My second choice of sessions was, partly, sentimental, because Ruth Bader Ginsburg is such an inspiration for feminists like me and I also wanted to see ABC journalist Fran Kelly strut her stuff in person. I wasn’t disappointed. The session was subtitled, Amanda Tyler In Conversation With Fran Kelly, and was framed as follows:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing last year — just as her book, co-authored with her former law clerk Amanda Tyler — was heading into production, was met with a public outpouring of grief. Tyler shares RBG’s optimistic vision of a just society and a ‘more perfect union’.

This is slightly incorrect, and stems from the fact that the session had been scheduled for last year’s cancelled festival. Ginsburg, “the notorious RBG”, or just RBG as I will call from here on, didn’t die last year, 2021, but in 2020. As a result, Ginsburg and Tyler’s co-written book, Justice, justice: Thou shalt pursue: A life’s work fighting for a more perfect union, instead of being relatively new off the press has now been out for well over a year. That, I think, changed somewhat the session’s focus from the book (though it was still the cornerstone of the discussion) to something wider – to RBG’s legacy and America today, as much as the book itself.

This session, unlike my first, was in the largest space in Kambri, and it was packed. RBG has a huge following. I have written briefly about her before, in a Literary Week post where I mentioned seeing the documentary RBG. I wrote that RBG “is a fascinating woman with an inspiring capacity for clarifying the complex”.

This was another engaging session, in a different way.

Kelly leapt right in with a big question: given RBG’s “wonder-woman status”, did Tyler feel pressure working on this book with her! Well yes, admitted Tyler, even though she’s in her late 40s now! But working with RBG was “so special” and the work was so important.

Regarding RBG’s health, Tyler said, answering another question, that yes, they were aware that “her death was coming” but RBG had tried so hard “to stay alive through the election and to the inauguration” so that, hopefully, a Democrat would win and be responsible for her replacement. (Those of you who follow American politics will appreciate all this.)

Kelly asked what Tyler saw as RBG’s most important role or characteristic. She responded that RBG recognised that she was talented and she used her talent not to make money but to make the world a better place. This was a point she would make to young graduates whenever she spoke at graduations. This theme of improving the world, improving America, improving the lot of others, recurred throughout the session.

RBG had graduated at the top of her class but couldn’t get a job in a law firm – because she was a woman. This resulted in her ending up in the court system, which, Tyler said, turned out to be a good thing. (As it was for Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the US Supreme Court. RBG was the second.)

Next up was discussion about RBG’s early court work. Her first gender law case was Moritz v. Commissioner in 1970, concerning a man who’d been refused a tax deduction for hiring a nurse to care for his elderly mother, a deduction he would have received had he been a woman. The important thing about this – besides that the law also discriminated against men – is that when the case was won the Government appealed, which got it to the Supreme Court.

RBG fought many sex discrimination cases during the 1970s – her favourite being the Stephen Wiesenfeld case. All this, said Tyler, would have made her significant even if she’d never been appointed to the Supreme Court.

The discussion identified many of RBG’s skills and strategies. She had a capacity for consensus; she chose multi-directional cases; and her superpower was taking cases as a litigator to the Supreme Court.

Kelly asked whether RBG was disappointed about being “the great dissenter”. Tyler, as she was wont to do, answered in a round-about way. (Is this lawyer style?) RBG, she said, wanted to be a judge, she wanted to be in public service. And, she did write some great majority decisions. But yes, she was disappointed to be in the minority at the end of her Supreme Court career. She wanted to leave a “road map”.

Kelly then asked what she thought of her celebrity status, “the notorious RBG”. No one would have predicted it, Tyler said, but it was the result of her dissent in a Voting Rights case – Shelby County vs Holder. Tyler quoted RBG from this case:

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

RBG loved, said Tyler, that she was inspiring a younger generation. She also saw the significance of an older woman becoming a superstar!

Then Kelly got to the sensitive question: should RBG have stepped down earlier to prevent what ended up happening – her replacement being chosen by Trump and the Republicans. Tyler replied that during Obama years, she was given clean bill of health, she was in her stride, and Republicans had hold of Senate so she felt they may not have supported the “right” replacement.

Tyler then turned to something that she mentioned many times during the rest of the session, the vote. She said that exit polls in the 2016 election (the Trump one, of course!) found that the no. 1 reason Republicans gave for voting was the Supreme Court, but this was barely mentioned by Democrat voters.

Tyler hadn’t answered Kelly’s question! So she pushed a little more! Tyler said she believes that RBG (like most people) anticipated Hillary Clinton would win.

Kelly turned to the Supreme court’s overturning of Roe V. Wade. Tyler said – meaninglessly, really – that if Hillary Clinton had won everything would be different! She said that she thinks RBG would be “apoplectic” at what was happening, because RBG believed that true gender quality depended on women having control of their reproduction.

There was more discussion about this, and then Kelly turned to the fear that other rights could fall, as hinted by Justice Clarence Thomas. Tyler does fear that rights like contraception and same-sex conduct, for example, are at risk. It is, she said, a difficult time for this county that sees itself as “a country of opportunity”.

Kelly asked whether this can be stopped, to which Tyler returned to her mantra: the vote. People must vote “as if we care about these issues”. The issue is the Senate and the filibuster rules, and she’s not seeing enough impetus for changing Federal law. The problem is that the US is becoming less unified – life is becoming increasingly different from state to state. So, for example, the abortion law changes are causing young women to seriously think which state they choose to go to college in. All this risks entrenching the spilt in American society.

The current Supreme Court is young, so will have its current make-up for decades. Biden has considered a commission to look at expanding the number of justices. Congress could do it but there are obvious ramifications to this. Another idea is that of staggered terms, but this requires changing the Constitution.

Kelly asked about RBG’s “striving for a more perfect union”. This, said Tyler, comes from the Constitution. It invites ongoing struggle and effort to improve American life. RBG saw there was so much to be done. The Constitution, said Tyler, is based on people being able to live their lives “based on individual capacities”, but the equality implicit in this is not enshrined.

Kelly asked Tyler for her favourite RBG quote – there are many out there – but Tyler responded with a personal experience. When, as a nervous new mother she was planning to return to work, she asked RBG for advice. The email response was one line: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”. Love it.

Finally, Tyler commented that RBG lived a balanced life, and loved opera.

Q&A

The Q&A covered a few issues which I’ll just dot point:

• Compulsory voting: Tyler is interested in this idea, but said even just making election day a public holiday would help. Kelly, said, what about a Saturday (as we do)!
• Conflict of interest issue in Supreme Court (eg re Clarence Thomas’ wife): the Supreme Court is not bound by same rules of ethics as the rest of court system. Thomas has not recused himself so far in conflict of interest situations.
• RBG’s advice for new generation of law students: Tyler gave two: Don’t just think about the courts, also think about electoral and legislative arenas; and Play the long game.
• ERA (Equal Rights Amendment): RBG wanted this in the Constitution.
• Favourite moments with RBG: both related to opera!

Tyler said that in her last conversation with RBG – August 2020 – RBG expressed concern about how the pandemic would affect the world’s children. Even at the end of her life, Tyler said, RBG was thinking about others and the future.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2022
Her last words: The inspiring life and legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsberg: Amanda Tyler In Conversation With Fran Kelly.
Saturday 13 August 2022, 12-1pm

A preamble

After a long pandemic-caused hiatus during which it didn’t, like many others, “pivot” to an online format, the Canberra Writers Festival is back. Unfortunately, it clashed with a time we could visit our Melbourne family, so the best I could do was reduce that trip by a day so I could at least attend some Saturday sessions. Sunday, the festival’s last day, was long ago booked – an afternoon theatre booking to see the Sheku Kaneh-Mason Musicians. Life is just too busy.

So, with just one day, what to attend out of a plethora of choices, given they are held over several venues on either side of “the lake.”(Those who know Canberra know that “the lake” is a major mental divide in Canberra, as much as a physical one. We laugh about it, because it is ridiculous, but it’s there!) The point, though, is that I didn’t want to book sessions that would involve a lot of travel.

As I have written before, the Canberra Writers Festival’s tagline is “Power Passion Politics”, but I mostly seek the more literary focused ones. I found one on Saturday morning at ANU’s new-ish Kambri Centre, so decided that would be my venue. There were still choices to be made, and you can see what I decided in this and the following posts …. though in another twist of fate, a late important appointment saw me missing my last booked session of the day, Chloe Hooper with Richard Fidler. Darn it! The choices were hard, as there were many interesting people to see and hear, but that’s Festival life.

Writing the precipice: Panel discussion with Kathryn Heyman, Chris Hammer and Diana Reid

The moderator was Nicole Abadee, a writer and podcaster about books, a literary judge, and a literary event moderator. She ran the panel more as a interview-each-author style rather than a free-flow discussion between the panelists. Both styles have their advantages, and in this case we did hear some excellent ideas from each of the writers.

The panel was titled “Writing the precipice”, which the program described as:

Our best-selling authors reveal how they tackle their characters’ pivotal moments when they stand on the precipice of life-changing disclosures and discoveries, and how they navigate the decisions beyond.

After introducing the authors and their latest works – Kathryn Heyman’s memoir Fury, Diana Reid’s campus novel Love and virtue, and Chris Hammer’s crime novel Treasure and dirt – Abadee asked them to briefly set the scene of their books, and then got into the nitty gritty!

Heyman was a little uncertain about Abadee’s suggestion that she’d actually stood on the precipice from her childhood. Heyman didn’t really see it that way, though she had, she said, grown up in poverty in a single-parent family.

She was keen to focus on the idea of “precipice” which she defined as “an edge that you can fall or leap from”. It’s a moment where everything is lost, but, paradoxically there’s everything to gain. She felt that, despite growing up in the underclass, her cleverness opened doors. Class is an issue that she and others mentioned and to which we returned later in the panel.

Abadee was keen to follow the childhood precipice point, saying that she was referring to the fact that both Heyman’s father and step-father had been violent. While agreeing with this, Heyman returned to her precipice idea. She said Fury is about making decisions that from the outside look dangerous. It is set in the context of her having faced major and minor bombardments as a female. 

Fury is not about Heyman’s assault, but about what she did after the court case. However, Abadee briefly explained that Heyman had been assaulted by a taxi driver, had reported it to the police, but the taxi driver had been acquitted. Heyman said that her experience of the social justice system had been brutal, and that she’d realised that the places where she should be safe, she was not. She returned to the precipice idea. Basically, she said, it’s about what is there to lose. There is nothing to do but leap. This she did, into something that looked dangerous – taking a job on a boat as a cook, with four strange men.

Why put herself at harm, is the question she gets frequently, but she said that she was physically, psychologically, mentally on a threshold, and decided to look at it differently, at how would it be if she were “one of the boys”?

Abadee quoted back to her her reference to a Larkin poem from which she’d taken the idea that when you are removed from the familiar, you perceive things differently, and thus perceive yourself differently. In other words, when removed from what you know you can transform yourself. Like in a story, you can rewrite yourself. She wanted, she said, to build “physical and psychological muscle”.

While at sea she was frequently in danger, but not from the men – from the bad weather and the crew’s incompetence! She came back changed.

She ended on an interesting point. She’d come to realise, she said, the value of naming the mess, naming the trauma. Stay with me here … she said books had taught her to name seabirds by learning to see their differences. And so, she learnt “to put language to the precise trauma”. If you can name it, she said, you become bigger than it.

Reid was asked to start by talking about the friendship between the two women protagonists in her book. Michaela is from a single parent family in Canberra, and finds herself in a Sydney university residential college where most of the residents are well-to-do, with private school backgrounds. One of these is Eve, who is self-confident, articulate, and a model for Michaela.

There are, she said, some fundamental philosophical questions behind the novel, one being the idea expressed by Gore Vidal which is that is it not enough to succeed, that to succeed, others must fail. Michaela comes to see this. So the book is about a rivalry more than a friendship.

Reid said much contemporary literature is about women being supportive but there are toxic relationships too. She clarified, though, that this book has a very particular context – a competitive academic environment, in the male-dominated subject of philosophy. Unfortunately, Michaela equates success with male attention, and thinks getting an older man to love her would endorse her as a person.

Abadee asked her about the prologue which, Reid explained, is written in third person. It’s a sex scene in which the woman is so drunk she remembers nothing. That woman, it turns out, is Michaela, who is the first person narrator of the rest of the novel. This incident becomes a critical point between the two women. Here is a precipice. Eve tells her she should report it.

This situation said Reid, goes to the power of storytelling as process of invention: I don’t remember it so it’s not in my story. When Michaela is encouraged to report, she’s being asked to put it in her narrative. The tension exists in her being deprived of her autonomy, her ability to control her narrative. What is the impact for her versus for feminism of telling the story. Who has the right to tell the story?

Regarding Eve, the question is whether she’s a good person or just looks like one. Is it ok to betray a friend for social good? Reid saw Eve in terms os performative activism. She ultimately leaves the place better, but there is tension between being morally correct and feeling superior, about not using “morals as sticks to beat other people down”. Although Eve does good work, she does it for herself.

Another philosophical question Reid explores then concerns the definition of goodness. Does it reside in your impact on the world or your reasons for doing so. Is it less “good” if you do it for yourself?

Later, Reid commented that her book came partly out of self-criticism (with Eve being an exaggerated her) and out of observation.

When we got to Hammer, Abadee noted that each of his novels starts with a hook. His latest, Treasure & dirt, opens with a miner being found dead, crucified. All his protagonists, she suggested, are on a precipice.

Hammer said that his openings are typical of crime books: you need to capture people as quickly as you can. The discussion then focused on the detectives, Ivan and Nell, who are both flawed, both on a precipice.

They are not hands-off detectives. He said there are plenty of crime books where the detective mechanistically solve crime, with much violence and sex involved. And there are those cosy crime novels where you know nothing about detective. However, he is interested in how characters change. Both his detectives find their careers at risk, are unsure about their status in police force. Will they throw the other under bus to save themselves?

Hammer described the different issues confronting each of the detectives – creating the precipice each is on – and said that solving the crime is important to both their careers. Each is on a career precipice, but also important is how they see themselves. They have choices. Hammer said that as a reader he likes to immerse himself in the characters, to think what he’d do. He likes to write such characters.

Heyman then said that all the books deal with class and shame, and asked the writers to talk about class. Heyman simply said, class plays a huge role, and that in addition to “class” and “shame”, the three books are all about “characters in extremis”.

Reid made two points about class. One is that moral judgements depend on context. Eve finds it easy to judge but finds it hard to acknowledge her power over Michaela because of her class. The other is that universities are places of privileged people who go on into privileged roles. What they see as culturally normal thus becomes the norm affecting everyone. Great point. Heyman added that people from the underclass and billionaires have a freedom because they are outside the middle class which establishes the norms.

Hammer said that his novel is set in a hardscrabble place, but that there are two powerful, rich men in it. Will they get away with massive illegality? Will Ivan and Nell, who are there for a homicide, do anything about it?

Abadee, picking up the shame thread, referred to Heyman’s title, Fury, and her idea that the best antidote to shame is anger. Heyman said that shame breeds in silence, in buying into others’ stories of who you are. It doesn’t do well when out in the open. By contrast, fury has energy, so the idea is to convert shame to anger (and energy).

Reid said shame involves lack of control; it arises when others judge you by facets of yourself you can’t control.

Hammer said that Nell is found in a compromising situation. She feels she’s been duped, but as a young woman in male-dominate police force, she has to decide whether she will fold or stand up.

An insightful session, which found some fascinating coherence between three very different books.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2022
Writing the precipice
Saturday 13 August 2022, 10-11 am