 3: And I'm very interested, particularly in a novel that also
Speaker 3: delves into fundaments intellism, both of religion and sought, how
Speaker 3: one's normal can become entrenched and kind of blind you.
Speaker 2: It seems to me that the great kind of beating
Speaker 2: heart of this book, the counterpoint to those unexamined normals
Speaker 2: that we endure in our lives, is friendship. This is
Speaker 2: one of the kind of great novels that I remember
Speaker 2: reading about the strange business that is adult friendship. When
Speaker 2: we think that we're reconciled with who we are in
Speaker 2: the world, we think we know what our interactions with
Speaker 2: other people are. To open ourselves up to someone new
Speaker 2: and to have to give an account for our lives
Speaker 2: to someone new. Is this exhilarating thing, And I think
Speaker 2: you capture that so beautifully.
Speaker 3: I've delved into friendship in most of the novels, particularly Reunion,
Speaker 3: which is about a group of friends. Here as it
Speaker 3: evolves the Lynchpin, there are three main characters. Adrian, a
Speaker 3: woman Laura who's your town planned in her late fifties,
Speaker 3: who has been long married to her husband, whom she
Speaker 3: met at university. She fell deeply and blindly in love
Speaker 3: and that has not changed. And the third person is
Speaker 3: Kezy Kaziah. She's in her late twenties. She was raised
Speaker 3: in a fundamentalist Pentecostal community on the outskirts of Melbourne,
Speaker 3: and because of the choices she's made, one of them
Speaker 3: is to do with her sexuality, she has been banished
Speaker 3: from that community and also exiled by her family. And
Speaker 3: the interesting thing about friendship is that I actually see
Speaker 3: Kesey the youngest, the youngest being the full crumb the
Speaker 3: lynch pin. They all become friends, there's and more, but
Speaker 3: I see Kezy as that full crumb, and it was
Speaker 3: nice to give it to the young one.
Speaker 2: I'm interested in that phrase. Nice to give it to
Speaker 2: the young one. When you write a book like this,
Speaker 2: and as you said, it's very much a character driven book,
Speaker 2: do you create the characters and then follow it where
Speaker 2: it takes you, or do you have a more schematic approach.
Speaker 3: It's very organic with this book. The first character was Adrian,
Speaker 3: and I've long wanted to write a relationship between an
Speaker 3: older woman and a younger man. So Laura came next,
Speaker 3: and in fact Kezy was the third. Because I've got
Speaker 3: deeper into the novel, I understood that I wanted to
Speaker 3: explore this notion of fundamentalism in relationships. I mean that
Speaker 3: black and white, it's the opposite to uncertainty, that the
Speaker 3: human project is all about uncertainty, and yet we chase
Speaker 3: against it instead of embracing it. And one way of
Speaker 3: getting rid of the uncomfortable chaf is by seizing on
Speaker 3: an ideology or or anything where all of the answers
Speaker 3: are there. And I think it also happens in relationships too.
Speaker 2: I think it absolutely does so when building the character
Speaker 2: of Laura, because the key thing about how she defines
Speaker 2: herself when we're first introduced to her is her marriage.
Speaker 2: She has more or less subsumed everything else about her identity,
Speaker 2: about her imaginative life, about her sense of possibility to
Speaker 2: this marriage with a man who she believes is a
Speaker 2: perfect husband. I don't want to give away the pleasures
Speaker 2: of narrative in this book and the ways in which
Speaker 2: stuff unfils, So I'm going to be a bit circumspect
Speaker 2: about how to say this. But Laura and Tony's marriage
Speaker 2: was that written as the product of marriages. You've observed people,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: I just want to say one thing. When we meet Laura,
Speaker 3: we actually meet her in her work role, and she
Speaker 3: is wrong and she's in control. She is everything that
Speaker 3: she's not when she's with Tony. And we also learn
Speaker 3: when she first met Tony and why why she just
Speaker 3: fell for him. As for the relationship that does develop,
Speaker 3: one very dominant partner and the other one that subsumes
Speaker 3: themselves despite being so capable and intelligent and having friends
Speaker 3: and all of those sorts of things, but subsumes themselves
Speaker 3: in the marriage under the husband. I've seen it in marriages.
Speaker 3: I've seen it in relationships where there is no marriage.
Speaker 3: I've seen it between sisters and brothers. I think it's very,
Speaker 3: very common. I mean in any relationship. Striving for that equality.
Speaker 3: It's very very hard. It's very hard, and particularly if
Speaker 3: I mean Tony has tickets on himself, he shared those
Speaker 3: tickets with Laura throughout their marriage, really, and he knew
Speaker 3: which buttons to press with her. That's the other thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, it's a kind of chilling portrait, partly because
Speaker 2: it's you know, I think we've all had that thing
Speaker 2: of having someone we love with the partner who we
Speaker 2: can see diminishes them or holds them back from what
Speaker 2: they're capable of. It's quite a distressing thing to be proximant.
Speaker 3: To, it is, and you can't when someone's caught in
Speaker 3: a situation like that. They are caught, they've got all
Speaker 3: of the answers. You cannot say anything. You can't because
Speaker 3: they'll do what Laura says. I mean, Laura turns around
Speaker 3: and says, you don't understand.
Speaker 2: I think one of the things that's so delighted me
Speaker 2: in this book was you don't fall into any of
Speaker 2: the ubiquitous traps about generational misunderstanding or disagreement. Even though
Speaker 2: Kezy is younger than the other two characters and significantly
Speaker 2: younger than Laura, their friendship is firstly has real integrity
Speaker 2: to it. But the ways in which they relate, the
Speaker 2: ways in which they understand each other, the ways in
Speaker 2: which they view the world, has nothing to do with
Speaker 2: generational divide. And I think it's really lovely. Did you
Speaker 2: have to work at that? Or is that reflective of
Speaker 2: the kind of friendships you have?
Speaker 3: It's something that I don't know how common it is.
Speaker 3: I actually didn't even think in those terms. It was
Speaker 3: more that Kezy she's only twenty eight, but she's been
Speaker 3: through a lot, and she has understandings that a lot
Speaker 3: of much older people don't have, and Laura actually needed
Speaker 3: those understandings. And maybe it's the very difference of Kez
Speaker 3: that allowed Laura then to take what she was seeing
Speaker 3: and hearing and relate it to her own her own situation.
Speaker 3: But certainly, I mean in the real world, I mean
Speaker 3: I have friendships with younger people and I really really
Speaker 3: value them.
Speaker 2: When we return, Andrea reveals why she's always been fascinated
Speaker 2: by death and shares some of the poems that make
Speaker 2: it all make sense to her. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: I don't want to give anything away, but suffice it
Speaker 2: to say death isn't only an abstraction. In this book,
Speaker 2: it's not only the subject of Adrian's field of study.
Speaker 2: He and the other characters in the book have to
Speaker 2: contend with a very real death that occurs late in
Speaker 2: its pages, and that contrast between the theory and the
Speaker 2: reality is almost like an assault, as this brutality to
Speaker 2: it after pages of thinking about it philosophically, thinking about
Speaker 2: it poetically, the prose of death is a very different creature.
Speaker 2: There's an amazing passage in this late part of the
Speaker 2: book where Adrien is reflecting on that gulf between imagined
Speaker 2: and real death. And I asked Andrea to read it
Speaker 2: to us.
Speaker 3: But I know nothing about death, nothing about death in
Speaker 3: the hand, death in the heart. I don't know how
Speaker 3: to watch someone die. Death has been and he paused
Speaker 3: and took a deep breath. A curiosity for me, a fascination.
Speaker 3: I've been half in love with easeful death, but there's
Speaker 3: nothing easeful about death. I knew nothing about how death
Speaker 3: attacks you, colonizes you, how it brings on horror and
Speaker 3: sadness and futility and anger. I know nothing about death.
Speaker 2: That bit really doubt at me, because that gulf between
Speaker 2: the imagined, I mean you talked about how the ability
Speaker 2: to be moved by art is about imaginative suppleness and capacity.
Speaker 2: But the gulf between what we imagine and what we
Speaker 2: experience is a vast one always, And I think that's
Speaker 2: why that passage so jumped out at me. Is it
Speaker 2: suggested that there's the poems, there's the beautiful kind of
Speaker 2: words that are said about it, and then there's the reality.
Speaker 3: Yep, absolutely absolutely got it. I think also what feeds
Speaker 3: that is that sense of the sense of rupture, and
Speaker 3: there's nothing, there is nothing that compares with that.
Speaker 2: As we've touched on already, Adrian is a scholar of death.
Speaker 2: He is at great pains to say that that's got
Speaker 2: nothing to do with being often at a young age.
Speaker 2: That's just a coincidence. But he is fascinated by death,
Speaker 2: and I do know that that is something that you
Speaker 2: draw from a personal fascination. Tell me why death is
Speaker 2: such an important, interesting, flexible subject to play with.
Speaker 3: Like uncertainty, which is common to us, all, so is death.
Speaker 3: And I've always, for most of my life I've been
Speaker 3: captivated by the mysteries of death, but also that so
Speaker 3: many people are frightened of death, and to me, it's
Speaker 3: been I've said this to my father decades ago, who
Speaker 3: he had a friend who had cancer and the prognosis
Speaker 3: was not good and my father was quite distressed about
Speaker 3: it because his friend was very, very depressed. And I said,
Speaker 3: you need to let Charlie know that you do it
Speaker 3: in your terms. You're alive until you die. And I
Speaker 3: have a great, great belief, and it's here in this
Speaker 3: book too, that you live until you die, and the
Speaker 3: idea of a process of dying is an oxymoron. You
Speaker 3: live and then you die. That's not to say there
Speaker 3: might be suffering and pain and a whole lot of
Speaker 3: other things, but the people who suffer death are the
Speaker 3: people who are left behind. And this all seemed fairly
Speaker 3: clear to me quite young. At the same time, of course,
Speaker 3: there are mysteries about death, so I wanted to plunge
Speaker 3: into it. I mean, I do believe that religion would
Speaker 3: be on its knees if we didn't have such a
Speaker 3: great fear of death. I think the poets, in particular,
Speaker 3: they've found death a great subject to explore because it's
Speaker 3: totally open ended, which of course is one of the
Speaker 3: things that scares people. You know, there are over two
Speaker 3: thousand requiems that have been written, so music is there too.
Speaker 3: So to me, it's just it's this vast universe that's
Speaker 3: there to be explored.
Speaker 2: I understand you've sat with now a different people as they.
Speaker 3: Died, but there've been other I've been uncommonly unlucky. Two
Speaker 3: of my closest friends from school died before their time,
Speaker 3: and of course my partner, Dorothy did. I was there
Speaker 3: when my father and mother died. So I mean there's
Speaker 3: been Yes, I've had my fair share.
Speaker 2: There is and I again don't want to give anything away,
Speaker 2: but in this novel there is death, and not just
Speaker 2: in the abstract or as a field of study, but
Speaker 2: as a reality that the characters have to endure and navigate.
Speaker 2: Did you always know that that was going to be
Speaker 2: part of the story you were telling or did that
Speaker 2: take you by surprise?
Speaker 3: No, it's not. I mean, I just love the way
Speaker 3: novels develop, and the reason why you do twenty drafts
Speaker 3: is because you know they have to find their center
Speaker 3: and the death that happens towards well, actually we know,
Speaker 3: we know those problems about the middle of the novel,
Speaker 3: but the death happens at the end. It wasn't there
Speaker 3: first up. I mean, it's quite interesting that it was
Speaker 3: in Adrian's exploration of death that I realized the possibility
Speaker 3: of bringing in a death.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: He says at one stage that he's written hundreds of
Speaker 3: thousands of words about death, but not about suicide, and
Speaker 3: yet his father committed suicide, and when it comes to
Speaker 3: a death that's close to him, he actually says that
Speaker 3: he knows nothing about death. Very different when it's up close.
Speaker 2: Of course. I mean, on that note, are there certain
Speaker 2: poets or poems that you particularly return to things that resonate?
Speaker 3: There are some poets, I mean, look, Dylan Thomas's Do
Speaker 3: Not Go Gentle is a fairly good example, but there
Speaker 3: are some other ones that I've just Douglas Dunn, English
Speaker 3: poet wrote a collection called Elegies after the death of
Speaker 3: his wife. They provide consolation. But as soon as you
Speaker 3: talk about consolation, as soon as you're talking about that
Speaker 3: that quiet tutors you're reading, you're going places. And yes,
Speaker 3: so it's illuminating to Edward Hirsch has written a collection
Speaker 3: called Gabrielle, and it's about the early death of his
Speaker 3: son Gabrielle. So these are sweets of poems, Ted Hughes's
Speaker 3: crow poems, and I have to say Ted Hughes's Birthday letters.
Speaker 3: They are full of regret and anguish and all of
Speaker 3: those sorts of things. And yes, while a lot of
Speaker 3: the poems are not specifically about Sylvia Platt's death, they
Speaker 3: kind of are. I mean, they've written a long time
Speaker 3: after she died. I have a seven page a four
Speaker 3: seven page list of death books and death poems just listening,
Speaker 3: So there are a lot in there. You know. I
Speaker 3: have looked to my fellow and sister writers in exploring
Speaker 3: this topic. It's been I mean, I must say, when
Speaker 3: I first realized the novel was going to be about death,
Speaker 3: I thought, oh, you know, you've got so much good
Speaker 3: stuff to read and music to listen to, this fabulous
Speaker 3: death music.
Speaker 2: I like that you've added your own, your own book
Speaker 2: to the library of great literature about death. It's a
Speaker 2: wonderful novel and it's such a thrill to read it.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Michael, thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: of Read This. As always, if you want to dive
Speaker 1: further into Read This, you can search for it wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to podcasts. There are more than seventy five
Speaker 1: episodes in the archive for you to enjoy. See you
Speaker 1: next week.