Author: Whispering Gums

Colum McCann, Twist (#BookReview)

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Colum McCann said during the conversation I attended back in May that books are never completed until they are in the hands of readers who tell back what a book is about. This is essentially reception theory, which, referencing Wikipedia, says that readers interpret the meaning of what they read based on their individual cultural backgrounds and life experiences. In other words, “the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader”.

Although I don’t adhere to any theory absolutely, this makes some sense to me – as does my extrapolation from this that the reader’s background and life experiences contribute not only to the meaning they obtain from a work, but their assessment of it.

Colum McCann’s latest novel Twist was my reading group’s last book of the year. All of us were fascinated by its underlying story about the data – our data – travelling around the world via undersea cables, and the fragility or vulnerability of this data. But, when it came to assessing how much we liked the book, other things came into play, things that say as much about who we are as readers, what we look for in books, as they say about the book itself. For example, readers who look to empathise with appealing, rounded, human characters might assess Twist quite differently from those for whom ideas play a significant role in their preferences.

I’ll return to this, but first more on the novel. Twist is narrated by 50-something Irish novelist, Anthony Fennell, whose career had stalled. It “felt stagnant”, and he was feeling disconnected from life, “the world did not beckon, nor did it greatly reward”. He was, in fact, “unsure what fiction or drama could do anymore”. He needed, he tells us, “a story about connection, about grace, about repair”. Fortuitously, into his lap falls an assignment to write a long feature about a cable repair vessel, which is led by a man called John Conway (whose name, we soon realise, contains allusions to Joseph Conrad and also perhaps to that other well-known JC).

So, in the first few pages of the novel, we know we are being told a story from after the event by a writer who was there as it happened. We know this event relates to Conway because Fennell tells us on the opening page that something had happened to him, and that he is going to tell his version of what happened as best he can, which might take some “liberties with the gaps”. Conway, then, is central to the narrative arc, but we also know that the subject matter is data and the internet, and that the theme will concern ideas like connection and disconnection, brokenness and repair, fact, fiction and the limits of storytelling. It’s impressive, in fact, just how much of the rest of the book is set up in the first couple of pages.

The narrative proper then starts. It’s January 2019, and Fennell meets Conway, and his partner Zanele, in Cape Town, before joining the Georges Lacointe on its journey up the western African coast to the site of a cable break. It takes some time to get there, so we get to know Conway a bit more. He is a good leader, and his multicultural crew of men respect him. The first and main cable break is repaired at the end of Part One, and then things go seriously awry. Zanele, who was performing in her unauthorised climate-change-focused version of Waiting for Godot in rural England, suffers an acid attack. Life starts to “unravel” for Conway who cannot get away to help her. Indeed, as the back cover says, Conway disappears.

I will leave the plot there. It does get more complicated, so I’ve not spoiled it I believe. I will return instead to my opening point about readers and their assessments. Most of those in my group who had reservations focused on the characters. Conway and Zanele were too shadowy; they were not well-rounded; we didn’t know them well. And, why choose a hard-to-identify-with man like Fennell as a narrator? I understand these questions but they don’t concern me, because I read the book differently – so let’s look at that.

Twist draws from, or was inspired by, two classic novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby, with its story of a man’s obsessive love for an unattainable woman, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness and its story about the darkness at the centre of colonialism. While the narrative arc clearly owes much to Fitzgerald, McCann said during the aforementioned conversation that Conrad’s novel provides the more obvious literary parallel. Those tubes along the seabed, he said, follow old colonial routes, and suggest corporate or digital colonialism.

“There is no logic. The world is messy.” (Fennell)

Looking at the novel through this perspective provides a way of understanding why McCann has written it the way he has. It is not about Conway and Zanele. We only see them through the eyes of Fennell. They are established enough to draw us in but their prime role is to support the ideas – disconnection, connection, turbulence, repair – rather than to be the subjects of the story. We know Fennell somewhat better, as we need to. He is a flawed man, stalled in life and feeling disconnected from it. It is his journey through the narrative that carries our hopes for repair.

If I had any criticism, it would more likely concern the writing. McCann’s is an exuberant, epigrammatic style. It’s not hard to see what he is doing, the games he is playing with meaning and metaphor. However, I can enjoy this sort of writing. It keeps ideas to the fore. And they were ideas that interest me – zeitgeist issues about the fragility of our data; the line between doubt/certainty, connection/disconnection (emotionally, spiritually, technologically), and break/repair; and the messiness of life. It’s not hard to find quotable quotes, like “opinion, the obscene certainty of our days” (p. 218) and “the disease of our days is that we spend so much time on the surface” (p. 25). I enjoy these too!

Part Two opens with:

It is, I suppose, the job of the teller to rearrange the scattered pieces of a story so that they conform to some sort of coherence. Between fact and fiction lie memory and imagination. Within memory and imagination lies our desire to capture at least some essence of the truth, which is, at best, messy.

By the end, McCann has told a story which illuminates the messiness of our time. The truth is that there is no real coherence. There is – and probably always has been – just all of us trying to muddle through the best way we can. This is not earth-shattering news, but McCann exposes some of the issues, many driven by technology, that affect our trying today. The light he throws on these – and the personal progress Fennell makes – are why I enjoyed reading this novel.

Colum McCann
Twist
London: Bloomsbury, 2025
239pp.
ISBN: 9781526656957

Monday musings on Australian literature: Selected Australian doorstoppers

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A week or so ago, I saw a post by Cathy (746 Books) that she was taking part in a Doorstoppers in December reading event. My first thought was that December is the last month I would commit to reading doorstoppers. In fact, my reading group agrees that doorstopper month is January, our Southern Hemisphere summer holiday month. That’s the only month we willingly schedule a long book. My second thought was that I call these books “big baggy monsters”. But, that’s not complimentary I know – and I do like many big books. Also, it’s not alliterative, which is almost de rigueur for these blog reading challenges.

Anyhow, I will not be taking active part, but it seemed like a good opportunity for a Monday Musings. I’ll start with definitions because, of course, definition is an essential component of any challenge. The challenge has been initiated by Laura Tisdall, so she has defined the term for the participants. (Although, readers are an anarchic lot and can also make up their own rules! We wouldn’t have it any other way, would we?) Here is what she says:

Genre conventions vary so much. For litfic, for example, which tends to run shorter, I can see anything over 350 pages qualifying as a doorstopper, whereas in epic fantasy, 400 pages would probably be bog standard. Let’s say it has to at least hit the 350-page mark – and we encourage taking on those real 500-page or 600-page + behemoths 

I love her recognition that what is a doorstopper isn’t absolute, that it does depend on the conventions or expectations of different forms or genres. I will focus on the literary fiction end of the spectrum but I think 350 pages is a bit short, particularly if I want to narrow the field a bit, so I’m going to set my target for this post at 450 pages. I am also going to limit my selected list to fiction published this century (albeit the challenge, itself, is not limited to fiction.)

However, I will commence with a little nod to doorstoppers our past. The nineteenth century was the century of big baggy monsters, even in Australia. And “baggy” is the right word for some, due partly to the fact that many were initially published in newspapers as serials, so they tended to, let me say, ramble a bit to keep people interested over the long haul. Dickens is the obvious example of a writer of big digressive books.

In 19th century Australia, publishing was just getting going so the pickings are fewer, but there’s Marcus Clarke’s 1874 His natural life (later For the term of his natural life). Pagination varies widely with edition, but let’s average it to 500pp. Catherine Martin’s 1890 An Australian girl is around 470pp. Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under arms runs between 400 and 450pp in most editions, while Caroline Leakey’s 1859 The broad arrow is shorter, with editions averaging around 400pp.

By the 20th century, Australian publishing was growing. Like Leakey’s novel, Joseph Furphy/Tom Collins’ 1903 Such is life is shorter, averaging 400pp (Bill’s final post). Henry Handel Richardson’s 1930 The fortunes of Richard Mahony, depending on the edition, comes in around the 950pp mark. Of course, it was initially published as three separate, and therefore relatively short, volumes but the doorstopper edition is the one I first knew in my family home. Throughout the century many doorstoppers hit the bookstands, including books by Christina Stead in the 1930s and 40s, Xavier Herbert from the 1930s to the 1970s (when his doorstopper extraordinaire, Poor fellow my country was published), Patrick White from the 1950s to late in his career, and on to writers like Pater Carey whose second novel, 1985’s Illywhacker, was 600 pages. He went on to publish more big novels through the late 20th and into the 21st century.

Selected 21st Century Doorstoppers

The list below draws from novels I’ve read from this century. In cases where I’ve read more than one doorstopper from that author, I’ve just chosen one.

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
  • Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (2009, 464pp, my review)
  • Trent Dalton, Boy swallows universe (2018, 474pp, my review)
  • Michelle de Kretser, Questions of travel (2012, 517pp, my review)
  • Sara Dowse, As the lonely fly (2017, 480pp, my review)
  • Richard Flanagan, The narrow road to the deep north (2013, 466pp, my review)
  • Elliot Perlman, The street sweeper (2011, 626pp, my review)
  • Wendy Scarfe, Hunger town (2014, 456pp, my review)
  • Steve Toltz, A fraction of a whole (2008, 561pp, my review)
  • Christos Tsiolkas, The slap (2008, 485pp, my review)
  • Tim Winton, Dirt music (2001, 465pp, read before blogging)
  • Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (2006, 526pp, my review)
Sara Dowse, As the lonely bly

There are many more but this is a start. They include historical and contemporary fiction. Many offer grand sweeps, while some, like Scarfe’s Hunger town, are tightly focused. The grand sweep – mostly across and/or place – is of course not unusual in doorstoppers. A few are comic or satiric in tone, like Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, while others are serious, and sometimes quite dark. The authors include First Nations Alexis Wright and some of migrant background. And, male writers outweigh the females. Perhaps it’s in proportion to the male-female publication ratio? I don’t have the statistics to prove or disprove this. Most of these authors have written many books, not all of which are big, meaning the form has followed the function!

Are you planning to take part in Doorstoppers in December? And, if you are, what are you planning to read? Regardless, how do doorstoppers fit into your reading practice?

Six degrees of separation, FROM Seascraper TO …

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Woo hoo, it’s summer at last, not that we necessarily knew it, given on day 2 Canberra experienced its lowest summer minimum (just below freezing point) since records began. However, this weekend is different and we are seeing proper summer temperatures. Just right for our Southern Hemisphere Christmas parties that are starting to happen. I do hope all of you who celebrate holidays in December have good ones. Now, I will get onto the meme. As always, if you don’t know how it works, please check Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month, it’s a Booker Prize nominated novel, Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper, about which I know nothing except what I read while researching it for this meme! GoodReads ends its description by calling it “the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows, and sees possibilities when a stranger arrives”.

So that is where I am going, that is, to a young woman hemmed in by circumstances and who sees possibilities in a stranger to comes to stay – at the guesthouse where she works. The novel is Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho (my review). It has some other loose links to Seascraper, in that she lives in a coastal town – though this is not a seaside book in the sense that Wood’s book seems to be, and she doesn’t earn her living directly from the sea.

Now I’m moving into a link or theme that will inform the rest of this post, the idea of borders. Dusapin’s unnamed narrator’s town is on the border between North and South Korea. Indeed, when the Korean peninsula was divided into two countries post-World War 2, Sokcho was on the Northern side. It became part of the South after the 1953 Korean War armistice. So, my link is to another novel set in a border region where borders have been changed by war, Olga Tokarczuk’s House of day, house of night (my review). In this book, the border has a strong presence that plays on people’s lives.

Hans Bergner, Between sea and sky

For the people in my next book, war and borders are also important, but in a very different way. The book is Hans Bergner’s Between sea and sky (my review). His people are Jewish refugees on a dilapidated boat, searching for a new home, but being accepted by no-one. They are borderless – and desperate. The book has other links with Tokarczuk’s novel – the refugees are Polish, and the war affecting them is World War 2.

Thomas King and Natasha Donovan, Borders, cover

Staying with borders, I’m moving to another, well, borderless story, in a way, Thomas King’s Borders (see my review of the short story, and of the graphic novel co-created with Natasha Donovan). This is another story where borders have been drawn up with no consideration of their relevance to the people who live there, in this case, First Nations people. Our protagonist insists – rightly – that she is Blackfoot, not American or Canadian, and gets caught in borderland limbo.

Yuri Herrera, Signs preceding the end of the world

It was not hard to keep on theme, as stories about borders and people abound. We are staying in North America for this one, Yuri Herrera’s Signs preceding the end of the world (my review). Drawing from the USA’s border with Mexico, it tells of a young girl who crosses it – at great risk – to take messages to her brother. Herrera is interested in not only the politics of borders like this, but also their personal, psychological and spiritual implications. I wrote in my post that the novel “works on two levels, the literal Mexican-American border story and something more universal about crossings and transitions”.

My final book moves further into this idea of mental transitions, but is inspired by a war over borders (to put it simply) – the Vietnam or American War. I’m talking Biff Ward’s memoir, The third chopstick (my review). Ward, a pacifist and anti-Vietnam War activist, decided later in life to revisit her actions during those emotional times. So she sought out, met and interviewed some of the soldiers who fought in the war she’d demonstrated against, and learnt a little about national borders but a whole lot more about the borders in our minds!

Three of my six selections this month are by women and three by men (but one is a male-female collaboration, so the women have it, slightly!) Three of the books are translated. We have crossed much of the globe, east-west and north-south, and touched on war too often, with all set over the last century. Will we ever learn to live peacefully with national borders? Dare I say it would be great to have none?

Have you read Seascraper and, regardless, what would you link to?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Trove treasures (15), What Australia read in 1945

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Help Books Clker.com
(Courtesy OCAL, via clker.com)

Another post in my Monday Musings subseries called Trove Treasures, in which I share stories or comments, serious or funny, that I come across during my Trove travels. 

Today’s story is longer than those I have mostly shared, but given it’s an annual recap of 1945, exactly 80 years ago, I’ve decided to share it. The article, “What we read in 1945” (29 December 1945), was written by Ian Mair* who may have been The Argus’ Literary Editor at the time, given his was the byline for the Argus’ Weekend Magazine Literary Supplement.

The first part of the article contains the titles of books by Australian writers – across various forms, including novels, short stories, poetry, and essays – published in Australia in 1945. Before these, however, he says this:

What must surely be from all reports the most important book of the year by an Australian, Christina Stead’s For love alone [my review], published in America, has been out some months, yet has not been seen in Australia, and is not likely to be seen here for some months yet.

Harumph. Indeed, he introduces his article with the comment that it had been an “odd” year for the Australian book world because importers had been “unable to get anything like the numbers required of the books they have ordered” and instead, “have had to half-fill their shops with whatever material of second rate interest the English trade cared to send them”. Nonetheless, trade had boomed, and Australian publishers and printers had “prospered”.

Do read the article yourself if you are interested, as I’m just going to share some of the authors and titles he names, and some of the issues he raises.

1946 Cheshire ed.

So, he makes a big call saying that “the most beautiful piece of Australian writing of the year”, in book form, was Alan Marshall’s nonfiction These are my people. Marshall was 42 when it was published, and it seems to have been his first book. Despite some reservations, Mair says that “it will very likely be still read years hence, and not only because it is the first book of a young writer who is obviously going places”. Well, Australians will know that Marshall did indeed go places, with his 1955 autobiography, I can jump puddles, becoming an Australian classic.

Mair also names two other nonfiction works as making “the two most important contributions to our literature” for “the light they throw on the Australian scene, and the different ways we have reacted to it imaginatively”. They are Sid Baker’s The Australian language, which is “more than philological” and is “by a true writer”, and Bernard Smith’s history of Australian art titled Place, taste and tradition. It is ‘less “literary” in feeling’ but offers new ideas “that everywhere illuminate Australian literature and life”.

All well and good, but I am more interested in fiction. After mentioning Marshall’s nonfiction work, he names James Aldridge’s war novel The sea eagle. It won, in 1945, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, which I’d never heard of, but was a British Commonwealth Prize that lasted from 1942 to 2010. Anyhow, Mair says it was a second book, and “still full of promise”, but less original than Marshall’s book. Mair felt it was too influenced by Hemingway. Its “prose and outlook are mannered … But Aldridge himself can imagine and write; he only needs time off to inspect the behaviour of people in general (not just soldiers), under less fantastic circumstances than those that environ his stories”. He was prolific, if Wikipedia is anything to go by.

I found this interesting but, reading on, I came across authors we Australian literature lovers know better. He says:

A year in which Katharine Susannah Prichard, Norman Lindsay, and Elinor [Eleanor] Dark put out novels should have been good.

Should? He was disappointed, describing them all as “deficient in basic thinking out”:

1944 Angus and Robertson ed.

Miss Prichard’s Potch and Colour (Prichard biographer, Nathan Hobby’s review) fell between her professions that they were either legend or simple slabs of life. Lindsay’s Cousin from Fiji worked over his favourite theme of flaming youth among puritans in a way that added nothing to it – and in literature if you don’t go forward you go back. Mrs. Dark’s Little company (Marcie’s review) was a tremendously solemn, vague argument that might be going on to this day for all the book showed.

I did like his point that “in literature, if you don’t go forward you go back”. Anyhow, fortunately for Mair, it was a good year for short stories – including Douglas Stewart’s collection Girl with the red hair – and for poetry. I should clarify that Prichard’s Potch and colour was also a short story collection.

Mair names more books, including essays, books of criticism, and biography, which you can read about in the article! I want to end on some comments he made about publishing in general. He says:

… considering the number of books bought during a year when money was plentiful, and so many consumers’ foods were scarce, Australian authors didn’t make much hay.

The problem was that the Australian market was small “for an author who really puts work into his [of course] writing”, but if Australian authors publish overseas – like Stead, for example – their books don’t reach their “fellow Australians at all” or reaches them “very late”. He names other authors, besides Stead, who publish overseas, like Henry Handel Richardson, Eleanor Dark and Kylie Tennant.

He says that “American publishers have surrendered the whole Australian market to the English book trade” and that English publishers are only interested in publishing an Australian book if “it will also sell reasonably well in England”. The end result is that “it is quite on the cards that an Australian novel published in what may well be as things are, its best possible market, that is, the United States, will not reach Australia at all”. If, however, an author does publish first in Australia, chances are American publishers will shy away, because it is no longer new – and it is “almost certain that an English publisher will reject it”. Catch 22 eh?

Some of this plight, he says, was being discussed by the Tariff Board, booksellers, publishers, and authors themselves. But, he moved on to his next point, which concerned something authors and publishers could do to potentially ‘improve matters”. This was, like Australia’s “exporters of tinned goods”, to “package things a bit better”. He said:

Australian dust-jackets, bindings, lay-outs, type faces, and printing are – generally speaking – awful. Dust-jackets are almost always completely without character, and usually in hideous colours. Even our most experienced publishers usually contrive to ruin the binding of a book with either ugly lettering on the spine, dirty use of gold-leaf, or even the title repeated in the front cover. And so on.

And this wasn’t all. He turned to the editing. Authors could write good or bad books, but no-one, he says, speaking to authors, would take them seriously if their “proofs are badly read” or their “grammar is rocky”, if they repeat themselves “unnecessarily”, or if they waste their adjectives on the first paragraph of the first page. A good publishing house should fix these – or,

in every capital city there are a number of newspaper sub-editors, able men, who could “clean up” and “tighten” many a book by a high-ranking Australian author or authoress in such a way that, though we may be ashamed of what in our books appears as lack of culture, we need no longer blush for our sheer illiteracy. I recommend this for all books, even for those morally-offensive pretentious ones of which there have been a few this year.

Moral delinquency is an awful spectacle indeed at any time; it is doubly so when it has egg on its chin.

He didn’t pull his punches, our Mr Mair. This article was, it turned out, a little treasure.

What say you?

* According to AustLit, Ian Mair (1907-1993) was a “librarian, lecturer, writer and critic”.

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing (#BookReview)

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My reading for Buried in Print Marcie’s annual MARM month has been both sporadic and minimal, to say the least, but this year I finally got to read a book that has been on my TBR shelves for a long time and that I have planned to read over the last few MARMs. It’s Atwood’s treatise (or manifesto or just plain ponderings) on writing, Negotiating with the dead. Interestingly, in 2003 it won the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for Autobiography/Memoir. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, though on reflection I can see it does have a strong element of memoir.

Its origins, however, are not in memoir but in the series of lectures she delivered at the University of Cambridge in 2000, the Empson Lectures, which commemorate literary critic, William Empson. (I recently – and sadly – downsized his most famous book, Seven types of ambiguity, out of my library). Atwood turned those lectures into this set of essays that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002 (and that I leapt on when I saw it remaindered in 2010).

Subtitled “A writer on writing”, this book is probably not quite what most of us would expect, unless we really know Atwood. As she says in her Introduction, it is not so much about writing as about something more abstract, more existential even, about what is writing, who is the writer, and what are the writer’s relationships with writing, with the reader, with other writers, and with themself. It’s also about the relationship between writing and other art forms, like painting and composing. She says in her Introduction that “it’s about the position the writer find himself in; or herself, which is always a little different”. (Love the little gender reference here.) It’s about what exactly is the writer “up to, why and for whom?”

I rarely do this, but I’m sharing the table of contents for the flavour it gives:

  • Introduction: Into the labyrinth
  • Prologue
  • 1 Orientation: Who do you think you are? What is “a writer,” and how did I become one?
  • 2 Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double Why there are always two?
  • 3 Dedication: The Great God Pen Apollo vs. Mammon: at whose altar should the writer worship?
  • 4 Temptation: Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co. Who waves the wand, pulls the strings, or signs the Devil’s book?
  • 5 Communion: Nobody to Nobody The eternal triangle: the writer, the reader, and the book as go-between
  • 6 Descent: Negotiating with the dead Who makes the trip to the Underworld, and why?

There is way too much in the book for me to comment on, but I don’t want to do a general overview either, so I’m just going to share a couple of the ideas that interested me.

One of her main threads concerns “duality” and “doubleness” in writers’ lives. There’s a fundamental duality for a writer – a novelist anyhow – between “the real and the imagined”. She suggests that an inability to distinguish between the two may have had something to do with why she became a writer. This interested me, but it’s not what interested me most in this book. Rather, it was the idea of the writer’s “doubleness”, which she introduces in chapter 2, “Duplicity”, the idea that there is the person who writes and the other person who lives life (walking the dog, eating bran “as a sensible precaution”, and so on). She explains it this way:

All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person.

It’s obvious, of course, but we don’t often think about it. Writers do, though. Take Sofie Laguna, for example. In the recent conversation I attended, she said she wished she’d kept a diary when she was writing her novel to capture the “dance” she’d had between the conscious and the subconscious as she worked through the issues she was confronting. In other words, the Sofie in front of us was not the Sofie who had written that book. In chapter 5, “Communion”, Atwood addresses this issue from a different angle when she talks about the relationship between writers and readers.

Back to the writer, though, Atwood talks about, gives examples of, how different writers handle this doubleness, the degree to which they consciously separate their two selves or don’t. This brought to my mind Brian Castro’s Chinese postman (my review) in which he regularly – consciously of course – shifts between first person and third for the same character, a character who owes much to Castro himself but is not Castro. This may be similar to the example she gives, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Borges and I”. It’s also something Helen Garner has often discussed, such as in her essay “I” published in Meanjin in Autumn 2002. Even in her nonfiction works, she “creates a persona”, one that “only a very naive reader would suppose … is exactly, precisely and totally identical with the Helen Garner you might see before you”. My point in saying all this is that I think Atwood is exploring something interesting here. Is it new? I don’t know, but it captures ideas I’m seeing both in statements like those of Laguna and Garner, and in recent fiction where I’m noticing an increasing self-consciousness in writers who are explicitly striving for new forms of expression.

Another double Atwood discusses – one related to but also different from the above – is that between the writer and the writing. The writer dies, for example, but the writing lives on. It brought to mind that murky issue concerning posthumous publication (which was discussed on 746 Books Cathy’s Novellas in November post about Marquez’s Until August). It’s a bit tangential, I guess, but Atwood’s separation of the writer and the writing, her sense of the doubleness of writers, puts another spin on this conundrum.

She discusses other issues too, including that of purpose, to which she gives two chapters (3 and 4), setting the art-for-art’s sake supporters against the moral purpose/social relevance proponents, and which of course touches on that grubby issue of writing to earn money!

It’s an erudite book, in that she marshals many writers, known and unknown to me, to illustrate her ideas, but the arguments are also accessible and invite engagement. I did have questions as I read, but she managed to answer most of them. A good read.

Read for Marcie’s #MARM2025

Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002
219pp.
ISBN: 9780521662604

Nonfiction November 2025

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My participation in Nonfiction November, like Novellas in November and MARM, tends to be a bit random and sporadic. Last year, I wrote one post for Nonfiction November. I will do the same this year, focusing on two of the questions – My Year in Nonfiction and Book Pairings. These are the two that most interest me.

Week 1: Your year in Nonfiction

Heather (Based on a True Story) hosted this week, which is described as follows:

Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more?  What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

This Nonfiction November year runs, by my definition, from 1 November 2024 to 31 October 2025. My nonfiction reading has been varied, though most of it involved some sort of life writing – biography, memoir, and hybrids of the two. These books were, in alphabetical order by author, with links to my reviews or posts where applicable:

  • Sarah Ailwood, “Austen’s Men, Immortality and Intertextuality” (2023, essay, read for a Jane Austen group meeting)
  • Wayne Bergmann and Madelaine Dickie, Some people want to shoot me (2024, co-written biography, my review)
  • Ruby Doyle, “A bush picnic” (1933, newspaper column, read for my post on Doyle)
  • Helen Garner, The season (2024, memoir, my review)
  • Gideon Haigh, My brother Jaz (2024, memoir, my review)
  • Marion Halligan, Words for Lucy (2022, memoir, my review)
  • Andra Putnis, Stories my grandmothers never told me (2024, biography/memoir, my review)
  • Helen Trinca, Looking for Elizabeth: The life of Elizabeth Harrower (2025, biography, my review)
  • Sonia Voumard, Tremor (2024, memoir, my review)

I am currently reading two other nonfiction works, including Hazzard and Harrower: The letters by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham (see my author conversation post) which I started last year. What I’ve read so far provided some good background for Trinca’s biography of Elizabeth Harrower.

I won’t answer the rest of the questions, except to say that my favourite nonfiction includes literary biography and memoir, and narrative nonfiction on any subject that I think might be interesting!

Week 3: Book Pairings

Liz (Adventures is Reading, Running and Working from Home) hosts this week, and explains it thus:

Pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title (or whatever you want to pair up). Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or two books on two different areas have chimed and have a link. You can be as creative as you like!

This is my favourite part of Nonfiction November, because, like the #SixDegrees meme, it’s fun to think about. I’m giving you three pairs. My rule was that the nonfiction book had to come from this year’s reading, but the paired book could – and indeed all do – come from previous years.

Grandmothers’ stories

Cover

This year my reading group read Andra Putnis’ biography/memoir, Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me (my review) about her two Latvian grandmothers who survived World War Two and ended up in Australia. Five years ago, we discussed Favel Parrett’s novel There was still love (my review), which revolves around the lives of two Czech sisters, who also survived World War 2, but here one ends up in Australia while the other remains in Prague. Parrett tells her story mainly through the eyes of their grandchildren. 

Mining and land rights in Western Australia

Wayne Bergmann and Madelaine Dickie’s biography Some people want to shoot me (my review) tells the story of First Nations man Wayne Bergmann who has spent much of his life fighting for the rights of Traditional Owners. One of those fights documented in this book occurred when he was chief executive of the Kimberley Land Council during the James Price Point gas hub negotiations which saw conflict within First Nations communities and between them and the wider Broome community. Madelaine Dickie’s novel Red can origami (my review) is set in a fictional community in the same region and encompasses a similar story of conflict, negotiation, tested loyalties and skulduggery over a uranium mining licence.

Youth football

This pairing of Helen Garner’s memoir The season (my review) with Karen Viggers’ novel Sidelines (my review) is a bit looser than the previous two, but I’m going there. Both are Australian books about young people playing sport, and in both the sport is football. However, in Garner’s memoir the football is Australian Rules, while in Viggers’ novel it’s soccer (or, in fact, to many, “the” football). Also, Garner focuses on the positive aspects. Hers is a grandmother’s story. She wanted to get to know her grandson better so she followed him through a year of training for and playing games. It’s primarily about the relationship she developed with her grandson through doing so, but does include some insights into youth sport, mostly in terms of its benefits. Viggers’ novel, on the other hand, sets out specifically to interrogate what happens when parental support turns into pressure, and what that pressure can do to the young players experiencing it.

What would you pair (and/or do you have anything to share regarding your year in nonfiction)?

Novellas in November 2025

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Last Novellas in November I wrote two posts, besides my reviews, but this year I will only manage one. However, I just want to put it on record that I do appreciate the work put into it by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck), because novellas feature highly in my most memorable books.

These reading months tend to suggest you start with “my year in [whatever the topic is]”, so that is my focus for this post. Last year I had read nine – a small number I know compared to many of you. This year, which goes from 1 November 2024 to 31 October 2025, I’ve read even fewer, but they were good! I’m dividing them into two groups: Novellas, and Novella-length Nonfiction.

Novella

  • Melanie Cheng, The burrow (185pp.) (my review): shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize and other awards
  • PS Cottier and NG Hartland, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin (115pp.) (my review): joint winner of the 2024 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize
  • Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice (184pp) (my review): winner of the 2025 Stella Prize and Prime Minister’s Literary Award
  • Shirley Hazzard, The bay of noon (182pp.) (my review)

Novella-length nonfiction

  • Helen Garner, The season (Memoir, 188pp.) (my review)
  • Gideon Haigh, My brother Jaz (Memoir, 87pp.) (my review)
  • Sonya Voumard, Tremor (Memoir, 129pp.) (my review): joint winner of the 2024 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize

In addition to these, I have read a novella this month but it will appear in next year’s novella count. And I’ll soon be reading another novella-length nonfiction, but again that’s for next year’s count.

All of the above, with the exception of Shirley Hazzard’s The bay of noon, were published in 2024, which suggests that publishers are currently happy to publish shorter works – and, given some showing in literary awards, that judges see value in them. Meanwhile, Shirley Hazzard’s novel, now 55 years old, could be called a classic.

It’s interesting – and completely serendipitous – that the three novella-length nonfiction books are all memoirs. It’s made me think, however, that this shorter length is a good one for memoirs because it encourages a focus on the main driver for the memoir, and discourages the wallowing or padding that can sometimes happen? Indeed, Sonya Voumard made exactly this point about writing Tremor (see my post on a conversation with her).

And this leads me to making a brief final note on novel-length. I have read many wonderful long books, but I have a preference for short (and therefore usually tight) ones. Just as, anecdotally, there’s the view that readers want more bang for their buck when buying books, meaning they don’t want to pay around the same amount for a 100-page novella as for a 400-page tome, I want more bang for my reading time! In other words, I prefer to read three great novellas in the same time I can read one great tome. That’s three different authors’ perspectives and ideas versus one. This, in addition the fact that I do enjoy concision (which I seem unable to emulate!), is what appeals. The point is that getting lost in a book’s world and never wanting to leave it, while I do love that, is not my main criterion for enjoyment.

If you are taking part in Novellas in November, you clearly enjoy them too. And, you are probably interested in literary culture, so if you are interested in the history of book-lengths, check out this article “Novels and novellas and tomes, Oh my!” by American writer and editor, Lincoln Michel. It has an American slant but I found it most interesting nonetheless. (BTW, if you read to the end, you’ll see that he struggles to be concise too!)

Thoughts anyone?

Written for Novellas in November 2025.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 16, Edna Davies

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Of all the forgotten writers I’ve researched, Edna Davies proved by far the most difficult. Even AustLit had nothing on her besides a list of a few works, but she intrigued me so I soldiered on. This post, like most of my recent Forgotten Writers posts, a revision, with a little bit of added information, of the one I posted there.

Edna Davies

So, for my AWW post I started at the end, where we get some facts. Her death was reported on 26 December 1952 in the Family Notices section of The Pioneer (from Yorketown, South Australia). It said she was 56 years old, which suggests she was born in 1896. The notice gives her name as Edna Irene, identifies her parents, and names her siblings as Daisy, Keith and Jack (deceased).

There are two other entries for her in the newspaper in December. On 12 December, a brief article announced that ‘Miss Edna Davies, “Pioneer” representative and correspondent, has been absent for some weeks because of ill health, and is at present in hospital, where she may have to spend some time yet’. They identify someone who will gather news, and add that “until Miss Davies’ return to Minlaton, advertisements, or payment of accounts, should be sent direct to the Pioneer Office”, which suggests she had an administrative role. They conclude this announcement, by saying that ‘The weekly feature “Comments on the News” (Written by Miss Davies) will, we regret, have to be temporarily suspended”, which confirms her writing contribution.

On 26 December, the same day the death notice appeared, they published a brief obituary. Here it is in full:

Press and Radio Correspondent Dies
Yorke Peninsula generally will feel the loss of Miss Edna Davies, of Minlaton who died in an Adelaide Hospital on Monday. Miss Davies, whose name is particularly familiar to readers of “The Pioneer,” has served many years as Southern and Central Yorke Peninsula’s chief correspondent for radio stations, provincial and metropolitan newspapers. People in many Peninsula towns will miss the friendly weekly phone calls she used to make in her search for news about the doings of local organisations and people. Her articles, as well as her Peninsula news items, have been of great value and interest, and we join her brother and sister and our readers in mourning her sudden demise.

So, it’s likely that she was born in Minlaton, central Yorke Peninsula, which is about 30 kms north of Yorketown, the home of her employer The Pioneer. Indeed, on 20 March 1926, a brief article appeared in The Pioneer, headed “Minlaton. Farewell to Miss Edna Davies”. The article describes an event that was held at the Minlaton Institute “to bid farewell to Miss Edna Davies and Mr. Jack Davies” (presumably the brother mentioned in the death notice.) They were leaving for London. (Indeed, according to Adelaide’s The Register, they left on 20 March). There were “eulogistic addresses” and “a useful cheque” was handed to Miss Davies. What does this tell us? Not a lot, but we can glean some information. She was around 30 years old, and seemingly not married. She was known in the community, at least enough for her departure to be reported on, albeit social news was more common at the time. It also tells us – from the headline – that it was she, not her brother, who was most known.  

Since writing my AWW post, I have done more research, and have discovered something about why she was known in the community. For example, Adelaide’s Observer (3 November 1923), writing on the Central Yorke’s Peninsula Agricultural Society’s annual show, observed that “the show committee provided the dinner … under the able management of Miss Edna Davies … Things worked smoothly in this department”. The article also praises the work of the Society’s secretary, Mr D.M.S. Davies, Edna’s father.

Anyhow, back to her chronology, three months after the report of her going to London, Moonta’s The People’s Weekly (12 June 1926) writes about the Minlaton Literary Society’s fourth annual musical and elocutionary competitions, advising that entries go to “secretary (Miss Edna Davies)”. This must have been a clerical error because, from the many newspaper reports under her by-line – and headed “Travel” or “Our London Letter” – it’s clear that she was in England by June 1926, then through 1927 and probably into early 1928. It’s possible that some of the articles dated later in 1928 were written back home.

Certainly, on 31 May 1929, there is a report in The Pioneer of the Minlaton Institute Literary Society’s seventh annual musical and elocutionary competitions and once again entries were to go to secretary Edna Davies. She probably was back on the job then. From this time, there are more articles, stories and columns – including her “Comments on the News” – by her South Australian papers. Together they build up a picture of who she was, and what she thought about life – local, national and international.

One that captured my attention was written from England, and published in The Pioneer on 6 January 1928. She starts by saying she hadn’t been doing much sightseeing so was “short of material” for her London Letter. So, she writes about some reading she’s doing about Australia, including a book by Mr Fraser. From what she says, I believe the book was Australia: The making of a nation (1911/12) by Scottish travel writer John Foster Fraser. Chapter 19 is tilted “A White Australia”. Fraser, a man of his times, understands the desire for a “white Australia”, but asks this:

What will Australian people say when the question is put to them, “As you are not developing this region [the great uninhabited north], what right have you to prohibit other people from developing it? It was not your land in the first instance. You obtained it by conquest that was peaceful. What can you do to resist conquest by force of arms? Who are you to say to the world, Let other peoples crowd together and be hungry owing to congestion of population, live cramped and struggling lives, but we, although doing practically nothing to develop our own resources, do not want anybody else to come in and develop the resources of a part of the world not given to us but given to the human race?'”

Davies is taken with this question and asks, “Have we all studied the pros and cons of the question carefully, so that should it be wanted, we can without hesitation give a carefully thought out decision after viewing the question from all sides. Looking back through history we see that no nation has ever come into, or held its own, without fighting for it, so why should we be an exception”. Her thinking – and Foster’s thinking – is not our thinking, but that she took the issue up and was published tells us something about her and the times. Neither of course consider that “little” line of Foster’s that “It was not your land in the first instance”.

Another randomly chosen example of her thinking comes from 20 June 1952, when she writes in her column “Comments on the News”:

READING about a press conference Mr. Menzies had recently in London this thought struck me — “What much wider outlook British pressmen seem to have than do their colleagues in Australia.”
And that’s a bad thing for Australia. Because if pressmen haven’t a wide outlook how can the public, who depend on them for news of the outside world, be expected to have one.

She slates it to the “old problem” of Australia’s geographic isolation, suggesting that “we are so isolated from other places that it it [sic] hard to realise that their welfare and their doings are important to us”.

AustLit lists 5 stories by her, and AWW lists 12 short stories in Stories from online archives (11 from the 1930s and 1 from the 1940s), but these are just a few of many short stories by her that were published in South Australian newspapers, and The Bulletin. I shared one of The Bulletin stories in my AWW post. Titled “Scrub”, it’s perfect “Bulletin-fare”, with its story of a woman who cannot get over a childhood nightmarish experience in the bush, and an intriguing take on lost-child-in-the-bush tradition in Australian culture.

Edna Davies turned out to be another example of an independent woman who seems to have made a career for herself in journalism and writing.

Sources

Edna Davies, “Scrub“, The Bulletin, Vol. 56 No. 2906 (23 Oct 1935)

All other sources are linked in the article.

Angus Gaunt, Anna (#BookReview)

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Last month, I posted on the winners of the 2025 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize, of which Angus Gaunt’s Anna was one. I am thrilled with this prize, not only because I love the novella form, but because of the variety of stories we are seeing. So far the fiction winners have been an historical novel from Kim Kelly, a contemporary coming-of-age novel from Rebecca Burton, and an audacious “what if” story from PS Cottier and NG Hartland. Three very different books, and now Anna makes it four.

When I started reading Anna, I thought I was heading into a dystopian novel. It is told third person from Anna’s perspective, and starts with her walking in the woods. A young man is following her. The woods are not identified, and neither is the young man, but she recognises him as a guard from the place she’s just left. Through their initial interaction, we learn that “the war is over” and the gates had been opened. Therefore, she firmly implies, he has no jurisdiction over her.

Anna, we discover as her journey continues, is about 15 years old, and had been taken to a labour camp with her family about three years ago. Her parents had died but she’s hoping her remaining siblings are ahead of her, safe in the exodus she’d missed. We know nothing about the woods – but they do not sound Australian – nor do we know the time setting. It is cold. There are some generic animals and plants – deer, hares, mushrooms, berries. The story focuses on Anna’s thought processes and her survival. There is almost nothing about the sociopolitical situation that got her there. We do know that Anna and the guard speak different languages, which suggests an invasion or some sort of oppression of minorities, but Gaunt does not go there. The notes I made during my reading, include this: “Timeless, placeless, non-political, means not dystopian? More allegory?”

The judges don’t call it either of these, but on “why this book is different” they say:

Winter is only beginning to thaw in a remote forest as Anna treks for her survival, accompanied by someone she cannot trust. With distilled clarity, this short novel carries the reader on a journey from victimhood to self-possession.

So, it is about survival, or, more precisely, about the inner resources you need to develop to overcome a dire situation.

Anna is a moving and absorbing read. Gaunt quickly engages our sympathy for his protagonist, young and defenceless in the woods. The language in the first two paragraphs sets up uncertainty. It starts:

Anna had already walked further than she meant to, but did not want to go back, not yet. She was basking in the sun … also in the silence. She had not done something like this for a long time … (p. 9)

Then she stops and looks up, where she sees “a large predatory bird … floating on secret air currents, delicate wing tips spread”. “Predatory” but “delicate”. Should we be worried? Then she sees the young guard, later identified as Yevgeny. He’s very young, uncertain, and in a show of bravado he tries to shoot the bird, but fails. He’s never shot anything before. And so the narrative and its main characters are established. Anna is alert, sensitive, intelligent and has some nous and wisdom about her. The guard, also young, lacks confidence, experience and nous, and is confused about his role as a man, a soldier, a human. This makes him potentially dangerous but also vulnerable. We – like Anna – are on the watch for which way he might go.

And so the novel progresses as this uneasy, wary-of-each-other pair journey through the woods, looking for the railroad and its promise of civilisation. Early on, during a brief time when she and Yevgeny are not together and she has returned to the camp, Anna meets a dying man who gives her his last food. Then later, together, they come across a cottage containing a barely surviving couple.

This brings another literary form to mind, the journey narrative, the search for home, a new one or old one, and – perhaps – for self. In journey narratives, physical and spiritual or emotional challenges are faced, and people are met. The journeyer must rely on inner resources to overcome the challenges, including assessing whether the people met are to be trusted or not. This is what we watch Anna do. We are privy to her thoughts as she goes, as she draws together past knowledge and present experience, and we gain confidence in her ability to make good decisions. Nearly half way through the story, her mind drifts to the schoolroom. It is comforting, but she stops herself,

recognising that she was attracted by the emotion of it rather than its practical application. There was not room for emotion. She was glad of this thought. Feelings and emotion could only cloud the mind, waste precious resources. All resources were precious. Her mind was clear now. She had a choice to make and she made one. (p. 56)

Of course it’s not a straight line, and Anna, like any journeyer under stress, slips back several times before getting a grip once more.

Anna is beautiful to read, from the first sentence. The language is tight but expressive. The necessary tension is off-set by moments of tenderness and hope, not to mention some subtle foreshadowing. And the characterisation is warm and empathetic.

I concluded my post on last year’s winner, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin, that it was an audacious “what if” story. Anna is also audacious, in a different way. It calls on the tropes of established forms, like allegory and the journey narrative, but makes them into something new, something that confronts issues like trust and power in a way that feels both modern and timeless.

Read for Novellas in November.

Angus Gaunt
Anna
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2025
110pp.
ISBN: 9780645927047

Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd.

Helen Garner and Sarah Krasnostein in conversation with Beejay Silcox

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Last night’s ANU/Meet-the-Author event was a sold-out affair, in a 500-seat theatre. And why not? Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, and Sarah Krasnostein are among Australia’s top writers of narrative nonfiction, and they have just produced a book about the Leongatha mushroom murders. Indeed, it’s only because they have written about it that I am interested in reading about this case. Of course I knew about it, but I didn’t follow it intensely because these tragic criminal cases that capture the public’s attention so often become unedifying spectacles in which emotion overtakes reason in much of the public discourse. And I don’t want to go there.

As always, Colin Steele did the introductions, including explaining that Chloe Hooper had had to pull out due to her young son being sick. He referenced Jen Webb’s recent article on The mushroom tapes in The Conversation, and quoted her statement that “If I were asked to pick three people to write about this dramatic, yet banal, crime story, I’d choose them”. Yes! He then handed the floor over to Beejay Silcox.

The conversation

I was disappointed not to see Chloe Hooper because I have seen Helen and Sarah in action before, and because Kate (booksaremyfavouriteandbest) loved the event she attended with the three of them. So, Chloe’s absence created a significant hole, but Helen and Sarah filled it wonderfully – and graciously. They were open, thoughtful, and, as Kate found, still discovering new things to talk about.

Beejay started by quoting Janet Malcolm, who, she clearly knows, is a favourite of Garner’s. Malcom has argued that what journalists do is “morally indefensible” because of the way they draw in and then report on their subjects. But, continued Beejay, good journalists will overcome this risk by not rushing in, by, I think she said, applying “a tilt” to the way they look at things. And these writers are “masters of the tilt”.

On working together

The conversation covered the sorts of things you would expect for a book like this, including our complicity as readers/spectators, why this case, the need to resist easy answers, their process, their thoughts on the trial, and where the trust in each other had come in.

Sarah noted that there is no division between Helen’s work and her person, which of course is what so many of us love about her, but which has also brought her criticism. They all respected each other – not surprisingly – so had no doubts about each other’s personal processes. Helen said they were like people who had been in and survived a car crash. They were friends for life now.

Beejay referred to the fact that each had shared what their opening line would have been had they written the book alone (though they wouldn’t have, they said). Their lines (pp. 4-5) capture something about their individual approaches. Helen’s, which plays on lines by Sir Walter Scott, sounds baroque, Shakespearean. It speaks of empathy and the question of where is the line that an ordinary person crosses to commit such a crime. Chloe’s is more sociological (as in, what in society created this), while Sarah’s is more legal. As Sarah said, each had her own tone and vibe, her own interest in what they were observing.

Sarah commented on how the case had “asserted itself into public discourse with velocity”.

There was more talk about how and why they decided to write this book. They admitted to bristling at the assumption from others that it was “their story”. They found the sensationalism repellent. (In a humorous interaction, Helen dobbed Sarah and Chloe in as readers of the Daily Mail, which she eschews, but didn’t mind their passing on its news!)

It was an exhausting process, given the trial lasted 10 weeks. Helen talked of how you cope with something like this, on defending yourself against awfulness and pain of the trial, how the mind turns off. They noticed early that the journalists had formed a gang, presumably their way of coping. Beejay suggested that humour is another way, and that Helen provided some of the book’s comic relief.

On the court – and their approach to understanding it

The court is a workplace, said Sarah, so alongside extraordinary grief and distress are all the administrative aspects, such as when to have lunch, managing a juror needing a toilet break. They shared examples of humour and drama in the witness box. Sarah described their work as an “ethnography of a micro-world”, one in which they tried to capture the humanity of court.

Observing that their book is more about watching, than about the judgement, Beejay asked what was important to see, that we normally wouldn’t. Helen’s answer came quickly. It was distress and suffering. You see the survivors. Helen said they dreaded people thinking they were taking suffering lightly. Sarah agreed, adding that one of the heaviest things is that this is not a story of exceptionalism but more of “there but for the grace of god …”

They talked about emotions versus the banality, the quotidian details, such as, for Helen, Erin’s toe in the hiking sandals she would wear. She commented on being nearly undone by the domestic nature of it all, such as survivor Ian talking about having “a nice bowl of porridge” in the morning with his wife of many years, and now she’s gone.

Beejay described the book as both spectacle and literature, and quoted Helen’s comment in it that “everything could become a metaphor here“. The discussion went roundabout here, but essentially they agreed that in a case like this, metaphor must be handled carefully. In fact, Helen suggested that the urge to get metaphorical doesn’t belong in nonfiction. Sarah shared something from documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. He said that to find a detail that stands for the whole is a gold nugget, but then realised that that detail (from his Vietnam War film) represented the piece of a man’s soul that had come at great cost – so “gold nugget” was not appropriate. So, said Sarah, you must handle metaphor carefully, as you are dealing with human meaning. Helen had never heard Sarah say this. They agreed that nonfiction deals with facts you must honour, that it is chained to reality in a certain way.

On Erin

This led to a conversation about Erin, how the public had turned her into “a character”, and how information that had come up in the pre-hearings (such as probable earlier attempts on her husband’s life) was deemed inadmissible in court because there was no evidence. This decision would enrage a family, Sarah said, but is necessary to protect the presumption of innocence. (There was humour in the conversation here because Daily Mail readers knew this information, but Helen didn’t – and had felt an idiot!)

But, who was Erin? Mostly, women kill to protect, so Sarah had gone into the hearings with this understanding, but as information came out she had to reassess her thinking.

Helen found Erin a strange person, but thought the court artists’ depiction of her as evil, witch-like, was appalling. Later, they described the way the media/the public feasted on her was a form of horror.

Sarah said that when Erin started speaking on the witness stand, she was articulate, funny, recognisable, but gradually, as she was questioned, this picture melted. It was hard to separate Erin’s self from the persona. The unpalatable parts of her personality were on display. The bad-tempered teacher-like tone she used in response to the prosecutor was a misstep. It’s a middle-class story, said Helen.

Re explaining Erin’s crossing that line into murder, Helen was surprised to find that the prosecution doesn’t have to find a motive. She doesn’t have an answer. Like most humans, Erin embodied various people, mother, crabby teacher … Sarah added that Erin is not legally insane but is a deeply disordered person, so how do you apply “order” to her? We want answers, but we can often be mysterious to ourselves. Erin is recognisable as a mother, but like many of us can also harbour a primal rage.

Q & A

On how such an intelligent, well-educated woman could think she could get away with it: Helen has a theory about murderers. They have a great desire to do it, and a fantasy about how they are going to do it, but this all stops at the lethal blow because they haven’t thought about what happens next. So, for example, Erin hadn’t concealed evidence of her ownership of the dehydrator. This was astonishing,

On ethical issues they considered during the process: There were many, including the children, the community, whether they should look at sites (like the home). Are you adding to harm or does not looking do harm too? They questioned whether they were looking out of human curiosity, were they just perving? Sarah said that Helen has a view about “utility”. Courts are public, so we should understand them, we should ask questions about what they are doing. Hannah Arrendt described such crimes or behaviour as “a rent in the social fabric”. The law is being acted in our name, so we have duty to know what the law is doing. Part of the “utility” is to add complexity to our understanding, to show that the law, and these cases, are not simple.

On the role of gender in how the case played out publicly: Gender absolutely played a role. Had the crime been committed by a man it would not have held the public’s attention for so long. This was a middle class mum, set around something domestic, the serving of a meal. Her behaviour was a violent inversion of a major archetype of what women are. The gleeful mocking tone employed by some commentators was an insult to victims. (And reminiscent of how Lindy Chamberlain was “feasted upon”.)

Finally…

Beejay described the book as “a love letter to doubt”, to which Helen responded that she is a fan of ambivalence. Yes! She is not the god of all knowing consciousness; she wants readers to be there, questioning along with her. Doubt comes in different forms. At times, Helen and Sarah would be sentimental and mushy, while Chloe would remonstrate, “Guys, she’s planning to poison them”. They agreed that their essential subject matter was the preservation of doubt. 

Beejay concluded by asking them what they wished we all knew or felt. Sarah named the mockery, caricature, parody that was applied to the case. Why do people do this? These are people’s lives, and it affected a family and an entire community. Helen agreed, adding that “you want to preserve the tenderness in the story”. The old people who died kept disappearing from the story, but they were plain country people with faces of kindness, people who had helped Erin in need (which she recognised).

So, another excellent conversation with some meaningful takeaways encompassing how we respond to crimes like this, how we value writers who bring them to us in a considered thoughtful way, and how doubt and acknowledging complexity should be our mantras.

ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author
MC: Colin Steele
Lowitja O’Donoghue Cultural Centre, Australian National University
19 November 2025