Photo: Bronac McNeill
AWW: The fictional cul-de-sac in Canberra, Warrah Place, in 1979 is a return to your childhood. Can you tell me what compelled you to write about this time and place?
I lived in Canberra between the ages of five and 10 on a cul-de-sac that is fairly similar to Warrah Place, with some differences that I put in to help make the story work. But the reason for setting it there and then was that the idea came to me while I was recovering from surgery. Some years ago, I had a double mastectomy and my ovaries removed due to a family history with cancer, and I was thinking a great deal about my mum after that time.
The science wasn’t around in her generation, so I was thinking about her when she was the age that I was at the time, in my forties, and really wishing that I could have conversations with her about what her life was like then. I was a grown-up when she died. I was used to having adult conversations with her and I just know that she would have really loved to have had that kind of chat with me around what it was like for her, but equally what it was like for other women.
So, writing this was very much my way of travelling back in time and saying to my mum, ‘What was it like here? And, what about these women, in this context, with everything that’s going on nationally and globally, what happens if women want to change their lives?’
I was at a point in my life where I was looking for something new and I was wanting to re-invent myself as a writer, and just thinking what options are available to different women? How is change possible? How do you create the conditions for change within different contexts?
The surgery would have been a huge upheaval emotionally and physically, did this project become a way through that for you?
I think it made everything much more meaningful and poignant. I also think it propelled me into a different phase of writing.
I’d been working on something previously that I was sticking with because I felt like I had to see it through even though I knew it wasn’t working. I had worked in adolescent mental health services and I was writing something about teenagers in care and really struggling with it.
I think I was very much coming at it with a professional hat on rather than a story-telling hat, and I had to un-learn how to do that and see my responsibility to story rather than to characters. Connecting with something that felt much more personal to me freed me from having to come at it as a psychotherapist.
Because I connected with it much more personally and it is about my own relationship, and something that was very precious to me, it made it so much easier for me to find my own voice in the writing.
Had you always wanted to be a writer or is this something that you came to later?
I really enjoyed writing when I was younger. At school it was something that teachers said, ‘You’re good at this.’ But not for a second did I consider it as something that I could do as an adult. When I grew up, I didn’t know anyone who was a writer. I think representation matters.
Anyone I knew who was studying something like English or English literature was doing that with a view to becoming a teacher. So, for a while, when I was young I toyed with the idea of becoming an English teacher because I loved reading and writing. But I didn’t want to be a teacher.
I’m glad my career took the path that it did because I don’t think I would have ended up here, writing this kind of stuff. What I write is very much informed by the career I had beforehand. So, I’m really thankful for it.
In my career I was very much focused on the theory and practice of psychotherapy. I had a very clear trajectory in mind. I was going to be a PhD. I was going to write textbooks. Around having my children I took more time off work than I might have otherwise. I stepped out of work for a while, and I think that is what really gave me a bit more perspective and allowed me a bit of breathing space to consider what else my training might be good for. And I feel like I landed on my feet in that writing fiction feels to me the absolute perfect fit.
The story is a close study of the women who live on Warrah Place, their secrets, and how they interact with each other. How did you assemble this cast? What inspired them?
I was really interested in exploring women at different ages. I think about women as being both embodied, how they inhabit their body at different ages, and at the same time I think about these characters as being embedded within the context.
I was thinking very much about Australia, about Canberra specifically, and that time and what position women might be able to occupy within cultural discourses. I definitely wanted a cast of women where [readers] know who they are, partly by the stories they tell about themselves, and partly by the stories that are told about them.
That’s why you’ve got different points and view, different women taking the spotlight, so you can see how they choose to present themselves. But you also see how they are positioned by other people as they walk in and out of each others’ scenes and homes and lives. And where that tension is between the assumptions people make about us and the way we want to see ourselves.
As a psychotherapist I’m very much interested in how we make meaning of our lives and how we know ourselves through stories, and how some stories become dominant and others become subjugated. How we get recruited into believing certain versions and not others. And how we go about re-authoring stories that might not serve us well.
All of that thinking was very much in my mind as I was thinking about the relationships between these women and how they were creating not just their identities but what possibilities are available to them through their relationships with each other.
Given what you’ve said about where the book came from and where the story came from, did you always envisage it as a murder, or was that something that came later?
I never set out to write a crime novel. It was very much rooted in relationships. I knew that I needed some kind of event that would destabilise those relationships and upend [the women’s] lives to give them something to react to. Fairly early on I had this image of a severed foot being found because I was looking for some sort of metaphor that would represent the gruesomeness of the emotional lives of these women. The bits of them they keep hidden, and don’t show, and how that can actually feel quite horrific to hold onto things.
Once I had this foot it had to belong to somebody. The first decision that I made was that it wasn’t going to be a woman. I felt that that was something that I’d seen over and over again in books. A young dead woman. Then I had to learn how to write crime. That took a lot of trial and error to have a narrative that could see through to a conclusion but also allowed me the space to explore the lives of women, which was what I was really interested in.
Do you learn skills as a psychotherapist that help you create well-rounded, flesh and blood characters on the page?
Definitely. There are very specific things that I draw on. More broadly, the most helpful thing is to think about characters as relational beings. But every character has their own backstory and you are thinking about the roles and positions that they occupy within the families of origin. Where they grew up. Some of the characters are immigrants, so I had to think a lot about the cultural context in which they grew up. What beliefs you bring with you, what assumptions, what unspoken cultural ways of being there are that might not always be conscious, but they become patterns that we carry with us.
All of the characters had backstories that helped me to understand where they had come from, what patterns they were carrying with them, what tendencies within them different situations would be likely to provoke. That story didn’t necessarily make it onto the page but for me they were vital parts to creating these characters.
The Grapevine was the winner of the Stylist prize for feminist fiction. As an emerging author, how important was it to get that vote of confidence?
It was enormously helpful. In fact, if your readers are writers, I would encourage them to enter prizes if that is something that would be useful to them because the thing I found useful for me was firstly, it meant that I was taking my writing seriously. If you enter a prize you need to meet a deadline. You have to present your work in a professional way. The other thing that’s really useful about it is you learn how subjective it is. There were prizes where the feedback was completely the opposite of another prize’s feedback.
I think being a writer means that no matter what stage you’re at, no matter what success you’ve had, there are always knockbacks. Entering prizes can be a really useful way of learning about yourself and how you handle knockbacks because it’s going to be an integral part of being a writer.
Once I did win that prize, I had an agent who was expecting work from me and was working collaboratively with me and felt like I was having a relationship with her that was really enriching to me creative process. It felt like the beginning of something very exciting.
Are you working on another book? Can you tell us a little about it?
I’m working on my second novel. It’s lovely because there’s quite a lot of publicity to do for The Grapevine at the moment and I’m really enjoying balancing that with staying rooted in the practice of writing. It’s in its early stages and I’m having fun with it. I’m really interested in exploring intimacy in various forms and its relationship to belonging and loyalty and obligation and how dynamics shift around those things.
Buy The Grapevine here.
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