January 29, 2025 • 27 mins
Two-time Miles Franklin Award-winning author Michelle de Kretser has never been afraid of formal experimentation. Her seventh and latest book supports that idea. It is bold and, once again, a heady mix of serious intellectual inquiry with beautifully observed characterisation and formal play. This week on the show, Michael sits down with Michelle for a conversation about Theory & Practice and she reveals why writing it felt so different to all of her other books.
Reading list:
The Rose Grower, Michelle de Kretser, 1999
The Hamilton Case, Michelle de Kretser, 2003
The Lost Dog, Michelle de Kretser, 2007
Questions of Travel, Michelle de Kretser, 2012
Springtime, Michelle de Kretser, 2014
The Life to Come, Michelle de Kretser, 2017
On Shirley Hazzard, Michelle de Kretser, 2019
Scary Monsters, Michelle de Kretser, 2021
Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser, 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 Twitter
Guest: Michelle de Kretser
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Picture an Australian novel about a young woman in inner
city Melbourne in the early eighties, navigating a burgeoning intellectual
and cultural life and expanding sense of the world from
her studies, but also an explosion of friends and lovers,
of sexual jealousy, and anxious navigation of social and personal boundaries.
It's a slender book, and many critics seem to be
(00:22):
bogged down in questions of form and content, asking how
much of it is fiction and how much is just
based on the author's own life. I suspect if you
are setting up a drinking game for read this, one
of the more dangerous prompts for drinking would be mentioned
of Helen Ghana, our first guest, the patron saint of
this show and also part of the inspiration behind our
(00:45):
annual pilgrimage to fitzro Paul. So it would be natural
for the above description to immediately prompt the eager listener
to hit their imaginary game show buzzer and shout monkey Grip.
It's Monkey Grip. But the novel in question isn't that
classic debut. It's almost more than fifty years old now.
The novel I'm talking about today is a new release,
(01:06):
one that came out late last year by one of
Australia's most accomplished and admired litterary novelists. Despite making a
name for herself with sweeping maximalist novels, Michelle du Kretsa
is an author who has never been afraid of formal experimentation.
Her seventh book, Theory and Practice, supports this idea. It's
(01:30):
bold and once again there's a heady mix of serious
intellectual inquiry with beautifully observed characterization and then formal play.
It's a novel, but the front cover carries a photo
of a young Dacretsa, presumably at the age of the
book's protagonist, a writer who is ostensibly narrating the book.
(01:52):
A handful of pages in after the opening of what
reads like a naturalistic historical novel, the narrator chips in.
At that point she writes, the novel of us writing stalled.
It's really hard not to read this interjection as Decrets's own.
The confessional, inquiring voice is belonging, unfiltered to its author.
(02:13):
This blurring between fiction and memoir, between narrative and essay
is the prevailing mode of the book, and the product
is thrilling. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read. This
the show about the practice we love and the theory
behind it. I love this novel, and its sense of
(02:41):
intellectual curiosity and structural playfulness only enhance the human story
at its heart. But that cheekiness about category about how
it should be read, those aren't incidental pleasures. They're front
and center of how the book's were been published, and
the obvious starting point is its front cover, the striking
design by Text Publishings designer Chong Wing Ho, and the
(03:03):
books author looking out at us as we begin, I
thought I might begin by asking when you knew you
were going to be comfortable with or you wanted your
own photo on the cover of this novel?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Okay, well, Cheong asked me for photos of the nineteen eighties.
I sent him a selection, a small selection, because I
don't have many photos full stop. He came back with
that one and said, how would you feel if I
made this famous? I said frightened. He said why. I said, well,
(03:45):
I don't want this novel to be taken for a
memoirle and he said no, we'll take care of that,
don't worry. While he was working on the layout. I was,
of course, still frightened of that misreading, and I was
talking it over with my partner, who but the very
(04:09):
salient pointer, as he often does that whenever a woman
writes a novel with the first person narrator, it's taken
as sort of biographical. So he said, you know, you
could have put a photo of anything on the cover
and it would still be read as autobiography. And I
(04:30):
certainly had this experience with my last novel, one half
of which had a young female narrator. So I thought
that that was a good point. And when the cover
came back, well, of course under the photo were the
(04:53):
words the new novel underlined twice, and as I looked
at it, I thought it gestured at the hybrid nature
of the novel. It was saying, this is not straight fiction,
but it's not memoir either, And the more I looked
(05:15):
at it, it all fell into place for me when
I looked at the photo, and it reminded me of
Madrid's famous photo realist painting of a pipe captioned this
is not a pipe. In other words, reality and its
representation and art are not the same thing. I don't
(05:37):
know whether that was what Chong was channeling, but I
do know that certainly towards the end of the novel
a character specifically warns against mistaking realism for reality, so
perhaps that also played its part in Chong's decision. And
I am really pleased we went with that cover because
(06:00):
I think it's very striking visually, and I think it
has meant that a lot of young women in particular
have picked up the novel, and that is of course
extremely gratifying.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
You mentioned several times about the reading that it invites,
and it seems to me that it invites a particular reading,
but perhaps more than that, and not just to cover,
but moving into some of the choices made within the
book itself, it provokes a particular reading more than it
invites it that there is a sense of challenge and
(06:40):
play here that is designed not just to passively let
the reader come to it on their own terms, but
actively to unsettle or to just just to force them
to do a little bit more work.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yes, absolutely, I quite like unsettling readers. Why not. I
like novels set on set for me my expectations that
play with my expectations, and so yes, absolutely, I think
that's fair to say that it does, let's say, strongly
encourage a certain reading, which is there not necessarily followed through.
(07:19):
We don't want to have any spoilers.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
But now I love it, and there is a palpable
sense that I have felt this across your entire body
of work. Your appetite for play and your desire not
to allow the constraints of convention to hold you back
seems to be more acute with each book. Is that
a reasonable summation, Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
I'm flattered by that, of course, But I would say that,
for instance, my second novel, The Hamilton Case, very much
plays with the expectations set up by the conventional who
done it. So I guess that grows back a fair
way that kind of interest in form and narrative convention,
(08:08):
certainly with this one. And I you know, as you say,
I've had this interest in destabilizing the realist novel, and
so I wanted to write what I have come to
call the hyperrealist novel, the novel that doesn't read like
(08:29):
a novel, and hence the start of Theory and Practice,
which presents a completely conventional realist novel. And if I
might say so without sounding boastful, or anything, I think
(08:49):
quite efficiently, for given the length it is, sets up
an intrigue, a plot, a miscarriage of justice, a possible
romantic entanglement. In quite a few pages it does that
equssion play, and then it changes completely. And the reason
for doing that is, you know, it's like placing black
(09:10):
and white, and both colors come up shopper when they
are placed next to their antithesis. So I wanted what
followed to seem as the narrator say she wishes to
be telling the truth, to seem utterly and completely truthful
and not like a novel. And one of the other reasons,
(09:34):
for sort of secondary reason I suppose for having that
realist extract at the start, is that you know, the
narrator is a novelist, and when you get to the
end of the novel, you see how little events and
little details that have happened to her in her life
(09:58):
are reconfigured in the fiction that proceeds that starts theory
and practice, so it's kind of like the theory and
practice of the novel as well. I had in mind
that instruction you get in Matt's exams to show your workings.
So if you like the whole of the hyperrealist novel
(10:19):
is kind of the workings showing how those little beds
make it into fiction in disguised form, transformed, made fictional,
often out of recognition. So that was of interest to
me as well, you know, how to demonstrate how little
(10:41):
facts from one's life get turned into fiction.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
When I finished reading, I went up and got myself
a copy of Virginia Wolf's The Years, which I have
to confess I had never read. I mean, wolf obviously
is very important to this book and to you as
a writer, But did you talk for a moment about
The Years in particular and what it is that piqued
your interest about that particular book.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
So in the novel, the narrator is writing a thesis
on Virginia Wolfe's late fiction and on the three last novels,
namely The Waves, The Year's and Between the Acts. I'd
actually read both The Waves and Between the Acts, and
I hadn't read The Years. It was Wolfe's bestseller in
(11:30):
her day, and it's really underread now. So I read
it because I wanted the late fiction, because everyone writes
about the you know, the missus Dillaway into the Lighthouse.
I wanted something different, and I've read it, and I
read about it in Wolfe's diaries, her composition of it.
(11:51):
I was quite surprised when I read it, because it's
a very conventional novel, largely realist really, and coming after
the extreme modernist example experiment that was The Waves, it
was strikingly different, and I understand a writer's wish to
do something different, but this seemed almost like a return
(12:13):
to Wolfe's first to pre modernest novels. So what I
found out about her original plan for the novel was
that she wanted to do something very distinctive and different.
She wanted to write a novel made up of alternating
chapters of fiction and nonfiction, so a novel about an
(12:34):
English family that would cover about fifty years, and in
between those fictive chapters, she would have an essay commenting
on the social changes that had taken place in Britain
at that time. She wrote an awful lot. She wrote
about one hundred thousand words and then discarded it, which
(12:59):
is sort of heartbreaking thing for a writer to have done,
but she didn't. She discarded the plan. I should say,
she used fiction to write the novel that became The Years,
and she used some of the essaystic material her book
Three Guineas. So I liked that idea. I thought that
(13:23):
was a really fabulous idea, actually, the sort of mix
of fiction and non fiction. But I also felt that
the reason Wolf abandoned it, And I don't know why
actually abandoned it, but I felt the reason must have
been that it's terribly schematic, you know, chapter fiction, chapter
of nonfiction, chapter of fiction, essay, and Wolf the least
(13:44):
schematic of writers. I don't feel could have sustained that
very long. And I suddenly felt that if Virginia Wolf
couldn't do it, I couldn't. And it seemed much more
satisfactory to me to have kind of tangle of fiction
and nonfiction, whether that was essay or a little bit
(14:07):
on memoir, and for the reader to not necessarily always
be able to tell where one ended and the other began.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
I'm really glad you made that point about how schematic
that plan was, because it strikes me hearing you talk.
You know, that desire to write a novel that doesn't
feel like a novel. You know your narrator in theory
and practice makes the same point. But she says, I
wanted to form. It allowed for formlessness and mess and
(14:37):
I think, you know, I think part of the real
achievement here is to do something that is so kind
of intellectually robust and rigorous and curious on the one hand,
but also messy and complicated like human beings and tells
a kind of novelistic story on the other. And I wonder,
(15:01):
did you have to consciously go in and mess it
up at intervals? Did you find yourself did you find
yourself going one, No, this is too rigid, or these
modes are too self evident, and I have to have
to just blur the edges a bit more.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
No, not really, not as far as form was concerned.
But the mess I was interested in was much more
human mess. So that you know, for the narrator as
well as for many of the of the other characters,
there is this messy gap between theory and practice, between
(15:41):
our ideals and our actions. I'm always interested in that
when it comes to character. And I would say that
art really is energized by that mess because it's complex
and contradictory, and those are things that art feeds on.
Those are things that the novel feeds on, or maybe
(16:04):
I just I feed on them as a writer and reader,
and so that was the kind of mess I was
interested in. And as for the formlessness, well, just because
sometimes you can't tell what is fictive and what isn't.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
When we return, Michelle discusses sexual jealousy, feminism, and what
it means to be a writer in the public eye,
we'll be right back the gulf between theory and practice,
(16:46):
between who we want to be and who we are.
It might be best served by the novel artistically. Is
that best embodied by our twenties in a life? Is
that what that period of bigger university in your twenties
is four?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Not really, I think, you know. I mean, I'm sure
there's I'm still quite out of mess between my theories
and my point.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Now you're reconciled as a human being at this point.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
But I do think that, you know, in one's early twenties,
one is asking the question, you know, how should a
person be? So it's an attractive period for a novelist
because you're still trying to figure out what life is
for and what it will hold for you and how
you can get there and what you should do. So
I think there is a lot of energy and a
(17:33):
lot of mess when you are in your early twenties
as the narrator is I think that you know, Wolf,
for instance, there's someone who went on being contradictory and
messy right to the end of her life, and we
all do that.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
I think, do you think culturally we're at a low
point for capacity to process those contradictions in the people
and in particular in the artists who we admire.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah, that's such a good Christian, isn't it. I mean
it is a very topical one what we do with
the failings and flaws of writers we admire. The emblematic
writer for me when that comes up, isn't Wolf, it's
v Snipol. I mean, the man was a monster. You
(18:30):
know what can you say? Racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, Brahminist, you
name it. He's been there, he's done that, He's got
it on a T shirt. And yet an extraordinary, brilliant writer,
really brilliant and really really important for hundreds of thousands
(18:54):
of diasporic writers. So you know, there's the man and
there's the work. I really understand someone who's young and
hasn't read one ipail and says, I don't want to
read those people I really understand that, I really get that,
(19:15):
or an older person it says, I don't want to
read those people totally. But for me, you know, I
did read them and they are part of who I am.
So well. Remember McCaulay, you know, he says judgment is
simply trying to reject a part of what we are
because it hurts. The living cannot call the dead collect
(19:39):
they won't accept the charge, and it reverts.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Oh that's fantastic.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
I don't expect artists of any kind to be saints,
you know, to be without feelings and flaws and shortcomings.
But I think it is part of our moment that
artists are so much in the public gaze now because
of social media, for instance, and so there is increasingly
(20:09):
this request, one might almost say, a demand that the
artist's private life must conform to an ideal in the work.
That if the artist is a prominent person, that then
their private life must be equally flawless. I mean, if
(20:30):
the what am I trying to say, I think if
they're getting accolades for their work, then their selves should
also deserve accolades.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
It's also the point that you make so well in
theory and practice about truth about the artist who professes
to tell law, share a truth, or illuminate a truth
that otherwise goes unremarked upon. Is that then that holds
them to some kind of moral standard if they're an
arbiter of truth.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Absolutely, And I so, I mean for Wolf, obviously she
wrote quite brilliantly about women's lives and took the patriarchy
to tusk on that score. And therefore, you know, there's
the expectation that she has to also be virtuous when
it comes to matters of race, for instance, or anything else.
(21:22):
And really she wasn't you know. I mean, she was
horrible about pretty much everyone in her diaries, which are great,
wonderful literary documents. And she was gossipy, she was often hatty,
and she was human.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
I do like the way in which, in theory and
practice you do put forward a case that it's perhaps
in sexual jealousy that we best see the illustration of
our idea of ourself and how we live our lives
being diverging. You know, it's a particularly a cute example,
(22:01):
particularly for a young feminist, to identify sexual jealousy in oneself.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Yeah, sure, I mean, I think in the world there
are many ways in which the gap becomes evident politically,
for instance. But you know, I was writing about a
young woman. In any young person's life, you know, sex, desire,
romantic entanglesments loom particularly large at this point in one's life,
(22:30):
and so that was the narrative I chose to tell.
There is the wish on the narrator's behalf to be
a good feminist and her inability to follow through when
it comes to the woman she constructs as her rival,
who is her lover's official. And I thought it was
(22:55):
good to write about jealousy because it is such a
source of shame, and shame is an interesting emotion because
it has tremendous silencing power, and what is being silenced,
what cannot be expressed, is always of interest to a novelist,
(23:19):
isn't it. Yeah, you know, you want to express it.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Just at a technical level, at a level of form
and process. The sense of play and the sense of
fun in this book runs all the way through it.
And I'm curious about whether that was the experience of
writing it as well.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
That's a good question. I look it undertok me a
year to write, which is probably on average half the
time it takes me to write a book, but it's
half as long. There were many times of just work,
and you know the kind of dart that visits any writer, thinking,
I don't know where this is going, who will want
(23:59):
to read this rubbish? Et cetera, et cetera. I mean,
all the things that you know wake you up at
three in the morning. But I would say that when
I had finished the first draft, actually even when I
finished the book, I mean, there's always just a sense
of a little adrenaline rush because you've just actually made something.
(24:21):
So there was that, but beyond that, I think I
really felt a sense of exhilaration. I felt I had
made something different and that was very pleasing to me.
And I would say that again without in any way
trying to diminish the amount of work and revision that
(24:43):
any novel requires. I felt, with this bookcast with no
other that it was somehow all ready inside me and
I just needed to be able to get it out there,
to give it a form for system world.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Michelle Decretz's latest novel, Theory and Practice, is out now.
Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've
been reading this week and almost a year ago to
the day we had on as a guest, Geraldine Brooks.
She gave her life sentence and she spoke movingly about
(25:26):
her writing career about Horse, her most recent novel, but
she also talked about her late husband, and she's just
brought out a beautiful memoir called Memorial Day that deals
with the grief and shock that came upon his unexpected
death a few years ago. It's an absolutely beautiful memoir
as you would expect, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
(25:47):
You can also go back to the archive and listen
to that conversation with the peerless Geraldine Brooks. That book, again,
is called Memorial Day. You can find that in all
of Geraldine Brooks's books, and Michelle de Cretz's books, and
Virginia Wolf's books. In fact, lots of books can be
found at your local independent bookstore or library. That's it
(26:08):
for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot.
On next week's show, I'll be in conversation with the
brilliant Rachel Kong discussing her latest novel, Real Americans, and
what luck means to her as a writer.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Luck is I think really at the core of this
book this question of what creates our lives essentially, is
it luck? Is it chance? Is it the actions that
we take? Is it free will? Right? And that's just
a question that I've thought about for all my life.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
I think read this as a Schwartz Media production, made
possible by the generous support of our A group. The
show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing
by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zolten Fetcher. Thanks
for listening, See you next week.
Picture an Australian novel about a young woman in inner
city Melbourne in the early eighties, navigating a burgeoning intellectual
and cultural life and expanding sense of the world from
her studies, but also an explosion of friends and lovers,
of sexual jealousy, and anxious navigation of social and personal boundaries.
It's a slender book, and many critics seem to be
(00:22):
bogged down in questions of form and content, asking how
much of it is fiction and how much is just
based on the author's own life. I suspect if you
are setting up a drinking game for read this, one
of the more dangerous prompts for drinking would be mentioned
of Helen Ghana, our first guest, the patron saint of
this show and also part of the inspiration behind our
(00:45):
annual pilgrimage to fitzro Paul. So it would be natural
for the above description to immediately prompt the eager listener
to hit their imaginary game show buzzer and shout monkey Grip.
It's Monkey Grip. But the novel in question isn't that
classic debut. It's almost more than fifty years old now.
The novel I'm talking about today is a new release,
(01:06):
one that came out late last year by one of
Australia's most accomplished and admired litterary novelists. Despite making a
name for herself with sweeping maximalist novels, Michelle du Kretsa
is an author who has never been afraid of formal experimentation.
Her seventh book, Theory and Practice, supports this idea. It's
(01:30):
bold and once again there's a heady mix of serious
intellectual inquiry with beautifully observed characterization and then formal play.
It's a novel, but the front cover carries a photo
of a young Dacretsa, presumably at the age of the
book's protagonist, a writer who is ostensibly narrating the book.
(01:52):
A handful of pages in after the opening of what
reads like a naturalistic historical novel, the narrator chips in.
At that point she writes, the novel of us writing stalled.
It's really hard not to read this interjection as Decrets's own.
The confessional, inquiring voice is belonging, unfiltered to its author.
(02:13):
This blurring between fiction and memoir, between narrative and essay
is the prevailing mode of the book, and the product
is thrilling. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read. This
the show about the practice we love and the theory
behind it. I love this novel, and its sense of
(02:41):
intellectual curiosity and structural playfulness only enhance the human story
at its heart. But that cheekiness about category about how
it should be read, those aren't incidental pleasures. They're front
and center of how the book's were been published, and
the obvious starting point is its front cover, the striking
design by Text Publishings designer Chong Wing Ho, and the
(03:03):
books author looking out at us as we begin, I
thought I might begin by asking when you knew you
were going to be comfortable with or you wanted your
own photo on the cover of this novel?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Okay, well, Cheong asked me for photos of the nineteen eighties.
I sent him a selection, a small selection, because I
don't have many photos full stop. He came back with
that one and said, how would you feel if I
made this famous? I said frightened. He said why. I said, well,
(03:45):
I don't want this novel to be taken for a
memoirle and he said no, we'll take care of that,
don't worry. While he was working on the layout. I was,
of course, still frightened of that misreading, and I was
talking it over with my partner, who but the very
(04:09):
salient pointer, as he often does that whenever a woman
writes a novel with the first person narrator, it's taken
as sort of biographical. So he said, you know, you
could have put a photo of anything on the cover
and it would still be read as autobiography. And I
(04:30):
certainly had this experience with my last novel, one half
of which had a young female narrator. So I thought
that that was a good point. And when the cover
came back, well, of course under the photo were the
(04:53):
words the new novel underlined twice, and as I looked
at it, I thought it gestured at the hybrid nature
of the novel. It was saying, this is not straight fiction,
but it's not memoir either, And the more I looked
(05:15):
at it, it all fell into place for me when
I looked at the photo, and it reminded me of
Madrid's famous photo realist painting of a pipe captioned this
is not a pipe. In other words, reality and its
representation and art are not the same thing. I don't
(05:37):
know whether that was what Chong was channeling, but I
do know that certainly towards the end of the novel
a character specifically warns against mistaking realism for reality, so
perhaps that also played its part in Chong's decision. And
I am really pleased we went with that cover because
(06:00):
I think it's very striking visually, and I think it
has meant that a lot of young women in particular
have picked up the novel, and that is of course
extremely gratifying.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
You mentioned several times about the reading that it invites,
and it seems to me that it invites a particular reading,
but perhaps more than that, and not just to cover,
but moving into some of the choices made within the
book itself, it provokes a particular reading more than it
invites it that there is a sense of challenge and
(06:40):
play here that is designed not just to passively let
the reader come to it on their own terms, but
actively to unsettle or to just just to force them
to do a little bit more work.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yes, absolutely, I quite like unsettling readers. Why not. I
like novels set on set for me my expectations that
play with my expectations, and so yes, absolutely, I think
that's fair to say that it does, let's say, strongly
encourage a certain reading, which is there not necessarily followed through.
(07:19):
We don't want to have any spoilers.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
But now I love it, and there is a palpable
sense that I have felt this across your entire body
of work. Your appetite for play and your desire not
to allow the constraints of convention to hold you back
seems to be more acute with each book. Is that
a reasonable summation, Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
I'm flattered by that, of course, But I would say that,
for instance, my second novel, The Hamilton Case, very much
plays with the expectations set up by the conventional who
done it. So I guess that grows back a fair
way that kind of interest in form and narrative convention,
(08:08):
certainly with this one. And I you know, as you say,
I've had this interest in destabilizing the realist novel, and
so I wanted to write what I have come to
call the hyperrealist novel, the novel that doesn't read like
(08:29):
a novel, and hence the start of Theory and Practice,
which presents a completely conventional realist novel. And if I
might say so without sounding boastful, or anything, I think
(08:49):
quite efficiently, for given the length it is, sets up
an intrigue, a plot, a miscarriage of justice, a possible
romantic entanglement. In quite a few pages it does that
equssion play, and then it changes completely. And the reason
for doing that is, you know, it's like placing black
(09:10):
and white, and both colors come up shopper when they
are placed next to their antithesis. So I wanted what
followed to seem as the narrator say she wishes to
be telling the truth, to seem utterly and completely truthful
and not like a novel. And one of the other reasons,
(09:34):
for sort of secondary reason I suppose for having that
realist extract at the start, is that you know, the
narrator is a novelist, and when you get to the
end of the novel, you see how little events and
little details that have happened to her in her life
(09:58):
are reconfigured in the fiction that proceeds that starts theory
and practice, so it's kind of like the theory and
practice of the novel as well. I had in mind
that instruction you get in Matt's exams to show your workings.
So if you like the whole of the hyperrealist novel
(10:19):
is kind of the workings showing how those little beds
make it into fiction in disguised form, transformed, made fictional,
often out of recognition. So that was of interest to
me as well, you know, how to demonstrate how little
(10:41):
facts from one's life get turned into fiction.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
When I finished reading, I went up and got myself
a copy of Virginia Wolf's The Years, which I have
to confess I had never read. I mean, wolf obviously
is very important to this book and to you as
a writer, But did you talk for a moment about
The Years in particular and what it is that piqued
your interest about that particular book.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
So in the novel, the narrator is writing a thesis
on Virginia Wolfe's late fiction and on the three last novels,
namely The Waves, The Year's and Between the Acts. I'd
actually read both The Waves and Between the Acts, and
I hadn't read The Years. It was Wolfe's bestseller in
(11:30):
her day, and it's really underread now. So I read
it because I wanted the late fiction, because everyone writes
about the you know, the missus Dillaway into the Lighthouse.
I wanted something different, and I've read it, and I
read about it in Wolfe's diaries, her composition of it.
(11:51):
I was quite surprised when I read it, because it's
a very conventional novel, largely realist really, and coming after
the extreme modernist example experiment that was The Waves, it
was strikingly different, and I understand a writer's wish to
do something different, but this seemed almost like a return
(12:13):
to Wolfe's first to pre modernest novels. So what I
found out about her original plan for the novel was
that she wanted to do something very distinctive and different.
She wanted to write a novel made up of alternating
chapters of fiction and nonfiction, so a novel about an
(12:34):
English family that would cover about fifty years, and in
between those fictive chapters, she would have an essay commenting
on the social changes that had taken place in Britain
at that time. She wrote an awful lot. She wrote
about one hundred thousand words and then discarded it, which
(12:59):
is sort of heartbreaking thing for a writer to have done,
but she didn't. She discarded the plan. I should say,
she used fiction to write the novel that became The Years,
and she used some of the essaystic material her book
Three Guineas. So I liked that idea. I thought that
(13:23):
was a really fabulous idea, actually, the sort of mix
of fiction and non fiction. But I also felt that
the reason Wolf abandoned it, And I don't know why
actually abandoned it, but I felt the reason must have
been that it's terribly schematic, you know, chapter fiction, chapter
of nonfiction, chapter of fiction, essay, and Wolf the least
(13:44):
schematic of writers. I don't feel could have sustained that
very long. And I suddenly felt that if Virginia Wolf
couldn't do it, I couldn't. And it seemed much more
satisfactory to me to have kind of tangle of fiction
and nonfiction, whether that was essay or a little bit
(14:07):
on memoir, and for the reader to not necessarily always
be able to tell where one ended and the other began.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
I'm really glad you made that point about how schematic
that plan was, because it strikes me hearing you talk.
You know, that desire to write a novel that doesn't
feel like a novel. You know your narrator in theory
and practice makes the same point. But she says, I
wanted to form. It allowed for formlessness and mess and
(14:37):
I think, you know, I think part of the real
achievement here is to do something that is so kind
of intellectually robust and rigorous and curious on the one hand,
but also messy and complicated like human beings and tells
a kind of novelistic story on the other. And I wonder,
(15:01):
did you have to consciously go in and mess it
up at intervals? Did you find yourself did you find
yourself going one, No, this is too rigid, or these
modes are too self evident, and I have to have
to just blur the edges a bit more.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
No, not really, not as far as form was concerned.
But the mess I was interested in was much more
human mess. So that you know, for the narrator as
well as for many of the of the other characters,
there is this messy gap between theory and practice, between
(15:41):
our ideals and our actions. I'm always interested in that
when it comes to character. And I would say that
art really is energized by that mess because it's complex
and contradictory, and those are things that art feeds on.
Those are things that the novel feeds on, or maybe
(16:04):
I just I feed on them as a writer and reader,
and so that was the kind of mess I was
interested in. And as for the formlessness, well, just because
sometimes you can't tell what is fictive and what isn't.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
When we return, Michelle discusses sexual jealousy, feminism, and what
it means to be a writer in the public eye,
we'll be right back the gulf between theory and practice,
(16:46):
between who we want to be and who we are.
It might be best served by the novel artistically. Is
that best embodied by our twenties in a life? Is
that what that period of bigger university in your twenties
is four?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Not really, I think, you know. I mean, I'm sure
there's I'm still quite out of mess between my theories
and my point.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Now you're reconciled as a human being at this point.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
But I do think that, you know, in one's early twenties,
one is asking the question, you know, how should a
person be? So it's an attractive period for a novelist
because you're still trying to figure out what life is
for and what it will hold for you and how
you can get there and what you should do. So
I think there is a lot of energy and a
(17:33):
lot of mess when you are in your early twenties
as the narrator is I think that you know, Wolf,
for instance, there's someone who went on being contradictory and
messy right to the end of her life, and we
all do that.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
I think, do you think culturally we're at a low
point for capacity to process those contradictions in the people
and in particular in the artists who we admire.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah, that's such a good Christian, isn't it. I mean
it is a very topical one what we do with
the failings and flaws of writers we admire. The emblematic
writer for me when that comes up, isn't Wolf, it's
v Snipol. I mean, the man was a monster. You
(18:30):
know what can you say? Racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, Brahminist, you
name it. He's been there, he's done that, He's got
it on a T shirt. And yet an extraordinary, brilliant writer,
really brilliant and really really important for hundreds of thousands
(18:54):
of diasporic writers. So you know, there's the man and
there's the work. I really understand someone who's young and
hasn't read one ipail and says, I don't want to
read those people I really understand that, I really get that,
(19:15):
or an older person it says, I don't want to
read those people totally. But for me, you know, I
did read them and they are part of who I am.
So well. Remember McCaulay, you know, he says judgment is
simply trying to reject a part of what we are
because it hurts. The living cannot call the dead collect
(19:39):
they won't accept the charge, and it reverts.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Oh that's fantastic.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
I don't expect artists of any kind to be saints,
you know, to be without feelings and flaws and shortcomings.
But I think it is part of our moment that
artists are so much in the public gaze now because
of social media, for instance, and so there is increasingly
(20:09):
this request, one might almost say, a demand that the
artist's private life must conform to an ideal in the work.
That if the artist is a prominent person, that then
their private life must be equally flawless. I mean, if
(20:30):
the what am I trying to say, I think if
they're getting accolades for their work, then their selves should
also deserve accolades.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
It's also the point that you make so well in
theory and practice about truth about the artist who professes
to tell law, share a truth, or illuminate a truth
that otherwise goes unremarked upon. Is that then that holds
them to some kind of moral standard if they're an
arbiter of truth.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Absolutely, And I so, I mean for Wolf, obviously she
wrote quite brilliantly about women's lives and took the patriarchy
to tusk on that score. And therefore, you know, there's
the expectation that she has to also be virtuous when
it comes to matters of race, for instance, or anything else.
(21:22):
And really she wasn't you know. I mean, she was
horrible about pretty much everyone in her diaries, which are great,
wonderful literary documents. And she was gossipy, she was often hatty,
and she was human.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
I do like the way in which, in theory and
practice you do put forward a case that it's perhaps
in sexual jealousy that we best see the illustration of
our idea of ourself and how we live our lives
being diverging. You know, it's a particularly a cute example,
(22:01):
particularly for a young feminist, to identify sexual jealousy in oneself.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Yeah, sure, I mean, I think in the world there
are many ways in which the gap becomes evident politically,
for instance. But you know, I was writing about a
young woman. In any young person's life, you know, sex, desire,
romantic entanglesments loom particularly large at this point in one's life,
(22:30):
and so that was the narrative I chose to tell.
There is the wish on the narrator's behalf to be
a good feminist and her inability to follow through when
it comes to the woman she constructs as her rival,
who is her lover's official. And I thought it was
(22:55):
good to write about jealousy because it is such a
source of shame, and shame is an interesting emotion because
it has tremendous silencing power, and what is being silenced,
what cannot be expressed, is always of interest to a novelist,
(23:19):
isn't it. Yeah, you know, you want to express it.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Just at a technical level, at a level of form
and process. The sense of play and the sense of
fun in this book runs all the way through it.
And I'm curious about whether that was the experience of
writing it as well.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
That's a good question. I look it undertok me a
year to write, which is probably on average half the
time it takes me to write a book, but it's
half as long. There were many times of just work,
and you know the kind of dart that visits any writer, thinking,
I don't know where this is going, who will want
(23:59):
to read this rubbish? Et cetera, et cetera. I mean,
all the things that you know wake you up at
three in the morning. But I would say that when
I had finished the first draft, actually even when I
finished the book, I mean, there's always just a sense
of a little adrenaline rush because you've just actually made something.
(24:21):
So there was that, but beyond that, I think I
really felt a sense of exhilaration. I felt I had
made something different and that was very pleasing to me.
And I would say that again without in any way
trying to diminish the amount of work and revision that
(24:43):
any novel requires. I felt, with this bookcast with no
other that it was somehow all ready inside me and
I just needed to be able to get it out there,
to give it a form for system world.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Michelle Decretz's latest novel, Theory and Practice, is out now.
Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've
been reading this week and almost a year ago to
the day we had on as a guest, Geraldine Brooks.
She gave her life sentence and she spoke movingly about
(25:26):
her writing career about Horse, her most recent novel, but
she also talked about her late husband, and she's just
brought out a beautiful memoir called Memorial Day that deals
with the grief and shock that came upon his unexpected
death a few years ago. It's an absolutely beautiful memoir
as you would expect, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
(25:47):
You can also go back to the archive and listen
to that conversation with the peerless Geraldine Brooks. That book, again,
is called Memorial Day. You can find that in all
of Geraldine Brooks's books, and Michelle de Cretz's books, and
Virginia Wolf's books. In fact, lots of books can be
found at your local independent bookstore or library. That's it
(26:08):
for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot.
On next week's show, I'll be in conversation with the
brilliant Rachel Kong discussing her latest novel, Real Americans, and
what luck means to her as a writer.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Luck is I think really at the core of this
book this question of what creates our lives essentially, is
it luck? Is it chance? Is it the actions that
we take? Is it free will? Right? And that's just
a question that I've thought about for all my life.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
I think read this as a Schwartz Media production, made
possible by the generous support of our A group. The
show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing
by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zolten Fetcher. Thanks
for listening, See you next week.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.