May 24, 2025 • 23 mins
London-based Australian author Jessica Stanley’s second novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, opens with all the beats of a classic romantic comedy – a meet-cute, a grand gesture, instant attraction – but what follows is a book about the next bit, the day to day reality of just living. But Jessica writes it with grace and wit and compassion, finding the romance in what comes next when two people decide to be together. In this episode of Read This, Michael sits down with Jessica for a conversation about life, love, and the importance of what’s on your bookshelf.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello again. It's Daniel James and I'm here to share
another episode I read this Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast,
hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
and around the world. In this episode, Michael is chatting
with London based Australian writer Jessica Stanley. As always, Michael
(00:23):
joins me to share a little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hi, Michael, Daniel James.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Hello, So, Michael, you make a bit of a mission
in this episode that if you go to someone's house,
you're definitely going to spend time scaring their bookshelves.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Correct, Yes, doesn't everyone. Isn't that just a basic thing
you do when you go into someone else's house. I
am one hundred percent having a furtive perv at what's
on every bookshelf, and I am passing judgment all the
way through. This week's guest, Jessica Stanley says that she
does it, but she doesn't pass judgment, and I believe
she's lying. We all look at it and we all
(00:57):
have very strong opinions. And then the other thing is
like I'm partnered up I know you are too, Daniel,
But if you're single, I would encourage people to use
people's reading lists, their book recommendations as the ultimate dating determinant.
You know, let's forget dating apps. Let's just say, give
me your top three books. And if someone doesn't pass muster,
they can get stuffed.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
It really can reveal a lot a better person, can't it.
And the idea of what's on someone else's bookshelves plays
a bit of a key role in Jessica Stanley's new
novel City Yourself Kissed. Tell me a little bit about it.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
No, you're absolutely right. The thing that spurred me onto
that particularly unkind diatribe is that this novel that we're
talking about today begins with all the kind of beats
and expectations of a conventional rom com. You know, there's
a meat cut, a grand gesture, someone falls in a
lay human connection. But Jessica Stanley is a really smart writer.
(01:51):
She's much more interested in the question of kind of
human connection and in what comes next. This is a
book about the decade after the World Romance. She follows
her two characters, Coralie and Adam, as they go through
children and renovations and jobs and extended families and friends
and disappointment and corrosion and compromising, just all the grit
(02:13):
and grist of everyday life, which could be a trudge
in the hands of a lesser writer, but a writer
like Jessica Stanley turns it into something graceful and playful
and funny and dare I say it even romantic. It's
quite the feat and it's lovely to chat to her
about it.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Coming up in just a moment. What's on Jessica Stanley's bookshelves?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Where I want to start is an element of the
meat cut in your book, which is the swapping of
apartments and the looking at other people's bookshelves. And I
want to know, when you visit someone's house for the
first time, how nosy are you on the question of
what's on their bookshelves?
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Well, I'm interested, but as with most things, I'm observing,
but I'm not judging. So I'm interested to see what
people are reading. But by the time I've made it
into someone's home, I'm probably intimate with them anyway, so
I'm certainly not judging. And also I find a lot
of people in their thirties I'm not in my thirties.
I'm forty three, but a lot of people in their
(03:20):
thirties have moved around so much anyway that maybe they
would think their shelves weren't really reflective of them, so
to be judged on them would be upsetting. Whereas I'm
one of those people who I started amassing my books
when I went to the Lifeline, book Fair and Camera,
and I've taken them from every house to every house
my entire life.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Would someone know a lot about you from your bookshelves?
Speaker 3 (03:45):
I think so. One thing that I've done since I
was really young I probably wouldn't do it now is
that my books have always been separated into women authors
and then male authors, and I always put the women
authors in a special in a special place, and the
male authors I put, you know, in a secondary location
(04:06):
outside the bathroom or something like that.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Are they books on a shelf that would disqualify a
person for you?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
I think I would feel frightened and concerned if someone
had a top Gear book.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Oh yeah, good, yeah, nan out the door.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
But apart from that sort of thing, no, because who
knows someone might have a book because they're reviewing it
or writing a nusty essay about it. Yeah, I just
I couldn't be sure.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Are there books for you that you would insist that
someone read if you wanted them to understand you?
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Wow? Well, in consider a soft kissed I have Adam
say to Coraley that he loves the Don Watson book
about Paul Keating, and that makes sense for him because
he is a political journalist. And Coraly notices that the
spine of that book is corduroy. It's been read, so.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
I love that sscription. When I came across it on
the page, I was like, I'd never heard it before,
and a corduroy spine denoting a much loved book really
tickled me.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
And that's funny because I made my husband read that
book when we first met, as well as Watch the
Castle and What's the Murder of Old Chopper?
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Oh, there you go, Chopper, The Castle and Memoirs of
a Bleeding Heart? Yeah, that's a good cultural three. Was
that the Australia that you needed him to understand?
Speaker 3 (05:28):
That's exactly it. Yeah?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Did he have equivalent titles he felt that you needed
to understand?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Gosh, I feel really bad. Well, if he did, I'm
not across them.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
You're very literate already though. I imagine your love of
Allan Hollinghurst, for example, would mean that a particular strata
of London society you had a pretty good understanding of.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Yes, but that wasn't my husband's strata of society. What
is Northern Irish? Because he's Northern Irish. So he is
very insistent that I regularly watch a meme which is
a guy from Northern Ireland saying this is a wonder day,
a wonder day because it's sunny.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
There you go, that's a good thing to understand about,
that kind of Northern Irish energy. So tell me about
love and romance on the page. How crucial is it
to your reading history? How much is it something that
you relish, and how actively did you decide to subvert
those beats when writing Consider your Self Kissed.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
It's strange because when I began writing this book, I
had just published a previous book that hadn't gone very well,
This is a Great Hope, which came out in twenty
twenty two. It had been reviewed really nicely but hadn't
made any sort of splash, and people who knew me
really liked it, but no one else seemed to notice it,
(06:54):
And I couldn't even come over to launch it because
of the strange timing. But I had got to a
stage where I thought, Okay, writing a book isn't going
to change my life, And then I thought, well, am
I even going to try again? And I really felt
as if there was only one reason to try and
(07:17):
write another book, and that was for the love of
actually writing. And I had also come to a point
in my life where care and love feel like everything
to me, not just personally but in the political environment.
It feels like the most natural and intuitive response to
(07:39):
what's going on more generally, which I would characterize as
being quite hateful. And so, even though in the past
most of my most favorite books have been about families,
I wanted to combine that with a classic love story,
someone meeting someone and that feeling of falling in love,
but then to also follow that love for the next
(08:03):
ten years when things started to get hard. And one
of the books that I modeled it on, apart from
the Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, was American Wife
by Curtis Sittenfeld, where she follows fictionalized Laura Bush as
incredibly wildly. She falls in love with a fictionalized George W. Bush,
(08:23):
and I think you maybe follow them for twenty years,
and for some reason, she really gets you to care
about these two people. And so I thought, how can
I watch two people fall in love and convey that
to the reader, but also help people in a time
when it's pretty hard to concentrate on long form content
(08:46):
of any kind, and especially fiction. Maybe how can I
get them to fall in love with the experience of
reading about them.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
One of the things I love so much about this
book is its approach to time. It's as much a
book about the passing of time as it is about love.
That actually, when we hit what we think of as
kind of rom com beads tends to be a kind
of constrained and kind of almost instrumental way of telling
(09:13):
a story that the point at which you get together
and you fall in love, that's the end of the
interesting bit, and what comes afterwards is just the kind
of day to day of life. Was it always going
to be that kind of sweeping decade long view.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yeah, So I go around with a lot of material
in my mind, things that I think are funny or interesting,
funny things that people have said, and I sort of wait,
until I can come up with a structure or sort
of line my buckets up in a row to toss
the toss the content into, you know, like someone feeding
the penguins at the zoo. And this tenure structure came
(09:49):
to me right after the joint fortieth birthday party I
had with my husband. I had moved to London when
I was twenty nine, and I already knew him then,
but we got married pretty quickly afterwards, and so by
the time we were at our joint fortieth we had
had three children, and we had spent ten years together
as a married couple. And if I could have seen
(10:10):
when I was twenty nine, if I could have seen
this lovely party, my amazing husband, my lovely children, our friends,
my friend's children, all hanging out together and celebrating us,
I wouldn't have believed my luck. It was incredible and amazing.
But the actual emotional experience of having spent that ten years,
(10:31):
having reached the age of forty and been married for
so long, I really felt run over by a truck.
And the time, especially my experience of time, was incredible,
where days when you're on your own with a baby
can feel about twenty years long, and then something lovely
(10:55):
is happening to you and it just washes by and
is almost a dream afterwards. And so obviously, when I
was covering the ten years in the book, I was
trying to mimic that sense of time by zooming in
on some very special, deep emotional moments and then zooming
out and showing how time just runs away from you.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
When we returned, Jessica shares how being an outsider helped
her shape the main character, Coraly, and why she only
ever reads exactly what she wants to do.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Your protagonist, Coraly, for her as for yourself. In being
an outsider, that thing about starting your life over again
in another place and having roots elsewhere, How important to
you was it that Coraly was also an outsider in
the community that she was building.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Well, a lot of my favorite books feature an outsider
to a community, and I think it's the best standpoint
to analyze anything from. And of course, my favorite book
of all times, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
and Nick is the ultimate outsider. He embeds himself with
a family that is completely different to his own, and
(12:21):
he just notices every single thing about them, and that's
sort of what I want to do with Crawley, because
I am obsessed with being from Australia. It's a major
part of who I am. And I moved to London
for love, not necessarily to be in London, and since
(12:42):
then I've come to really love and appreciate it. But
I've also been noticing what's strange and funny about it,
and I want to write the book so I could
put everything that I'd noticed into a book.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
One of the things about that which I think you
capture so beautifully is the way in which any family
or any community is an accretion of different traditions and
different value sets, and an Australian amongst a bunch of Londoners.
It does seem an important counterweight to certain expectations around class,
around who's connected to who, and how that that Australianist
(13:20):
does seem to be a key element in the boog.
Have you had early readers in the UK? Do they
warm to Coraley's australianis? Do they recognize it?
Speaker 3 (13:32):
It's funny because when I went around to bookshops, you know,
before books come out, you get taken around to you
try and interest booksellers in what you're selling, and I
was too shy to do the kind of pitch the
intro and when my publicists started off with it's about
an Australian in London, I internally cringed. I thought, these
people are not going to care. And that has been
(13:54):
my personal experience of living in the UK for such
a long time, is that when people hear that you're
from Australia, or when people hear an Australian voice, they
zone out. So I was anxious about how the book
would be received, especially if the australianist was foregrounded. But
everyone has responded really beautifully, although it's interesting to me
(14:20):
that no one has responded about her being Australian. I
think they have just responded to her as a person,
which is the most you can hope.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
For, I think. So. I mean, the other thing you
have going for you is that telling a story of
the UK during that particular decade is one of massive
kind of social change, social anxiety, political turmoil. Do you
always know that Adam was going to be in the
political media sphere? Was that a useful tool for making
(14:49):
everything from Brexit to COVID to Boris Johnson a key
element of the story.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yes, that was the only way I could think of
to bring it in a way that was natural, because
when I moved over, maybe because I come from a
colonial mindset, I had this vast reserve of knowledge about
British politics that I was keen to show off, and
making Adam a political journalist seemed like the best and
(15:17):
most natural way to shoehorn it into a book. And
I also just had spent so much time. I think
it's hard to explain to people who weren't there the
way Brexit gripped the UK, because we really didn't know
from one minute to the next if we would have
a government, if we'd have a prime minister, or even
(15:39):
if we would have the ability to import toilet paper
or the chemicals for clean drinking water, and so watching
the news at ten o'clock became almost a matter of
life and death, and so I thought making Adam a
political journalist could really vivify that for the readers.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
It also carries with it that thing love external pressures
on a marriage and on a relationship, because that's his
professional sphere. It's very clear that at any moment, you
know as you're reading it you have this kind of anxiety,
you understand the pressure they're under. You understand how close
at times to the edge Coralli is feeling. And you know,
(16:19):
if you have a passing acquaintance with UK politics, that
just around the corner is going to be something else
that means that Adam is not going to be present
in their marriage.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Again, yeah, exactly. And I think that the news environment,
whether we are really following news in depth or whether
it just comes to us through our feeds or in snippets,
it does have the ability to change our entire state.
And I have had the experience of being at home,
(16:52):
having a lovely time with my children, then glancing at
my phone and suddenly my life is ruined, or at
least my day, because of some horrible political thing that's
happened to me. And I felt that rather than that
being something secret or private that happens to everyone in
their house every day, why not bring that out through
(17:13):
Coraly's experience and make it something that we can talk
about and notice in ourselves the way that politics can
really have a real world impact on people that it's
being done too. Because I think politics is something that
some people do and mostly it's something that we have
done to us, and I really wanted to show that
(17:36):
from the perspective of someone having politics done to them.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
You said before that your starting point wasn't really so
much the traditional rom com. But it's interesting how quickly
that shift between a meat cured, a grand romantic gesture,
a kind of rescue child from upon all those beats
that are so familiar to us from pop culture. There
is something about the life long aftermath of that that
(18:01):
feels relatively unwritten about.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
I agree. Maybe I'm just blanking, but I don't feel
as though there are many in depth domestic strife novels
where two people are good, conscientious, thoughtful people who don't
have some kind of dramatic issue in their relationship. They're
just two people struggling to do their best. And that's
really what I wanted to show if I could.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Yeah, there's no false drama in there. There's no gender Bokay,
this person has suddenly done this massive act of betrayal
or whatever. It's just it's kind of hard to get
on with life and work and a creative life or
a kind of independent, imaginative life and parenting and all
that other stuff. How important to you is the conception
(18:47):
of yourself as a writer. Have you always thought ultimately
you would write books.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Actually, when I was young, reading was such a huge
part of my life, and I really clearly remember when
we lived in Parkville. My parents would take me to
the library all the time. But there was a night
when the North Carlton library stayed open late, and so
I would go in my pajamas and dressing gown and
get my books for the week. And it was just
(19:15):
an absolutely mandatory part of my life to escape into
a book. It was almost like a life support system.
And in my house, books were venerated and authors were
as important as God's and so I just didn't consider
that I could take my kind of love of reading
(19:38):
and my love of writing and actually turn that into
a book. So I spent so long kind of trying
to earn money on the basis of it by being
a copywriter and that sort of stuff. And I didn't
start writing until I was about thirty, and my first
book didn't come out until I was forty, And so
that's a lot of life where I haven't conceptualized my
(20:00):
as a writer. And so now when I'm filling in
the card when I come into Australia to say what
I do. I write novelist and that makes me very happy.
But no, I wasn't one of those people who thought, yes,
that will be me someday. And I take a lot
of inspiration from people who came to it very late
(20:21):
and make it their life.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
But I'll be.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Fitzgerald who didn't start writing until she was about sixty.
I need a Bruckner people like that. So there are
role models that I could look to.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
It's funny many of those examples, many of those role
models of writers who come to it later are women.
That women's lives by and large don't allow for the
kind of space needed to give over to creative practice.
And so again and again you'll hear in these interviews
women who need to make that choice later rather than earlier.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Absolutely, and I have had to grow as a person
to be able to communicate to people who love me
that four hours a day minimum needs to be put
aside for me to be perfectly alone. And a lot
of women can't do that for a long time, whether
(21:16):
for personal reasons or just how their life is set up.
And so everyone who is struggling to do that, I
really feel for them. And I was that person for
a long time, so I get it.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Much like the rhythms in Consider your Self Kissed, There
is something too about time and being able to kind
of you know, I quite like the conception of not
really starting to write until you're thirty, not having a
first book till you're forty. Is if you can write
and write for pleasure and hone your craft and work
(21:51):
out the stories you want to tell them, the things
you want to capture, not having that sense of being
in a hurry, I think can only be a good thing.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Maybe, yeah, I agree, I think so.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
The thing for me, part of the important part of
it was that sense of being an active reader from
an early age like that reading was very important to me,
but it wasn't just a passive experience that to read
something was to add something to the world. Part of
that is, yet, how is reader a job? I'm not sure.
I hope it is.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Well. For me, reading was pure freedom, and so I
would go into the library, get my ten or twenty books,
and I would deal with the words as they came
into my body and became emotions and images. And even
now I tend to read in a way that is
extremely agentic, so I never feel as if there's a
(22:41):
book I must read. I only read what I want,
and when words are coming into me, I can let
them wash over me. It is just the area of
my life where I feel totally on solid ground, totally
able to experience what the book is giving. It's something
I don't have anywhere else in my life, but it
(23:03):
makes me feel strong and happy.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Jessica Stanley's new novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, is available at
all Good bookstores now.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Thanks so much for listening to another episode. I've read
this As always, if you want to dive further into
the show, you can search for it where If you
listen to podcasts, there are more than eighty episodes in
then read this archive for you to enjoy. See you
next week.
Hello again. It's Daniel James and I'm here to share
another episode I read this Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast,
hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
and around the world. In this episode, Michael is chatting
with London based Australian writer Jessica Stanley. As always, Michael
(00:23):
joins me to share a little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hi, Michael, Daniel James.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Hello, So, Michael, you make a bit of a mission
in this episode that if you go to someone's house,
you're definitely going to spend time scaring their bookshelves.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Correct, Yes, doesn't everyone. Isn't that just a basic thing
you do when you go into someone else's house. I
am one hundred percent having a furtive perv at what's
on every bookshelf, and I am passing judgment all the
way through. This week's guest, Jessica Stanley says that she
does it, but she doesn't pass judgment, and I believe
she's lying. We all look at it and we all
(00:57):
have very strong opinions. And then the other thing is
like I'm partnered up I know you are too, Daniel,
But if you're single, I would encourage people to use
people's reading lists, their book recommendations as the ultimate dating determinant.
You know, let's forget dating apps. Let's just say, give
me your top three books. And if someone doesn't pass muster,
they can get stuffed.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
It really can reveal a lot a better person, can't it.
And the idea of what's on someone else's bookshelves plays
a bit of a key role in Jessica Stanley's new
novel City Yourself Kissed. Tell me a little bit about it.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
No, you're absolutely right. The thing that spurred me onto
that particularly unkind diatribe is that this novel that we're
talking about today begins with all the kind of beats
and expectations of a conventional rom com. You know, there's
a meat cut, a grand gesture, someone falls in a
lay human connection. But Jessica Stanley is a really smart writer.
(01:51):
She's much more interested in the question of kind of
human connection and in what comes next. This is a
book about the decade after the World Romance. She follows
her two characters, Coralie and Adam, as they go through
children and renovations and jobs and extended families and friends
and disappointment and corrosion and compromising, just all the grit
(02:13):
and grist of everyday life, which could be a trudge
in the hands of a lesser writer, but a writer
like Jessica Stanley turns it into something graceful and playful
and funny and dare I say it even romantic. It's
quite the feat and it's lovely to chat to her
about it.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Coming up in just a moment. What's on Jessica Stanley's bookshelves?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Where I want to start is an element of the
meat cut in your book, which is the swapping of
apartments and the looking at other people's bookshelves. And I
want to know, when you visit someone's house for the
first time, how nosy are you on the question of
what's on their bookshelves?
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Well, I'm interested, but as with most things, I'm observing,
but I'm not judging. So I'm interested to see what
people are reading. But by the time I've made it
into someone's home, I'm probably intimate with them anyway, so
I'm certainly not judging. And also I find a lot
of people in their thirties I'm not in my thirties.
I'm forty three, but a lot of people in their
(03:20):
thirties have moved around so much anyway that maybe they
would think their shelves weren't really reflective of them, so
to be judged on them would be upsetting. Whereas I'm
one of those people who I started amassing my books
when I went to the Lifeline, book Fair and Camera,
and I've taken them from every house to every house
my entire life.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Would someone know a lot about you from your bookshelves?
Speaker 3 (03:45):
I think so. One thing that I've done since I
was really young I probably wouldn't do it now is
that my books have always been separated into women authors
and then male authors, and I always put the women
authors in a special in a special place, and the
male authors I put, you know, in a secondary location
(04:06):
outside the bathroom or something like that.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Are they books on a shelf that would disqualify a
person for you?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
I think I would feel frightened and concerned if someone
had a top Gear book.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Oh yeah, good, yeah, nan out the door.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
But apart from that sort of thing, no, because who
knows someone might have a book because they're reviewing it
or writing a nusty essay about it. Yeah, I just
I couldn't be sure.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Are there books for you that you would insist that
someone read if you wanted them to understand you?
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Wow? Well, in consider a soft kissed I have Adam
say to Coraley that he loves the Don Watson book
about Paul Keating, and that makes sense for him because
he is a political journalist. And Coraly notices that the
spine of that book is corduroy. It's been read, so.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
I love that sscription. When I came across it on
the page, I was like, I'd never heard it before,
and a corduroy spine denoting a much loved book really
tickled me.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
And that's funny because I made my husband read that
book when we first met, as well as Watch the
Castle and What's the Murder of Old Chopper?
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Oh, there you go, Chopper, The Castle and Memoirs of
a Bleeding Heart? Yeah, that's a good cultural three. Was
that the Australia that you needed him to understand?
Speaker 3 (05:28):
That's exactly it. Yeah?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Did he have equivalent titles he felt that you needed
to understand?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Gosh, I feel really bad. Well, if he did, I'm
not across them.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
You're very literate already though. I imagine your love of
Allan Hollinghurst, for example, would mean that a particular strata
of London society you had a pretty good understanding of.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Yes, but that wasn't my husband's strata of society. What
is Northern Irish? Because he's Northern Irish. So he is
very insistent that I regularly watch a meme which is
a guy from Northern Ireland saying this is a wonder day,
a wonder day because it's sunny.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
There you go, that's a good thing to understand about,
that kind of Northern Irish energy. So tell me about
love and romance on the page. How crucial is it
to your reading history? How much is it something that
you relish, and how actively did you decide to subvert
those beats when writing Consider your Self Kissed.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
It's strange because when I began writing this book, I
had just published a previous book that hadn't gone very well,
This is a Great Hope, which came out in twenty
twenty two. It had been reviewed really nicely but hadn't
made any sort of splash, and people who knew me
really liked it, but no one else seemed to notice it,
(06:54):
And I couldn't even come over to launch it because
of the strange timing. But I had got to a
stage where I thought, Okay, writing a book isn't going
to change my life, And then I thought, well, am
I even going to try again? And I really felt
as if there was only one reason to try and
(07:17):
write another book, and that was for the love of
actually writing. And I had also come to a point
in my life where care and love feel like everything
to me, not just personally but in the political environment.
It feels like the most natural and intuitive response to
(07:39):
what's going on more generally, which I would characterize as
being quite hateful. And so, even though in the past
most of my most favorite books have been about families,
I wanted to combine that with a classic love story,
someone meeting someone and that feeling of falling in love,
but then to also follow that love for the next
(08:03):
ten years when things started to get hard. And one
of the books that I modeled it on, apart from
the Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, was American Wife
by Curtis Sittenfeld, where she follows fictionalized Laura Bush as
incredibly wildly. She falls in love with a fictionalized George W. Bush,
(08:23):
and I think you maybe follow them for twenty years,
and for some reason, she really gets you to care
about these two people. And so I thought, how can
I watch two people fall in love and convey that
to the reader, but also help people in a time
when it's pretty hard to concentrate on long form content
(08:46):
of any kind, and especially fiction. Maybe how can I
get them to fall in love with the experience of
reading about them.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
One of the things I love so much about this
book is its approach to time. It's as much a
book about the passing of time as it is about love.
That actually, when we hit what we think of as
kind of rom com beads tends to be a kind
of constrained and kind of almost instrumental way of telling
(09:13):
a story that the point at which you get together
and you fall in love, that's the end of the
interesting bit, and what comes afterwards is just the kind
of day to day of life. Was it always going
to be that kind of sweeping decade long view.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yeah, So I go around with a lot of material
in my mind, things that I think are funny or interesting,
funny things that people have said, and I sort of wait,
until I can come up with a structure or sort
of line my buckets up in a row to toss
the toss the content into, you know, like someone feeding
the penguins at the zoo. And this tenure structure came
(09:49):
to me right after the joint fortieth birthday party I
had with my husband. I had moved to London when
I was twenty nine, and I already knew him then,
but we got married pretty quickly afterwards, and so by
the time we were at our joint fortieth we had
had three children, and we had spent ten years together
as a married couple. And if I could have seen
(10:10):
when I was twenty nine, if I could have seen
this lovely party, my amazing husband, my lovely children, our friends,
my friend's children, all hanging out together and celebrating us,
I wouldn't have believed my luck. It was incredible and amazing.
But the actual emotional experience of having spent that ten years,
(10:31):
having reached the age of forty and been married for
so long, I really felt run over by a truck.
And the time, especially my experience of time, was incredible,
where days when you're on your own with a baby
can feel about twenty years long, and then something lovely
(10:55):
is happening to you and it just washes by and
is almost a dream afterwards. And so obviously, when I
was covering the ten years in the book, I was
trying to mimic that sense of time by zooming in
on some very special, deep emotional moments and then zooming
out and showing how time just runs away from you.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
When we returned, Jessica shares how being an outsider helped
her shape the main character, Coraly, and why she only
ever reads exactly what she wants to do.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Your protagonist, Coraly, for her as for yourself. In being
an outsider, that thing about starting your life over again
in another place and having roots elsewhere, How important to
you was it that Coraly was also an outsider in
the community that she was building.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Well, a lot of my favorite books feature an outsider
to a community, and I think it's the best standpoint
to analyze anything from. And of course, my favorite book
of all times, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
and Nick is the ultimate outsider. He embeds himself with
a family that is completely different to his own, and
(12:21):
he just notices every single thing about them, and that's
sort of what I want to do with Crawley, because
I am obsessed with being from Australia. It's a major
part of who I am. And I moved to London
for love, not necessarily to be in London, and since
(12:42):
then I've come to really love and appreciate it. But
I've also been noticing what's strange and funny about it,
and I want to write the book so I could
put everything that I'd noticed into a book.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
One of the things about that which I think you
capture so beautifully is the way in which any family
or any community is an accretion of different traditions and
different value sets, and an Australian amongst a bunch of Londoners.
It does seem an important counterweight to certain expectations around class,
around who's connected to who, and how that that Australianist
(13:20):
does seem to be a key element in the boog.
Have you had early readers in the UK? Do they
warm to Coraley's australianis? Do they recognize it?
Speaker 3 (13:32):
It's funny because when I went around to bookshops, you know,
before books come out, you get taken around to you
try and interest booksellers in what you're selling, and I
was too shy to do the kind of pitch the
intro and when my publicists started off with it's about
an Australian in London, I internally cringed. I thought, these
people are not going to care. And that has been
(13:54):
my personal experience of living in the UK for such
a long time, is that when people hear that you're
from Australia, or when people hear an Australian voice, they
zone out. So I was anxious about how the book
would be received, especially if the australianist was foregrounded. But
everyone has responded really beautifully, although it's interesting to me
(14:20):
that no one has responded about her being Australian. I
think they have just responded to her as a person,
which is the most you can hope.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
For, I think. So. I mean, the other thing you
have going for you is that telling a story of
the UK during that particular decade is one of massive
kind of social change, social anxiety, political turmoil. Do you
always know that Adam was going to be in the
political media sphere? Was that a useful tool for making
(14:49):
everything from Brexit to COVID to Boris Johnson a key
element of the story.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yes, that was the only way I could think of
to bring it in a way that was natural, because
when I moved over, maybe because I come from a
colonial mindset, I had this vast reserve of knowledge about
British politics that I was keen to show off, and
making Adam a political journalist seemed like the best and
(15:17):
most natural way to shoehorn it into a book. And
I also just had spent so much time. I think
it's hard to explain to people who weren't there the
way Brexit gripped the UK, because we really didn't know
from one minute to the next if we would have
a government, if we'd have a prime minister, or even
(15:39):
if we would have the ability to import toilet paper
or the chemicals for clean drinking water, and so watching
the news at ten o'clock became almost a matter of
life and death, and so I thought making Adam a
political journalist could really vivify that for the readers.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
It also carries with it that thing love external pressures
on a marriage and on a relationship, because that's his
professional sphere. It's very clear that at any moment, you
know as you're reading it you have this kind of anxiety,
you understand the pressure they're under. You understand how close
at times to the edge Coralli is feeling. And you know,
(16:19):
if you have a passing acquaintance with UK politics, that
just around the corner is going to be something else
that means that Adam is not going to be present
in their marriage.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Again, yeah, exactly. And I think that the news environment,
whether we are really following news in depth or whether
it just comes to us through our feeds or in snippets,
it does have the ability to change our entire state.
And I have had the experience of being at home,
(16:52):
having a lovely time with my children, then glancing at
my phone and suddenly my life is ruined, or at
least my day, because of some horrible political thing that's
happened to me. And I felt that rather than that
being something secret or private that happens to everyone in
their house every day, why not bring that out through
(17:13):
Coraly's experience and make it something that we can talk
about and notice in ourselves the way that politics can
really have a real world impact on people that it's
being done too. Because I think politics is something that
some people do and mostly it's something that we have
done to us, and I really wanted to show that
(17:36):
from the perspective of someone having politics done to them.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
You said before that your starting point wasn't really so
much the traditional rom com. But it's interesting how quickly
that shift between a meat cured, a grand romantic gesture,
a kind of rescue child from upon all those beats
that are so familiar to us from pop culture. There
is something about the life long aftermath of that that
(18:01):
feels relatively unwritten about.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
I agree. Maybe I'm just blanking, but I don't feel
as though there are many in depth domestic strife novels
where two people are good, conscientious, thoughtful people who don't
have some kind of dramatic issue in their relationship. They're
just two people struggling to do their best. And that's
really what I wanted to show if I could.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Yeah, there's no false drama in there. There's no gender Bokay,
this person has suddenly done this massive act of betrayal
or whatever. It's just it's kind of hard to get
on with life and work and a creative life or
a kind of independent, imaginative life and parenting and all
that other stuff. How important to you is the conception
(18:47):
of yourself as a writer. Have you always thought ultimately
you would write books.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Actually, when I was young, reading was such a huge
part of my life, and I really clearly remember when
we lived in Parkville. My parents would take me to
the library all the time. But there was a night
when the North Carlton library stayed open late, and so
I would go in my pajamas and dressing gown and
get my books for the week. And it was just
(19:15):
an absolutely mandatory part of my life to escape into
a book. It was almost like a life support system.
And in my house, books were venerated and authors were
as important as God's and so I just didn't consider
that I could take my kind of love of reading
(19:38):
and my love of writing and actually turn that into
a book. So I spent so long kind of trying
to earn money on the basis of it by being
a copywriter and that sort of stuff. And I didn't
start writing until I was about thirty, and my first
book didn't come out until I was forty, And so
that's a lot of life where I haven't conceptualized my
(20:00):
as a writer. And so now when I'm filling in
the card when I come into Australia to say what
I do. I write novelist and that makes me very happy.
But no, I wasn't one of those people who thought, yes,
that will be me someday. And I take a lot
of inspiration from people who came to it very late
(20:21):
and make it their life.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
But I'll be.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Fitzgerald who didn't start writing until she was about sixty.
I need a Bruckner people like that. So there are
role models that I could look to.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
It's funny many of those examples, many of those role
models of writers who come to it later are women.
That women's lives by and large don't allow for the
kind of space needed to give over to creative practice.
And so again and again you'll hear in these interviews
women who need to make that choice later rather than earlier.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Absolutely, and I have had to grow as a person
to be able to communicate to people who love me
that four hours a day minimum needs to be put
aside for me to be perfectly alone. And a lot
of women can't do that for a long time, whether
(21:16):
for personal reasons or just how their life is set up.
And so everyone who is struggling to do that, I
really feel for them. And I was that person for
a long time, so I get it.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Much like the rhythms in Consider your Self Kissed, There
is something too about time and being able to kind
of you know, I quite like the conception of not
really starting to write until you're thirty, not having a
first book till you're forty. Is if you can write
and write for pleasure and hone your craft and work
(21:51):
out the stories you want to tell them, the things
you want to capture, not having that sense of being
in a hurry, I think can only be a good thing.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Maybe, yeah, I agree, I think so.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
The thing for me, part of the important part of
it was that sense of being an active reader from
an early age like that reading was very important to me,
but it wasn't just a passive experience that to read
something was to add something to the world. Part of
that is, yet, how is reader a job? I'm not sure.
I hope it is.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Well. For me, reading was pure freedom, and so I
would go into the library, get my ten or twenty books,
and I would deal with the words as they came
into my body and became emotions and images. And even
now I tend to read in a way that is
extremely agentic, so I never feel as if there's a
(22:41):
book I must read. I only read what I want,
and when words are coming into me, I can let
them wash over me. It is just the area of
my life where I feel totally on solid ground, totally
able to experience what the book is giving. It's something
I don't have anywhere else in my life, but it
(23:03):
makes me feel strong and happy.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Jessica Stanley's new novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, is available at
all Good bookstores now.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Thanks so much for listening to another episode. I've read
this As always, if you want to dive further into
the show, you can search for it where If you
listen to podcasts, there are more than eighty episodes in
then read this archive for you to enjoy. See you
next week.
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