February 19, 2025 • 27 mins
In Melbourne-based author Sean Wilson’s new book, You Must Remember This, he tackles the complicated, tragic, and often fraught subject of dementia.. This week, Sean joins Michael for a conversation about loss, family, and how to hang on to one’s humanity as illness strips it away.
Reading list:
Gemini Falls, Sean Wilson, 2022
You Must Remember This, Sean Wilson, 2025
The Bright Sword, Lev Grossmann, 2024
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram and X
Guest: Sean Wilson
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
There are many types of unreliable narrator as a narrative device.
The idea that we shouldn't blindly follow our protagonist or
the person who's telling us the story is I'd argue
a singular, delicious treat for a reader, the un self
aware narrator or the duplicitous narrator, the narrator blinded by
their own perspective who's incapable of seeing the truth of things.
(00:23):
Literature is dotted with flawed lead characters and authorial trickery.
Some personal favorites are Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, or
Michel decretz Is The Hamilton Case, even Christos Chulkis's The Slap.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
These are all.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Examples of the kind of book where a shifting perspective
completely changes the way you feel about what you've read
in the pages before. But there are other ways that
an author can play with your expectations as a reader.
One of them is when they share the worldview and
thoughts of a character whose own experience of life is
fractured or a skew in some way. Think of all
(00:57):
those books you've read with a precocious child narrata who
doesn't understand what they're seeing or describing for us, the
unaware witness. So let's add to these ridly tricks one
more complex task of empathy and depiction. How do you
tell the story of someone whose connection to their own memories,
their very sense of self is breaking, even broken beyond repair.
(01:21):
How a might a work of art do justice to
the experience of dementia? A couple of years ago, the
film The Father with Olivia Coleman and Anthony Hopkins did
a powerful job of it. Closer to home read this
alumni Nonie Hazlehurst was in a film called June Again
and was also terrific. Both of those films used a
(01:42):
trick that so effectively got you into the experience of
the dementia sufferer. At random points, they'd be having conversations
with loved ones, and the films would change the actor
who was playing the secondary characters. The new person, without
missing a beat, would say the words that hold the conversation,
and our protagonist would face them with utter confusion and
a sense of dislocation. The new novel You Must Remember
(02:06):
This by Melbourne based author Sean Wilson, employs the literary
equivalent of this device. It follows Grace, a woman suffering
from dementia, and moves between slippery memory and present day confusion,
sharing her story, but also sharing the sense that that
story is slipping away. Because the book begins with chapter ten,
(02:28):
then follows it with chapter seven, then eleven, the whole
book shifts and twists as Grace tries to find purchase
in her own reality. It's deeply effective, a deeply moving approach,
a tragedy of forgetting, and a story of hanging on
to one's humanity as the illness strips it away. I'm
(02:48):
Michael Williams, and this is read this to show about
the books we love and the stories behind them. Did
I read somewhere that you must remember this had one
iteration where it was written for performance rather than for
(03:09):
the page.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, so we're going back over a decade now. I
originally wrote it for the stage, and it got a
bit of attention from some theater companies, didn't ultimately make
it on stage. And not long after I'd written it
and was talking to theater companies, I saw The Father
the play on stage because it was a play before
it was a film, and quickly realized that my play
(03:30):
was a little bit too close to that play, and
it was very unlikely I was ever going to get
it on main stage, so put it away, and then
at a certain point I just thought, you know, let's
have a go out rewriting it as a novel. And
so a lot of the elements in the stage version
aren't relatable to the novel. In the stage version, there's
(03:50):
Graces on stage the whole time, there's no blackout, people
are coming in and out from President Pass, and so
there's probably a little bit more bleed in the President
Pass in the stage version in order to get across
that message in a different way. But some of the elements,
some of the scenes, remain and have just sort of
rewritten them for the page instead.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
It really surprised me, partly because the book is so
accomplished on what I think of as particularly literary terms
rather than theatrical terms. You know that the fragmentary nature
of Grace's relationship with her reality and her past means
that you have to have a very deft hand with metaphor,
(04:32):
with how to express something that she might not be
able to express, and that relationship between kind of knowing
and not knowing that seems particularly well suited to the novel.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah, and the fact that you can get into Grace's
head and to a certain extent, show the confusion that
you wouldn't be able to get across on the stage,
or as you know, the constraints on the stage is
just dialogue in some scene description and bit of action.
You haven't got anything else, and so you can only
tell that stuf sorry, through the interactions that are happening
on stage. So it opens up a lot more possibility
(05:05):
to do it as a novel. I think it was
in some senses an easier process writing as a novel
compared to as a play. But as you said, it
gives you a bit more opportunity to explore the condition
itself through metaphor.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
So a story that you first tried to tell ten
years ago men couldn't let go of and came back
to in a different form. Was it your grandmother that
drove you to know that you wanted to tell this story?
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yeah, And I felt like I had a responsibility as
a writer but also as a grandson to try to
understand her experience. So at a certain point in her
life with dementia, I could tell that she was starting
to live between present and past, so she would be
interacting with us in the present, sometimes knowing who he was,
(05:57):
sometimes not.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
But she would talk about her parents, who.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Are long dead on the other side of the world,
as if they were about to visit. And she talk
about her age care worker in the same moment as
if that person was her best friend. And so it's
very difficult. Once a person reaches that point of cognitive decline,
they can't tell you what it's like, And so I
suppose it lends itself to a story, to exploring through
(06:21):
fiction what that experience might be like.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Was she your mom's mum or your dad's dad's mum?
And were you close?
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, yeah, really close.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
She's quite a remarkable person in a quiet way. She
grew up poor in Manchester, lived through the Blitz, the family,
got on a ship three months across to the other
side of the world in the fifties and sort of
raised her family over here without any assistance. You know,
someone requires a lot of fortitude to do something like that,
(06:52):
and it is tragic that at the end of her
life she gets to a point where she loses all
of those memories, all of the part that made her her,
And it's very difficult to watch a person go through that,
But then it's very difficult to see yourself disappearing in
their eyes at the same time, which I suppose is
one reason why there are so few accounts of dementia
(07:14):
in fiction, because it's a difficult thing if you have
experience with it, to see yourself, to watch yourself disappear,
and to see your love on going through that.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
How like for your family, the management of the dementia
and the kind of slow motion loss of this important figure.
How did that play out for you guys? Was it
something you talked about freely? Was it something you know?
My family definitely, Gallows humor is almost the only way
of coping with any of that stuff. But I'm curious.
(07:50):
One of the things I love so much in this
book is Grace's daughter Liz and how that plays out.
And I'm curious for you and your family.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Yeah, I think I just dialed up in Liz some
of the reactions that we all had. And so Liz
has some moments of frustration with Grace, and she has
some moments of compassion and acceptance, and I think the
intensity of those.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Are just dialed up.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
It's probably a little bit less in our experience, but
there was very much I witnessed in myself and other people.
There's moments where you want to try and tether them
to the present, and you almost want to fight against
the condition. And in those moments, sometimes when you do that,
it can create some distress for the person because you're
(08:34):
trying to correct them constantly and they are aware, in
a vague kind of sense in some cases of shame
and embarrassment about what they're saying and the fact that
they're not remembering. And so I think another path that
you can take, a more compassionate path where you just
sort of go along with things a lot of the time,
where you just even though they might be saying something
(08:56):
completely wrong, you just go along with the thread and
you continue, and you can kind of calmly and slowly
try to bring some of their memories out, but if
it doesn't happen, then you just sort of let it
go gently. And I think that that in the relationship
between Liz and Grace in the book, when the point
that it gets to, I think is a point where
(09:16):
Liz has started to come to terms with that and
what you mentioned about Gallow's humor, I think I tried
to get across in the book that there is a
tragedy going on, but I didn't want to make it
a tragedy pile on. There are moments of levity as well,
just as there are in life. Sometimes you reach for
(09:36):
dark humor and you can bring some parts of your
own life into the situation and try and make it
a little bit fun.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
I think that's important, Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
But the other part of that, I think, which I
think you do so well is and I should say here,
you're very clear in the acknowledgments in the book that
Grace isn't your grandma. Our experiences have echoes of that,
a drawn from that, but she's a different human being.
But you don't let yourself lose track of Grace the
human being. She's not completely subsumed by her confusion or
(10:12):
by her situation. Part of why the book works is
that it is the story of a woman who has
lived a life and dealt with disappointments and delights and
all manner of things.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
I wanted her to have a strength, and that was
important to me in the book because my grandmother was strong.
Although as you said, she's not the same person as
Grace in terms of who she was, the way she
behaved and her experiences. The rest is fictional, but she
had a strength to her character as well, and I
didn't want Grace to sort of be a very passive
(10:47):
and meek individual in this book. I wanted her to
be fighting against the condition in the early parts of
the book and trying to hold onto her identity as
much as possible, because I think that that's that's the
natural way that she would react in that situation.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
What struck me when I was reading this was that
it's one thing to write about a difficult experience, but
it's a complete other thing to find a way to
embody it, you know, to demonstrate genuine empathy for what
your character is going through. And I think you do
that really powerfully, and you must remember this.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
I think that's the most one of the most difficult
things about trying to portray a protagonist with dementia is
that they are going through cognitive declient. So you have
to if you're going to have close third person or
even first person. I'm not quite sure how you would
do first person. I think that would be a little
bit too difficult towards the end of the chronology, but
even close third person.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
You've got to.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Show that progression, and as they progress, there's a lot
of opportunities for you as a reader to become confused,
and so I think trying to get that balance between
readers are a little bit confused but a little unsettled
and able to sit in that. But then you still
get across that kind of dislocation that the character has.
(12:04):
It's it's a bit of a balancing act.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
That decision to make form agree with subject matter is
one of the great payoffs of this book and one
of the really moving things. I'm curious about the kind
of reader you are. Are you a fan of structural
play or do you like a good, straight, clear narrative.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
I think I like both, and I think it could
call it a party trick essentially to create a fragmented
narrative in this way and to, like you said, make
the form match the nature of the character. I think
in this instance you kind of have to do it
that way unless you're going to tell it from the
point of view of another character looking in, like Alice
(12:45):
Monroez the bear came over the mountain, where it's the
spouse looking in at the person with dementia. So I
don't think I had much of a choice in this case.
But I think in terms of my reading, I like
it both ways. I think what I'm looking for primarily
when i'm reading something is a good story and good writing,
and if you can tick those boxes for me, I
don't really mind about the rest of it. And I
(13:07):
mean in terms of a good story that you can
take me on a journey from A to B of
character growth and relationship change, but then also that there's
some art involved in the expression, that there's some beauty
on the page. And if I can get both of
those things, I really don't mind what.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Else you do.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
That question about telling a story and the structure of
a story and our expectations around the convention. So much
of that is tied up with chronology, with cause and effect,
with actions and consequences, and your decision, or as you
put it, the kind of inevitable fact that this story
(13:44):
had to be told in a fractured way kind of
robs you of that at first glance. Yeah, Instead, it's
almost akin to a collection of interconnected short stories about
a life where the threads and the echoes and resonance
has become clear as you go long. But you don't
necessarily get that path to satisfaction or joy or redemption.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
I think that there is a through line in the story,
and maybe it takes a little while to get to it,
but the through line really is the relationship change throughout
the story, and you get the flashbacks which contribute to
the relationship change in the present, and that's really what
I was trying to go for. I was thinking a
lot about Philip Larkin's anti natalist poem This be the
(14:27):
Verse when I was writing this, and not that I'm
an anti natalist because my wife and I have a
three month old son, but the last stanza, there's a
couple of lines in their man hands on misery to
man it deepens like a coastal shelf. And I was
thinking about how if we're not careful, and if our
parents aren't careful, we can pick up some of the
traits from them, and they picked up from their parents,
(14:50):
and we can embody those and we can bring those
into our relationships with our children. And some of those
traits may not be ideal, and some of the behaviors
they lead to may not be ideal. And what would
it take to go against the current in changing your
behavior and if at the same time as my main character,
Grace is in this story, she's reliving some of the past.
(15:12):
She's living simultaneously between this past key moments with her
relationship with her mother and then living in the present
and sort of slipping in and out of those timelines.
She's sort of experiencing those traits that she's picked up
with her mother as she's in a sense, with the
ticking clock of dementia in the present, trying to change
(15:33):
before it's too late, and trying to change her relationship
with her daughter. So I think that's what I was
trying to get at. That's the through line through the story.
Even though the chronology, as you said, is really fragmented
because she's slipping in and out of present and past,
there is a through line, and that's that change that
happens in her relationship with her daughter.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Yeah. I take your point about that through line, But
I think part of what's so fascinating and effective about
the way you approach it in this book is the
impossibility of either forgiveness or repair when it comes to
a broken relationship like the one between Grace and her mother.
The ways in which the kind of residual, lifelong traumas
(16:15):
of that unreconcilable after a certain point, and those questions
about how we do right by the people we love
and how we make things right when they're broken seem
to me to be almost as important to this book
as questions of memory.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Yeah, I think that I'm dealing with two things.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Both.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
Grace is changing because of the condition, and so really
all we are instincts and memories, and if our memories
are starting to break down, some of those stories that
we have about ourselves that lead to kind of a
cohesive self who we were, who we are, and who
we hope to be, she's starting to lose those. So
she's changing through the condition as she's going along. But
I think she's trying to change at the same time
(16:58):
against the current of change through the dementia, to change
a relationship with her daughter, And she does that through
the recollections she's having about her past, about her relationship
with her mother. And although the relationship with her mother
is fixed, that's changed, that's done. It does by reliving them,
(17:19):
does inform her relationship in the present.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
When We're returned, Seawan discusses how his relationship with reading
and writing has changed since becoming a published author. We'll
be right back, even though you must remember, this is
(17:47):
the first book I've read by Sean Wilson. I first
heard his name back in twenty twenty two. His debut
novel came out. It was called Gemini Falls, and several
people thrust it upon me and told me I should
read it, and I just got around to it. But
looking at it now, in light of having read his
second book, it strikes me how much of a departure
he's made. His Debut's a genre novel, for one thing.
(18:10):
It's set in the Great Depression, and it's probably best
understood as Australian rural noir, a kind of plot driven
murder mystery that's revealing a darker story about Australian society's evolution,
or lack thereof. I'm always fascinated by writers that can
transition between genres, so I wanted to know more. I'm
curious about your second book, and your first book is
(18:33):
a genre novel, like it is a novel that actually
does very much kind of follow the beats of convention
in order to tell the story it wants to tell.
Did this feel like a completely different set of muscles
you're flexing.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
No, the Gemini Falls felt like more of a departure,
and I was trying to achieve something very specific with that.
This feels more like it's in my wheelhouse. And I
actually wrote the manuscript you must remember this before Gemini
Falls out right, And so in a sense, this is
my first book, although it's gone through some editing and
rewriting Gemini Falls. I wanted to tell a particular story
(19:12):
about financial crisis and housing displacement in an unregulated market
economy and what that does to people in the community
and who sort of helps and who raises a fist,
And because I think there are some parallels between now
and the Great Depression in that sense, I said, it
is a historical novel in the Great Depression. And then
(19:34):
after that I decided, how how am I going to
tell this story keep people engaged in this topic. I
decided to have a crime in order to turn the
heat up on the community and explore those themes.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
And so.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Just naturally it sort of went into a genre that
I'd had no experience with.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
So when you say it didn't come naturally or you
didn't know that genre, did you find yourself reading a
lot of historical crime fiction in order to feel like
you could fit the conventions, or did you kind of
avoid it and happily go in naive.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
I probably should have read more.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
I read a little bit, but I think my guiding
light for that story was to kill a Mockingbird in
the sense that to Kill a Mockingbird could be a
crime novel or a courtroom drama if you were.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Reductive in that sense.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
But really it's about racism in the South and the
depression States rights gender roles. So I felt like I
had enough with that story to guide me, and then
from then on it was really just about I think
what's important in stories and what we always go back
to is the relationship change that happens in the novel.
(20:52):
So although I wanted to explore those themes and that
was important to me, as not enough just to have
a story about financial crisis and how displacement and all
of those issues that I wanted to explore. You've got
to have the relationships that they're changing. And so the
main character and the way he relates with his father
and his sister, those are really the important parts of
(21:14):
the story, and that's what keeps us coming back to stories.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
So what did writing in a mode that was if
you'll forgive this way of putting it a little bit
reverse engineered, what did that teach you about the writing
that you want to do next? Having done something that
from the sounds of things flows out organically because of
the personal elements of the story and because the structure
(21:40):
presented itself once he worked out what the project was,
what do you know now, two books under your belt,
what does number three book like?
Speaker 3 (21:49):
I think I would like to try something new for
their third book, and maybe not the third book, or
maybe the fourth book if I get that far better.
I think it's a shame when people write the same
book over and over again. From an artistic sense, I
can understand from a financial point of view, if a
book is a success.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Why, I think Philip Roth said, every writer just writes
the same book again and again, hoping as they hone
in that eventually they get it right.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
I've seen that happen, sure, But I've also seen you know,
Margaret at would write a speculative fiction and then go
to historical fiction. And although it's the same kind of
themes that she might be exploring, she's using very different
muscles as you mentioned in terms of structuring, I mean,
it would be a shame if the Beatles just made
(22:36):
Love Me Do over and over again. You never get
to Dear Prudence or Octopus's Garden, So in that sense.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
There's a choice crescendo with Octopus's Garden. I was with
you all the way through Dear Prudence, so then you
just had to be silly.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
And maybe I'll gave my own Octopus's Garden moment. You
never know.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
I don't doubt your capacity to do it. I'm curious
because there is a deliberate to the way you talk
about your writing, like there was a sense of purpose
and a sense of kind of internally imposed discipline on
how you want to approach it. Do you always know
you wanted to write? Was this something that you worked
your way towards.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Yeah, I've wanted to write for a long time. I
think when I was younger, in terms of where I
grew up, there weren't any examples of writers around me
growing up in the suburbs, So it took me a
long time to get to the point where I thought
I had enough to say in order and sort of
fit in that mold. But I think it took me
(23:36):
a little while to work up to it, but I
guess I've had a long time to think about it
and be deliberate in that sense.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
What kind of reader are you and how has that
changed since you've been writing your own books.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
I'm definitely more forgiving reader, I think, and this is
why I don't slag off other people's books, because I
understand to hard it is to write a book now
after we're writing too, and I understand how hard it
is to hold onto the vision through the editing and
publishing process as well, So I have more understanding, I
(24:14):
think for writers, if I feel that something's not working,
then I can sort of think back to some challenges
that I've had. So it's definitely made me more forgiving
in that sense. But I still am looking for those
moments where I feel that they're in so much control
that I can switch off and join in the fun.
(24:34):
I think one of the problems when you take on
a craft, and I think it's probably the same way
for musicians as well. If you're a drama you're probably
just listening to the drumming in any particular song and
understanding how it works in the mechanics of it. And
you find it hard to lose yourself in the song.
In the same sense, I do find it hard to
lose myself in fiction. And the only times that I
(24:57):
really do, where I really start to fall in to
the spell and have that kind of hallucinatory experience that
we all do in the best times when we're reading
is when I feel like the writer is really in control.
And I've had a few of those moments lately, and
it's been a pleasure when I'm able to sort of
switch off my analytical part of the writer reading and
(25:20):
just be a reader.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
That's a real joy.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Thank you, it's been a pleasure. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Sean Wilson's new novel. You must remember this is available
at all good bookstores. Now before we go, I wanted
to let you know what I've been reading this week,
And I remember as a teenager someone gave me a
(25:53):
copy of the Penguin Classics edition of Thomas Mallory's Lamote
the Arthur. I read it, and then I immediately read
H White's Once in Future King, and then I read
Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. I went on
quite the King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table kick. I was a very cool teenager, as you
can imagine. I loved it, and then I kind of
(26:13):
forgot about it entirely. But when it was announced that
Lev Grossman, who wrote this terrific book a few years
ago called The Magicians, was doing his own take on
the Arthurian legend, I thought I'd give it a shot.
The product is a lot of fun and definitely cast
my mind back to that teenage reading. He's got a
modern sensibility and an eye for queer and divergent versions
(26:35):
of those classic stories, and Grossman's created quite the romp.
You can find it and all the others we've mentioned
in this episode and your favorite independent bookstore. That's it
for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
your friends about it and rate and review us. It
helps a lot. Next week I'm read this I'm speaking
(26:55):
with the novelist Andrea Goldsmith about her gorgeous latest, The
Buried Life.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
Like uncertainty, which is common to us all, so is death,
and for most of my life I've been captivated by
the mysteries of death, but also that so many people
are frightened of death read.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
This is a SHORTZ media production made possible by the
generous support of UR Group. The show is produced and
edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and
original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you
next week.
There are many types of unreliable narrator as a narrative device.
The idea that we shouldn't blindly follow our protagonist or
the person who's telling us the story is I'd argue
a singular, delicious treat for a reader, the un self
aware narrator or the duplicitous narrator, the narrator blinded by
their own perspective who's incapable of seeing the truth of things.
(00:23):
Literature is dotted with flawed lead characters and authorial trickery.
Some personal favorites are Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, or
Michel decretz Is The Hamilton Case, even Christos Chulkis's The Slap.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
These are all.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Examples of the kind of book where a shifting perspective
completely changes the way you feel about what you've read
in the pages before. But there are other ways that
an author can play with your expectations as a reader.
One of them is when they share the worldview and
thoughts of a character whose own experience of life is
fractured or a skew in some way. Think of all
(00:57):
those books you've read with a precocious child narrata who
doesn't understand what they're seeing or describing for us, the
unaware witness. So let's add to these ridly tricks one
more complex task of empathy and depiction. How do you
tell the story of someone whose connection to their own memories,
their very sense of self is breaking, even broken beyond repair.
(01:21):
How a might a work of art do justice to
the experience of dementia? A couple of years ago, the
film The Father with Olivia Coleman and Anthony Hopkins did
a powerful job of it. Closer to home read this
alumni Nonie Hazlehurst was in a film called June Again
and was also terrific. Both of those films used a
(01:42):
trick that so effectively got you into the experience of
the dementia sufferer. At random points, they'd be having conversations
with loved ones, and the films would change the actor
who was playing the secondary characters. The new person, without
missing a beat, would say the words that hold the conversation,
and our protagonist would face them with utter confusion and
a sense of dislocation. The new novel You Must Remember
(02:06):
This by Melbourne based author Sean Wilson, employs the literary
equivalent of this device. It follows Grace, a woman suffering
from dementia, and moves between slippery memory and present day confusion,
sharing her story, but also sharing the sense that that
story is slipping away. Because the book begins with chapter ten,
(02:28):
then follows it with chapter seven, then eleven, the whole
book shifts and twists as Grace tries to find purchase
in her own reality. It's deeply effective, a deeply moving approach,
a tragedy of forgetting, and a story of hanging on
to one's humanity as the illness strips it away. I'm
(02:48):
Michael Williams, and this is read this to show about
the books we love and the stories behind them. Did
I read somewhere that you must remember this had one
iteration where it was written for performance rather than for
(03:09):
the page.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, so we're going back over a decade now. I
originally wrote it for the stage, and it got a
bit of attention from some theater companies, didn't ultimately make
it on stage. And not long after I'd written it
and was talking to theater companies, I saw The Father
the play on stage because it was a play before
it was a film, and quickly realized that my play
(03:30):
was a little bit too close to that play, and
it was very unlikely I was ever going to get
it on main stage, so put it away, and then
at a certain point I just thought, you know, let's
have a go out rewriting it as a novel. And
so a lot of the elements in the stage version
aren't relatable to the novel. In the stage version, there's
(03:50):
Graces on stage the whole time, there's no blackout, people
are coming in and out from President Pass, and so
there's probably a little bit more bleed in the President
Pass in the stage version in order to get across
that message in a different way. But some of the elements,
some of the scenes, remain and have just sort of
rewritten them for the page instead.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
It really surprised me, partly because the book is so
accomplished on what I think of as particularly literary terms
rather than theatrical terms. You know that the fragmentary nature
of Grace's relationship with her reality and her past means
that you have to have a very deft hand with metaphor,
(04:32):
with how to express something that she might not be
able to express, and that relationship between kind of knowing
and not knowing that seems particularly well suited to the novel.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah, and the fact that you can get into Grace's
head and to a certain extent, show the confusion that
you wouldn't be able to get across on the stage,
or as you know, the constraints on the stage is
just dialogue in some scene description and bit of action.
You haven't got anything else, and so you can only
tell that stuf sorry, through the interactions that are happening
on stage. So it opens up a lot more possibility
(05:05):
to do it as a novel. I think it was
in some senses an easier process writing as a novel
compared to as a play. But as you said, it
gives you a bit more opportunity to explore the condition
itself through metaphor.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
So a story that you first tried to tell ten
years ago men couldn't let go of and came back
to in a different form. Was it your grandmother that
drove you to know that you wanted to tell this story?
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yeah, And I felt like I had a responsibility as
a writer but also as a grandson to try to
understand her experience. So at a certain point in her
life with dementia, I could tell that she was starting
to live between present and past, so she would be
interacting with us in the present, sometimes knowing who he was,
(05:57):
sometimes not.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
But she would talk about her parents, who.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Are long dead on the other side of the world,
as if they were about to visit. And she talk
about her age care worker in the same moment as
if that person was her best friend. And so it's
very difficult. Once a person reaches that point of cognitive decline,
they can't tell you what it's like, And so I
suppose it lends itself to a story, to exploring through
(06:21):
fiction what that experience might be like.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Was she your mom's mum or your dad's dad's mum?
And were you close?
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, yeah, really close.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
She's quite a remarkable person in a quiet way. She
grew up poor in Manchester, lived through the Blitz, the family,
got on a ship three months across to the other
side of the world in the fifties and sort of
raised her family over here without any assistance. You know,
someone requires a lot of fortitude to do something like that,
(06:52):
and it is tragic that at the end of her
life she gets to a point where she loses all
of those memories, all of the part that made her her,
And it's very difficult to watch a person go through that,
But then it's very difficult to see yourself disappearing in
their eyes at the same time, which I suppose is
one reason why there are so few accounts of dementia
(07:14):
in fiction, because it's a difficult thing if you have
experience with it, to see yourself, to watch yourself disappear,
and to see your love on going through that.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
How like for your family, the management of the dementia
and the kind of slow motion loss of this important figure.
How did that play out for you guys? Was it
something you talked about freely? Was it something you know?
My family definitely, Gallows humor is almost the only way
of coping with any of that stuff. But I'm curious.
(07:50):
One of the things I love so much in this
book is Grace's daughter Liz and how that plays out.
And I'm curious for you and your family.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Yeah, I think I just dialed up in Liz some
of the reactions that we all had. And so Liz
has some moments of frustration with Grace, and she has
some moments of compassion and acceptance, and I think the
intensity of those.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Are just dialed up.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
It's probably a little bit less in our experience, but
there was very much I witnessed in myself and other people.
There's moments where you want to try and tether them
to the present, and you almost want to fight against
the condition. And in those moments, sometimes when you do that,
it can create some distress for the person because you're
(08:34):
trying to correct them constantly and they are aware, in
a vague kind of sense in some cases of shame
and embarrassment about what they're saying and the fact that
they're not remembering. And so I think another path that
you can take, a more compassionate path where you just
sort of go along with things a lot of the time,
where you just even though they might be saying something
(08:56):
completely wrong, you just go along with the thread and
you continue, and you can kind of calmly and slowly
try to bring some of their memories out, but if
it doesn't happen, then you just sort of let it
go gently. And I think that that in the relationship
between Liz and Grace in the book, when the point
that it gets to, I think is a point where
(09:16):
Liz has started to come to terms with that and
what you mentioned about Gallow's humor, I think I tried
to get across in the book that there is a
tragedy going on, but I didn't want to make it
a tragedy pile on. There are moments of levity as well,
just as there are in life. Sometimes you reach for
(09:36):
dark humor and you can bring some parts of your
own life into the situation and try and make it
a little bit fun.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
I think that's important, Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
But the other part of that, I think, which I
think you do so well is and I should say here,
you're very clear in the acknowledgments in the book that
Grace isn't your grandma. Our experiences have echoes of that,
a drawn from that, but she's a different human being.
But you don't let yourself lose track of Grace the
human being. She's not completely subsumed by her confusion or
(10:12):
by her situation. Part of why the book works is
that it is the story of a woman who has
lived a life and dealt with disappointments and delights and
all manner of things.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
I wanted her to have a strength, and that was
important to me in the book because my grandmother was strong.
Although as you said, she's not the same person as
Grace in terms of who she was, the way she
behaved and her experiences. The rest is fictional, but she
had a strength to her character as well, and I
didn't want Grace to sort of be a very passive
(10:47):
and meek individual in this book. I wanted her to
be fighting against the condition in the early parts of
the book and trying to hold onto her identity as
much as possible, because I think that that's that's the
natural way that she would react in that situation.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
What struck me when I was reading this was that
it's one thing to write about a difficult experience, but
it's a complete other thing to find a way to
embody it, you know, to demonstrate genuine empathy for what
your character is going through. And I think you do
that really powerfully, and you must remember this.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
I think that's the most one of the most difficult
things about trying to portray a protagonist with dementia is
that they are going through cognitive declient. So you have
to if you're going to have close third person or
even first person. I'm not quite sure how you would
do first person. I think that would be a little
bit too difficult towards the end of the chronology, but
even close third person.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
You've got to.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Show that progression, and as they progress, there's a lot
of opportunities for you as a reader to become confused,
and so I think trying to get that balance between
readers are a little bit confused but a little unsettled
and able to sit in that. But then you still
get across that kind of dislocation that the character has.
(12:04):
It's it's a bit of a balancing act.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
That decision to make form agree with subject matter is
one of the great payoffs of this book and one
of the really moving things. I'm curious about the kind
of reader you are. Are you a fan of structural
play or do you like a good, straight, clear narrative.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
I think I like both, and I think it could
call it a party trick essentially to create a fragmented
narrative in this way and to, like you said, make
the form match the nature of the character. I think
in this instance you kind of have to do it
that way unless you're going to tell it from the
point of view of another character looking in, like Alice
(12:45):
Monroez the bear came over the mountain, where it's the
spouse looking in at the person with dementia. So I
don't think I had much of a choice in this case.
But I think in terms of my reading, I like
it both ways. I think what I'm looking for primarily
when i'm reading something is a good story and good writing,
and if you can tick those boxes for me, I
don't really mind about the rest of it. And I
(13:07):
mean in terms of a good story that you can
take me on a journey from A to B of
character growth and relationship change, but then also that there's
some art involved in the expression, that there's some beauty
on the page. And if I can get both of
those things, I really don't mind what.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Else you do.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
That question about telling a story and the structure of
a story and our expectations around the convention. So much
of that is tied up with chronology, with cause and effect,
with actions and consequences, and your decision, or as you
put it, the kind of inevitable fact that this story
(13:44):
had to be told in a fractured way kind of
robs you of that at first glance. Yeah, Instead, it's
almost akin to a collection of interconnected short stories about
a life where the threads and the echoes and resonance
has become clear as you go long. But you don't
necessarily get that path to satisfaction or joy or redemption.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
I think that there is a through line in the story,
and maybe it takes a little while to get to it,
but the through line really is the relationship change throughout
the story, and you get the flashbacks which contribute to
the relationship change in the present, and that's really what
I was trying to go for. I was thinking a
lot about Philip Larkin's anti natalist poem This be the
(14:27):
Verse when I was writing this, and not that I'm
an anti natalist because my wife and I have a
three month old son, but the last stanza, there's a
couple of lines in their man hands on misery to
man it deepens like a coastal shelf. And I was
thinking about how if we're not careful, and if our
parents aren't careful, we can pick up some of the
traits from them, and they picked up from their parents,
(14:50):
and we can embody those and we can bring those
into our relationships with our children. And some of those
traits may not be ideal, and some of the behaviors
they lead to may not be ideal. And what would
it take to go against the current in changing your
behavior and if at the same time as my main character,
Grace is in this story, she's reliving some of the past.
(15:12):
She's living simultaneously between this past key moments with her
relationship with her mother and then living in the present
and sort of slipping in and out of those timelines.
She's sort of experiencing those traits that she's picked up
with her mother as she's in a sense, with the
ticking clock of dementia in the present, trying to change
(15:33):
before it's too late, and trying to change her relationship
with her daughter. So I think that's what I was
trying to get at. That's the through line through the story.
Even though the chronology, as you said, is really fragmented
because she's slipping in and out of present and past,
there is a through line, and that's that change that
happens in her relationship with her daughter.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Yeah. I take your point about that through line, But
I think part of what's so fascinating and effective about
the way you approach it in this book is the
impossibility of either forgiveness or repair when it comes to
a broken relationship like the one between Grace and her mother.
The ways in which the kind of residual, lifelong traumas
(16:15):
of that unreconcilable after a certain point, and those questions
about how we do right by the people we love
and how we make things right when they're broken seem
to me to be almost as important to this book
as questions of memory.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Yeah, I think that I'm dealing with two things.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Both.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
Grace is changing because of the condition, and so really
all we are instincts and memories, and if our memories
are starting to break down, some of those stories that
we have about ourselves that lead to kind of a
cohesive self who we were, who we are, and who
we hope to be, she's starting to lose those. So
she's changing through the condition as she's going along. But
I think she's trying to change at the same time
(16:58):
against the current of change through the dementia, to change
a relationship with her daughter, And she does that through
the recollections she's having about her past, about her relationship
with her mother. And although the relationship with her mother
is fixed, that's changed, that's done. It does by reliving them,
(17:19):
does inform her relationship in the present.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
When We're returned, Seawan discusses how his relationship with reading
and writing has changed since becoming a published author. We'll
be right back, even though you must remember, this is
(17:47):
the first book I've read by Sean Wilson. I first
heard his name back in twenty twenty two. His debut
novel came out. It was called Gemini Falls, and several
people thrust it upon me and told me I should
read it, and I just got around to it. But
looking at it now, in light of having read his
second book, it strikes me how much of a departure
he's made. His Debut's a genre novel, for one thing.
(18:10):
It's set in the Great Depression, and it's probably best
understood as Australian rural noir, a kind of plot driven
murder mystery that's revealing a darker story about Australian society's evolution,
or lack thereof. I'm always fascinated by writers that can
transition between genres, so I wanted to know more. I'm
curious about your second book, and your first book is
(18:33):
a genre novel, like it is a novel that actually
does very much kind of follow the beats of convention
in order to tell the story it wants to tell.
Did this feel like a completely different set of muscles
you're flexing.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
No, the Gemini Falls felt like more of a departure,
and I was trying to achieve something very specific with that.
This feels more like it's in my wheelhouse. And I
actually wrote the manuscript you must remember this before Gemini
Falls out right, And so in a sense, this is
my first book, although it's gone through some editing and
rewriting Gemini Falls. I wanted to tell a particular story
(19:12):
about financial crisis and housing displacement in an unregulated market
economy and what that does to people in the community
and who sort of helps and who raises a fist,
And because I think there are some parallels between now
and the Great Depression in that sense, I said, it
is a historical novel in the Great Depression. And then
(19:34):
after that I decided, how how am I going to
tell this story keep people engaged in this topic. I
decided to have a crime in order to turn the
heat up on the community and explore those themes.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
And so.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Just naturally it sort of went into a genre that
I'd had no experience with.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
So when you say it didn't come naturally or you
didn't know that genre, did you find yourself reading a
lot of historical crime fiction in order to feel like
you could fit the conventions, or did you kind of
avoid it and happily go in naive.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
I probably should have read more.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
I read a little bit, but I think my guiding
light for that story was to kill a Mockingbird in
the sense that to Kill a Mockingbird could be a
crime novel or a courtroom drama if you were.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Reductive in that sense.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
But really it's about racism in the South and the
depression States rights gender roles. So I felt like I
had enough with that story to guide me, and then
from then on it was really just about I think
what's important in stories and what we always go back
to is the relationship change that happens in the novel.
(20:52):
So although I wanted to explore those themes and that
was important to me, as not enough just to have
a story about financial crisis and how displacement and all
of those issues that I wanted to explore. You've got
to have the relationships that they're changing. And so the
main character and the way he relates with his father
and his sister, those are really the important parts of
(21:14):
the story, and that's what keeps us coming back to stories.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
So what did writing in a mode that was if
you'll forgive this way of putting it a little bit
reverse engineered, what did that teach you about the writing
that you want to do next? Having done something that
from the sounds of things flows out organically because of
the personal elements of the story and because the structure
(21:40):
presented itself once he worked out what the project was,
what do you know now, two books under your belt,
what does number three book like?
Speaker 3 (21:49):
I think I would like to try something new for
their third book, and maybe not the third book, or
maybe the fourth book if I get that far better.
I think it's a shame when people write the same
book over and over again. From an artistic sense, I
can understand from a financial point of view, if a
book is a success.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Why, I think Philip Roth said, every writer just writes
the same book again and again, hoping as they hone
in that eventually they get it right.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
I've seen that happen, sure, But I've also seen you know,
Margaret at would write a speculative fiction and then go
to historical fiction. And although it's the same kind of
themes that she might be exploring, she's using very different
muscles as you mentioned in terms of structuring, I mean,
it would be a shame if the Beatles just made
(22:36):
Love Me Do over and over again. You never get
to Dear Prudence or Octopus's Garden, So in that sense.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
There's a choice crescendo with Octopus's Garden. I was with
you all the way through Dear Prudence, so then you
just had to be silly.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
And maybe I'll gave my own Octopus's Garden moment. You
never know.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
I don't doubt your capacity to do it. I'm curious
because there is a deliberate to the way you talk
about your writing, like there was a sense of purpose
and a sense of kind of internally imposed discipline on
how you want to approach it. Do you always know
you wanted to write? Was this something that you worked
your way towards.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Yeah, I've wanted to write for a long time. I
think when I was younger, in terms of where I
grew up, there weren't any examples of writers around me
growing up in the suburbs, So it took me a
long time to get to the point where I thought
I had enough to say in order and sort of
fit in that mold. But I think it took me
(23:36):
a little while to work up to it, but I
guess I've had a long time to think about it
and be deliberate in that sense.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
What kind of reader are you and how has that
changed since you've been writing your own books.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
I'm definitely more forgiving reader, I think, and this is
why I don't slag off other people's books, because I
understand to hard it is to write a book now
after we're writing too, and I understand how hard it
is to hold onto the vision through the editing and
publishing process as well, So I have more understanding, I
(24:14):
think for writers, if I feel that something's not working,
then I can sort of think back to some challenges
that I've had. So it's definitely made me more forgiving
in that sense. But I still am looking for those
moments where I feel that they're in so much control
that I can switch off and join in the fun.
(24:34):
I think one of the problems when you take on
a craft, and I think it's probably the same way
for musicians as well. If you're a drama you're probably
just listening to the drumming in any particular song and
understanding how it works in the mechanics of it. And
you find it hard to lose yourself in the song.
In the same sense, I do find it hard to
lose myself in fiction. And the only times that I
(24:57):
really do, where I really start to fall in to
the spell and have that kind of hallucinatory experience that
we all do in the best times when we're reading
is when I feel like the writer is really in control.
And I've had a few of those moments lately, and
it's been a pleasure when I'm able to sort of
switch off my analytical part of the writer reading and
(25:20):
just be a reader.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
That's a real joy.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Thank you, it's been a pleasure. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Sean Wilson's new novel. You must remember this is available
at all good bookstores. Now before we go, I wanted
to let you know what I've been reading this week,
And I remember as a teenager someone gave me a
(25:53):
copy of the Penguin Classics edition of Thomas Mallory's Lamote
the Arthur. I read it, and then I immediately read
H White's Once in Future King, and then I read
Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. I went on
quite the King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table kick. I was a very cool teenager, as you
can imagine. I loved it, and then I kind of
(26:13):
forgot about it entirely. But when it was announced that
Lev Grossman, who wrote this terrific book a few years
ago called The Magicians, was doing his own take on
the Arthurian legend, I thought I'd give it a shot.
The product is a lot of fun and definitely cast
my mind back to that teenage reading. He's got a
modern sensibility and an eye for queer and divergent versions
(26:35):
of those classic stories, and Grossman's created quite the romp.
You can find it and all the others we've mentioned
in this episode and your favorite independent bookstore. That's it
for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
your friends about it and rate and review us. It
helps a lot. Next week I'm read this I'm speaking
(26:55):
with the novelist Andrea Goldsmith about her gorgeous latest, The
Buried Life.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
Like uncertainty, which is common to us all, so is death,
and for most of my life I've been captivated by
the mysteries of death, but also that so many people
are frightened of death read.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
This is a SHORTZ media production made possible by the
generous support of UR Group. The show is produced and
edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and
original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you
next week.
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