Dr. Paul Monk on the Nature of Autobiography and Memoir

In this podcast, Nick Fabbri and Dr. Paul Monk discuss the decision to write his three-volume autobiography and reflect on the nature, structure, and meaning of autobiography and memoir.

Key discussion points include:

• Why Write: Monk's impetus to write his own life story to preserve his interpretation of events, citing Socrates' idea that the "unexamined life is not worth living".

• Autobiography's Purpose: Exploring the purpose of memoir beyond mortality, citing Emperor Septimius Severus's famous nihilistic verdict: "Omnia fui, sed nihil expedit" (I have been everything, and it amounts to nothing).

• Literary Models: Monk discusses multi-volume influences like Simone de Beauvoir and Marcel Proust’s massive, meditative novel In Search of Lost Time.

• Volume One: Dreaming of Elrond: Covering his Catholic childhood and his seminal decision to drop out of law school on "Independence Day," 1975.

• Educational Pursuit: His intense effort to secure a liberal arts education at Melbourne University and the crushing financial barrier to attending US graduate schools.

• Volume Two: The Gnomes of Russell Hill: Detailing his PhD on US counter-insurgency and his subsequent period in the Australian Defence bureaucracy.

• Bureaucratic Failure: His experience with "institutional anti-learning mechanisms" and the Kafkaesque difficulty of obtaining a security clearance.

• Career and Integrity: His principled decision to leave government after being denied development, choosing integrity and imagination over a conventional career path.

• Volume Three: A Writer and a Poet: Detailing his career in critical thinking consulting (Austhink) and the transformative influence of his partner Claudia, who gave him "licence" to embrace his authentic self as a writer and a poet.

• Love and Poetic Intimacy: Reflecting on his development of authentic love and "profound, poetic intimacy" with both Claudia and Rachael, as registered in his major cycles of poetry.

Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.