May 7, 2025 • 24 mins
London-based Australian author Jessica Stanley’s second novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, opens with all the beats of a classic romantic comedy – a meet-cute, a grand gesture, instant attraction – but what follows is a book about the next bit, the day to day reality of just living. But Jessica writes it with grace and wit and compassion, finding the romance in what comes next when two people decide to be together. This week, Michael sits down with Jessica for a conversation about life, love, and the importance of what’s on your bookshelf.
Reading list:
A Great Hope, Jessica Stanley, 2022
Consider Yourself Kissed, Jessica Stanley, 2025
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
Guest: Jessica Stanley
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):
The last time I was lucky enough to visit the
heaven on Earth that is the Strand Bookshop in New
York City. Amongst the much vaunted eighteen miles of books,
I came across a line of merch tote bags and
tea towels, coffee cups, and bucket hats that were all
emblazoned with a quote from American filmmaker John Waters. It
(00:20):
simply read, if you go home with somebody and they
don't have books, don't fuck them. Delightful. In all the
conversations about romance and modern dating, about searching for a connection,
be it love or friendship or sex, too little is
made of the books that people read. I'm going to
be completely honest. If I visit your house, I'm one
(00:42):
hundred percent having a furtive perv at what's on your bookshelves.
Everything I want and need to know could be answered
if I see the pile on your bedside table, the
most stunned, most love books in your collection. Forget dating apps.
If you want a connection, provide a recommended reading list.
My partner, who is brilliant and wonderful and an excellent
(01:04):
reader with impeccable tastes, lied to me on our first
date about loving an author she knew I was excited about.
I was utterly convinced and completely charmed. London based Australian
author Jessica Stanley's second novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, opens with
all the beats of a classic romantic comedy, a meet, cute,
(01:24):
grand gesture, human connection. But she's too smart a writer
and too curious a thinker about the nature of human
relationships to leave it there. Instead, she's written a book
about the next bit after Coraline Adam's White Hot Courtship,
What does the next decade look like? Children and renovations
and jobs, extended families and friends, disappointments and corrosions, arguments
(01:50):
and compromises, the slog of the day to day reality
of just living. But she writes it with grace and
wit and compassion, finding them romans in the what comes
next when two people decide to be together. If I
saw this book on somebody's bookshelf, I'd know there was
someone I wanted to talk to. I have no doubt
(02:11):
it would be a fun conversation, lively, embracingly honest. Great
qualities in a book, even better qualities in a person.
I'm Michael Williams, and this is Read This the show
about the books we love and the stories behind me.
(02:32):
Where I want to start is an element of the
meat could in your book, which is the swapping of
apartments and the looking at other people's bookshelves. And I
want to know, when you visit someone's house for the
first time, how nosy are you on the question of
what's on their bookshelves.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Well, I'm interested, but as with most things, I'm observing,
but I'm not judging. So I'm interested to see what
people are reading. But by the time I've made it
into someone's home, I'm probably intimate with them anyway, so
I'm certainly not judging. And also I find a lot
of people in their thirties. I'm not in my thirties.
I'm forty three, but a lot of people in their
(03:11):
thirties have moved around so much anyway that maybe they
would think their shelves weren't really reflective of them, so
to be judged on them would be upsetting. Whereas I'm
one of those people who I started amassing my books
when I went to the Lifeline, book Fair and Camera,
and I've taken them from every house to every house
my entire life.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Would someone know a lot about you from your bookshelves?
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I think so. One thing that I've done since I
was really young I probably wouldn't do it now is
that my books have always been separated into women authors
and then male authors. And I always put the women
authors in a special in a special place, and the
male authors I put, you know, in a secondary location
(03:57):
outside the bathroom or something like that.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Are there books on a shelf that would disqualify a
person for you?
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I think I would feel frightened and concerned if someone
had a top Gear book.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Oh yeah, good, yeah, no, no out the door.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
But apart from that sort of thing, no, because who
knows someone might have a book because they're reviewing it
or writing a nasty essay about it. Yeah, I just
I couldn't be sure.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Are their books for you that you would insist that
someone read if you wanted them to understand you?
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Wow? Well, in considerous self kissed. I have Adam say
to Coraley that he loves the Don Watson book about
Paul Keating, and that makes sense for him because he
is a political journalist. And Coraly notices that the spine
of that book is corduroy.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
It's been read, so I love that description. When I
came across it on the page, I was like, I'd
never heard it before. And a corduroy spine denoting a
much loved book really tickles me.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
And that's funny because I made my husband read that
book when we first met, as well as Watch The
Castle and What's the Murder of Old Chopper?
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Oh, there you go, Chopper, The Castle and Memoirs of
a Bleeding Heart. Yeah, that's a good cultural three. Was
that the Australia that you needed him to understand?
Speaker 2 (05:19):
That's exactly it.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah, did he have equivalent titles he felt that you
needed to understand?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Gosh, I feel really bad. Well, if he did, I'm
not across them.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
You're very literate already, though. I imagine your love of
Alan Hollinghurst, for example, would mean that a particular strata
of London society you had a pretty good understanding of.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yes, but that wasn't my husband's strata of society. What
is Northern Irish? Because he's Northern Irish. So he is
very insistent that I regularly watch a meme which is
a guy from Northern Ireland saying this is a wonder day,
a wonder day because it's.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
There you go. That's a good thing to understand about,
that kind of Northern Irish energy. So tell me about
love and romance on the page. How crucial is it
to your reading history, How much is it something that
you relish, and how actively did you decide to subvert
those beats when writing Consider your self Kissed.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
It's strange because when I began writing this book, I
had just published a previous book that hadn't gone very well,
This is a Great Hope, which came out in twenty
twenty two. It had been reviewed really nicely but hadn't
made any sort of splash, and people who knew me
really liked it, but no one else seemed to notice it,
(06:45):
and I couldn't even come over to launch it because
of the strange timing. But I had got to a
stage where I thought, Okay, writing a book isn't going
to change my life. And then I thought, well, I'm
I'm even going to try again. And I really felt
as if there was only one reason to try and
(07:08):
write another book, and that was for the love of
actually writing. And I had also come to a point
in my life where care and love feel like everything
to me, not just personally, but in the political environment.
It feels like the most natural and intuitive response to
(07:30):
what's going on more generally, which I would characterize as
being quite hateful. And so, even though in the past
most of my most favorite books have been about families,
I wanted to combine that with a classic love story,
someone meeting someone and that feeling of falling in love,
but then to also follow that love for the next
(07:54):
ten years when things started to get hard. And one
of the books that I modeled it off, apart from
the Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, was American Wife
by Curtis Sittenfeld, where she follows fictionalized Laura Bush as
incredibly wildly she falls in love with a fictionalized George W. Bush,
(08:15):
and I think you maybe follow them for twenty years,
and for some reason, she really gets you to care
about these two people. And so I thought, how can
I watch two people fall in love and convey that
to the reader, but also help people in a time
when it's pretty hard to concentrate on long form content
(08:38):
of any kind, and especially fiction, Maybe how can I
get them to fall in love with the experience of
reading about them.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
One of the things I love so much about this
book is its approach to time. It's as much a
book about the passing of time as it is about love.
That actually, when we hit what we think of as
kind of rom combads tends to be kind of constrained
and kind of almost instrumental way of telling a story.
(09:05):
That the point at which you get together and you
fall in love, that's the end of the interesting bit,
and what comes afterwards is just the kind of day
to day of life. Was it always going to be
that kind of sweeping decade long view.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, So I go around with a lot of material
in my mind, things that I think are funny or interesting,
funny things that people have said, and I sort of
wait until I can come up with a structure or
sort of line my buckets up in a row to
toss the toss the content into, you know, like someone
feeding the penguins at the zoo. And this ten year
(09:40):
structure came to me right after the joint fortieth birthday
party I had with my husband. I had moved to
London when I was twenty nine, and I already knew
him then, but we got married pretty quickly afterwards. And
so by the time we were at our joint fortieth
we had had three children, and we had spent ten
years together as a married couple. And if I could
(10:01):
have seen when I was twenty nine, if I could
have seen this lovely party, my amazing husband, my lovely children,
our friends, my friend's children, all hanging out together and
celebrating us, I wouldn't believed my luck. It was incredible
and amazing. But the actual emotional experience of having spent
(10:21):
that ten years, having reached the age of forty and
been married for so long, I really felt run over
by a truck. And the time, especially, my experience of
time was incredible, where days when you're on your own
with a baby can feel about twenty years long, and
(10:45):
then something lovely is happening to you and it just
washes by and is almost a dream afterwards. And so obviously,
when I was covering the ten years in the book,
I was trying to mimic that sense of time by
zooming in on some very special, deep emotional moments and
(11:05):
then zooming out and showing how time just runs away
from you.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
When we returned, Jessica shares how being an outsider helped
her shape her main character, Coraly and why she only
ever reads exactly what she wants to do. We'll be
right back your protagonist Coraly for her as for yourself.
(11:38):
In being an outsider, that thing about starting your life
over again in another place and having roots elsewhere. How
important to you was it that Coraly was also an
outsider in the community that she was building.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Well, a lot of my favorite books feature an outsider
to a community, and I think it's the best standpoint
to analyze anything from. And of course, my favorite book
of all time it's The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst,
and Nick is the ultimate outsider. He embeds himself with
a family that is completely different to his own, and
(12:13):
he just notices every single thing about them. And that's
sort of what I want to do with Crawley, because
I am obsessed with being from Australia. It's a major
part of who I am, and I moved to London
for love, not necessarily to be in London, and since
(12:33):
then I've come to really love and appreciate it, but
I've also been noticing what's strange and funny about it,
and I wanted to write the book, so I could
put everything that I'd noticed into a book.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
One of the things about that which I think you
capture so beautifully is the way in which any family
or any community is and accretion of different traditions and
different value sets an Australian amongst a bunch of Londoners.
It does seem an important counterweight to certain expectations around class,
around who's connected to who and how that that Australianist
(13:12):
does seem to be a key element in the boog.
Have you had early readers in the UK? Do they
warm to Corally's Australianists? Do they recognize it?
Speaker 2 (13:23):
It's funny because when I went around to bookshops, you know,
before books come out, you get taken around to try
and interest booksellers in what you're selling. And I was
too shy to do the kind of pitch the intro,
And when my publicist started off with it's about an
Australian in London, I internally cringed. I thought, these people
are not going to care. And that has been my
(13:46):
personal experience of living in the UK for such a
long time, is that when people hear that you're from Australia,
or when people here in Australian voice, they zone out.
So I was anxious about how the book would be received,
especially if the australianess was foregrounded. But everyone has responded
(14:07):
really beautifully. Although it's interesting to me that no one
has responded about her being Australian. I think they have
just responded to her as a person, which is the
most you can hope for.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
I think so. I mean, the other thing you have
going for you is that telling the story of the
UK during that particular decade is one of massive kind
of social change, social anxiety, political turmoil. Do you always
know that Adam was going to be in the political
media sphere? Was that a useful tool for making everything
(14:41):
from Brexit to COVID to Boris Johnson a key element
of the story.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Yes, that was the only way I could think of
to bring it in in a way that was natural
because when I moved over, maybe because I come from
a colonial mindset, I had this vast reserve of knowledge
about British politics that I was keen to show off,
and making Adam a political journalist seemed like the best
(15:08):
and most natural way to shoehorn it into a book.
And I also just had spent so much time. I
think it's hard to explain to people who weren't there
the way Brexit gripped the UK, because we really didn't
know from one minute to the next if we would
have a government, if we'd have a prime minister, or
(15:30):
even if we would have the ability to import toilet
paper or the chemicals for clean drinking water, and so
watching the news at ten o'clock became almost a matter
of life and death, and so I thought making Adam
a political journalist could really vivify that for the readers.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
It also carries with it that thing love external pressures
on a marriage and on a relationship, because that's his
professional sphere. It's very clear that it any moment, you know,
as you're reading it you have this kind of anxiety.
You understand the pressure they're under, You understand how close
at times to the edge Coraley is feeling. And you know,
(16:10):
if you have a passing acquaintance with UK politics, that
just around the corner is going to be something else.
That means that Adam is not going to be present
in their marriage again.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Yeah, exactly. And I think that the news environment, whether
we are really following news in depth or whether it
just comes to us through our feeds or in snippets.
It does have the ability to change our entire state.
And I have had the experience of being at home,
(16:43):
having a lovely time with my children, then glancing at
my phone and suddenly my life is ruined, or at
least my day, because of some horrible political thing that's
happened to me. And I felt that, rather than that
being something secret or private that have happens to everyone
in their house every day, why not bring that out
(17:04):
through Coraly's experience and make it something that we can
talk about and notice in ourselves the way that politics
can really have a real world impact on people that
it's being done too, because I think politics is something
that some people do, and mostly it's something that we
have done to us, and I really wanted to show
(17:27):
that from the perspective of someone having politics done to them.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
You said before that your starting point wasn't really so
much the traditional rom com. But it's interesting how quickly
that shift between a meat cured, a grand romantic gesture,
a kind of rescue child from upon all those beats
that are so familiar to us from pop culture. There
is something about the long aftermath of that that feels
(17:53):
relatively unwritten about.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
I agree, maybe I'm just blanking, but I don't feel
as though there are men any in depth domestic strife
novels where two people are good, conscientious, thoughtful people who
don't have some kind of dramatic issue in their relationship.
They're just two people struggling to do their best. And
that's really what I wanted to show if I could.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Yeah, there's no false drama in there. There's no gender Bokay,
this person has suddenly done this massive act of betrayal
or whatever. It's just it's kind of hard to get
on with life and work and a creative life or
a kind of independent, imaginative life and parenting and all
that other stuff. How important to you is the conception
(18:38):
of yourself as a writer. Have you always thought ultimately
you would write books?
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Actually, when I was young, reading was such a huge
part of my life, and I really clearly remember when
we lived in Parkville. My parents would take me to
the library all the time. But there was a night
when the North Carlton library stayed open late, and so
I would go in my pajamas and dressing gown and
get my books for the week, and it was just
(19:06):
an absolutely mandatory part of my life to escape into
a book. It was almost like a life support system.
And in my house, books were venerated and authors were
as important as God's and so I just didn't consider
that I could take my kind of love of reading
(19:29):
and my love of writing and actually turn that into
a book. So I spent so long kind of trying
to earn money on the basis of it by being
a copywriter and that sort of stuff. And I didn't
start writing until I was about thirty, and my first
book didn't come out until I was forty. And so
that's a lot of life where I haven't conceptualized myself
(19:51):
as a writer. And so now when I'm filling in
the card when I come into Australia to say what
I do, I write no list And that makes me
very happy. But no, I wasn't one of those people
who thought, yes, that will be me someday. And I
take a lot of inspiration from people who came to
it very late and make it their life. Pelbie Fitzgerald,
(20:15):
who didn't start writing until she was about sixty. I
need a Bruckner people like that. So there are role
models that I could look to.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
It's funny many of those examples, many of those role
models of writers who come to it later are women.
That women's lives by and large don't allow for the
kind of space needed to give over to creative practice.
And so again and again you'll hear in these interviews
women who need to make that choice later rather than earlier.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Absolutely, and I have had to grow as a person
to be able to communicate to people who love me
that four hours a day minimum needs to be put
aside for me to be perfectly alone. And a lot
of women can't do that for a long time, whether
(21:07):
for personal reasons or just how their life is set up.
And so everyone who is struggling to do that, I
really feel for them. And I was that person for
a long time, so I get it.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Much like the rhythms in Consider your Self Kissed, there
is something too about time and being able to kind
of you know, I quite like the conception of not
really starting to write until you're thirty, not having a
first book till you're forty. Is if you can write
and write for pleasure and hone your craft and work
(21:42):
out the stories you want to tell them, the things
you want to capture. Not having that sense of being
in a hurry, I think can only be a good thing.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Maybe, yeah, I agree, I think so.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
The thing for me, part of the important part of
it was that sense of being an active reader from
an early age like that. Reading was very important to me,
but it wasn't just a passive experience. That to read
something was to add something to the world. Part of
that is yet, how is reader or a job? I'm
not sure. I hope it is. Well.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
For me, reading was pure freedom, and so I would
go into the library, get my ten or twenty books,
and I would deal with the words as they came
into my body and became emotions and images. And even
now I tend to read in a way that is
extremely agentic, so I never feel as if there's a
(22:32):
book I must read. I only read what I want,
and when words are coming into me, I can let
them wash over me. It is just the area of
my life where I feel totally on solid ground, totally
able to experience what the book is giving. It's something
I don't have anywhere else in my life. But it
(22:54):
makes me feel strong and happy.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Jessica Stanley's law consider yourself kissed is available at all
good bookstores. Now, before we go, one last value judgment
about what's on your bookshelves. If I come into your house,
I am not a fan of the color coded bookshelf.
(23:19):
I know it's pretty, I know it's ornamental. But for me,
there is a deliciousness to random happenstance when it comes
to how you around your bookshelves. Maybe by author, maybe
by when you bought them. But I like to stand
and browse endlessly, not to see that this book's read,
that book's blue, and that one's green. But that's just me.
(23:39):
Your mileage may vary. You can find all the books
we mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it
for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
your friends read and review us, share your favorite episode,
write about us on your blog, spread the word however
you can Next week and read this I'm chatting with
New York Times best selling author Wilson about his brand
(24:01):
new novel Run for the Hills, and Kevin reveals why
he wanted to become a writer.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
I loved reading so much, and I think it's just
like anything. If you love something enough like your your
experience of it, you love it so much that you
want to see if it's possible to make something not
to be better than or as good as, but to
just feel it touch up against the things that inspired you.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Read this as a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
the general support of the IRA Group. The show is
produced an edited by Clara Aams, with mixing by Travis
Evans and original compositions by Zolton Fetcher. Thanks for listening,
See you next week.
The last time I was lucky enough to visit the
heaven on Earth that is the Strand Bookshop in New
York City. Amongst the much vaunted eighteen miles of books,
I came across a line of merch tote bags and
tea towels, coffee cups, and bucket hats that were all
emblazoned with a quote from American filmmaker John Waters. It
(00:20):
simply read, if you go home with somebody and they
don't have books, don't fuck them. Delightful. In all the
conversations about romance and modern dating, about searching for a connection,
be it love or friendship or sex, too little is
made of the books that people read. I'm going to
be completely honest. If I visit your house, I'm one
(00:42):
hundred percent having a furtive perv at what's on your bookshelves.
Everything I want and need to know could be answered
if I see the pile on your bedside table, the
most stunned, most love books in your collection. Forget dating apps.
If you want a connection, provide a recommended reading list.
My partner, who is brilliant and wonderful and an excellent
(01:04):
reader with impeccable tastes, lied to me on our first
date about loving an author she knew I was excited about.
I was utterly convinced and completely charmed. London based Australian
author Jessica Stanley's second novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, opens with
all the beats of a classic romantic comedy, a meet, cute,
(01:24):
grand gesture, human connection. But she's too smart a writer
and too curious a thinker about the nature of human
relationships to leave it there. Instead, she's written a book
about the next bit after Coraline Adam's White Hot Courtship,
What does the next decade look like? Children and renovations
and jobs, extended families and friends, disappointments and corrosions, arguments
(01:50):
and compromises, the slog of the day to day reality
of just living. But she writes it with grace and
wit and compassion, finding them romans in the what comes
next when two people decide to be together. If I
saw this book on somebody's bookshelf, I'd know there was
someone I wanted to talk to. I have no doubt
(02:11):
it would be a fun conversation, lively, embracingly honest. Great
qualities in a book, even better qualities in a person.
I'm Michael Williams, and this is Read This the show
about the books we love and the stories behind me.
(02:32):
Where I want to start is an element of the
meat could in your book, which is the swapping of
apartments and the looking at other people's bookshelves. And I
want to know, when you visit someone's house for the
first time, how nosy are you on the question of
what's on their bookshelves.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Well, I'm interested, but as with most things, I'm observing,
but I'm not judging. So I'm interested to see what
people are reading. But by the time I've made it
into someone's home, I'm probably intimate with them anyway, so
I'm certainly not judging. And also I find a lot
of people in their thirties. I'm not in my thirties.
I'm forty three, but a lot of people in their
(03:11):
thirties have moved around so much anyway that maybe they
would think their shelves weren't really reflective of them, so
to be judged on them would be upsetting. Whereas I'm
one of those people who I started amassing my books
when I went to the Lifeline, book Fair and Camera,
and I've taken them from every house to every house
my entire life.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Would someone know a lot about you from your bookshelves?
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I think so. One thing that I've done since I
was really young I probably wouldn't do it now is
that my books have always been separated into women authors
and then male authors. And I always put the women
authors in a special in a special place, and the
male authors I put, you know, in a secondary location
(03:57):
outside the bathroom or something like that.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Are there books on a shelf that would disqualify a
person for you?
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I think I would feel frightened and concerned if someone
had a top Gear book.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Oh yeah, good, yeah, no, no out the door.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
But apart from that sort of thing, no, because who
knows someone might have a book because they're reviewing it
or writing a nasty essay about it. Yeah, I just
I couldn't be sure.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Are their books for you that you would insist that
someone read if you wanted them to understand you?
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Wow? Well, in considerous self kissed. I have Adam say
to Coraley that he loves the Don Watson book about
Paul Keating, and that makes sense for him because he
is a political journalist. And Coraly notices that the spine
of that book is corduroy.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
It's been read, so I love that description. When I
came across it on the page, I was like, I'd
never heard it before. And a corduroy spine denoting a
much loved book really tickles me.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
And that's funny because I made my husband read that
book when we first met, as well as Watch The
Castle and What's the Murder of Old Chopper?
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Oh, there you go, Chopper, The Castle and Memoirs of
a Bleeding Heart. Yeah, that's a good cultural three. Was
that the Australia that you needed him to understand?
Speaker 2 (05:19):
That's exactly it.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah, did he have equivalent titles he felt that you
needed to understand?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Gosh, I feel really bad. Well, if he did, I'm
not across them.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
You're very literate already, though. I imagine your love of
Alan Hollinghurst, for example, would mean that a particular strata
of London society you had a pretty good understanding of.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yes, but that wasn't my husband's strata of society. What
is Northern Irish? Because he's Northern Irish. So he is
very insistent that I regularly watch a meme which is
a guy from Northern Ireland saying this is a wonder day,
a wonder day because it's.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
There you go. That's a good thing to understand about,
that kind of Northern Irish energy. So tell me about
love and romance on the page. How crucial is it
to your reading history, How much is it something that
you relish, and how actively did you decide to subvert
those beats when writing Consider your self Kissed.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
It's strange because when I began writing this book, I
had just published a previous book that hadn't gone very well,
This is a Great Hope, which came out in twenty
twenty two. It had been reviewed really nicely but hadn't
made any sort of splash, and people who knew me
really liked it, but no one else seemed to notice it,
(06:45):
and I couldn't even come over to launch it because
of the strange timing. But I had got to a
stage where I thought, Okay, writing a book isn't going
to change my life. And then I thought, well, I'm
I'm even going to try again. And I really felt
as if there was only one reason to try and
(07:08):
write another book, and that was for the love of
actually writing. And I had also come to a point
in my life where care and love feel like everything
to me, not just personally, but in the political environment.
It feels like the most natural and intuitive response to
(07:30):
what's going on more generally, which I would characterize as
being quite hateful. And so, even though in the past
most of my most favorite books have been about families,
I wanted to combine that with a classic love story,
someone meeting someone and that feeling of falling in love,
but then to also follow that love for the next
(07:54):
ten years when things started to get hard. And one
of the books that I modeled it off, apart from
the Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, was American Wife
by Curtis Sittenfeld, where she follows fictionalized Laura Bush as
incredibly wildly she falls in love with a fictionalized George W. Bush,
(08:15):
and I think you maybe follow them for twenty years,
and for some reason, she really gets you to care
about these two people. And so I thought, how can
I watch two people fall in love and convey that
to the reader, but also help people in a time
when it's pretty hard to concentrate on long form content
(08:38):
of any kind, and especially fiction, Maybe how can I
get them to fall in love with the experience of
reading about them.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
One of the things I love so much about this
book is its approach to time. It's as much a
book about the passing of time as it is about love.
That actually, when we hit what we think of as
kind of rom combads tends to be kind of constrained
and kind of almost instrumental way of telling a story.
(09:05):
That the point at which you get together and you
fall in love, that's the end of the interesting bit,
and what comes afterwards is just the kind of day
to day of life. Was it always going to be
that kind of sweeping decade long view.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, So I go around with a lot of material
in my mind, things that I think are funny or interesting,
funny things that people have said, and I sort of
wait until I can come up with a structure or
sort of line my buckets up in a row to
toss the toss the content into, you know, like someone
feeding the penguins at the zoo. And this ten year
(09:40):
structure came to me right after the joint fortieth birthday
party I had with my husband. I had moved to
London when I was twenty nine, and I already knew
him then, but we got married pretty quickly afterwards. And
so by the time we were at our joint fortieth
we had had three children, and we had spent ten
years together as a married couple. And if I could
(10:01):
have seen when I was twenty nine, if I could
have seen this lovely party, my amazing husband, my lovely children,
our friends, my friend's children, all hanging out together and
celebrating us, I wouldn't believed my luck. It was incredible
and amazing. But the actual emotional experience of having spent
(10:21):
that ten years, having reached the age of forty and
been married for so long, I really felt run over
by a truck. And the time, especially, my experience of
time was incredible, where days when you're on your own
with a baby can feel about twenty years long, and
(10:45):
then something lovely is happening to you and it just
washes by and is almost a dream afterwards. And so obviously,
when I was covering the ten years in the book,
I was trying to mimic that sense of time by
zooming in on some very special, deep emotional moments and
(11:05):
then zooming out and showing how time just runs away
from you.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
When we returned, Jessica shares how being an outsider helped
her shape her main character, Coraly and why she only
ever reads exactly what she wants to do. We'll be
right back your protagonist Coraly for her as for yourself.
(11:38):
In being an outsider, that thing about starting your life
over again in another place and having roots elsewhere. How
important to you was it that Coraly was also an
outsider in the community that she was building.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Well, a lot of my favorite books feature an outsider
to a community, and I think it's the best standpoint
to analyze anything from. And of course, my favorite book
of all time it's The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst,
and Nick is the ultimate outsider. He embeds himself with
a family that is completely different to his own, and
(12:13):
he just notices every single thing about them. And that's
sort of what I want to do with Crawley, because
I am obsessed with being from Australia. It's a major
part of who I am, and I moved to London
for love, not necessarily to be in London, and since
(12:33):
then I've come to really love and appreciate it, but
I've also been noticing what's strange and funny about it,
and I wanted to write the book, so I could
put everything that I'd noticed into a book.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
One of the things about that which I think you
capture so beautifully is the way in which any family
or any community is and accretion of different traditions and
different value sets an Australian amongst a bunch of Londoners.
It does seem an important counterweight to certain expectations around class,
around who's connected to who and how that that Australianist
(13:12):
does seem to be a key element in the boog.
Have you had early readers in the UK? Do they
warm to Corally's Australianists? Do they recognize it?
Speaker 2 (13:23):
It's funny because when I went around to bookshops, you know,
before books come out, you get taken around to try
and interest booksellers in what you're selling. And I was
too shy to do the kind of pitch the intro,
And when my publicist started off with it's about an
Australian in London, I internally cringed. I thought, these people
are not going to care. And that has been my
(13:46):
personal experience of living in the UK for such a
long time, is that when people hear that you're from Australia,
or when people here in Australian voice, they zone out.
So I was anxious about how the book would be received,
especially if the australianess was foregrounded. But everyone has responded
(14:07):
really beautifully. Although it's interesting to me that no one
has responded about her being Australian. I think they have
just responded to her as a person, which is the
most you can hope for.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
I think so. I mean, the other thing you have
going for you is that telling the story of the
UK during that particular decade is one of massive kind
of social change, social anxiety, political turmoil. Do you always
know that Adam was going to be in the political
media sphere? Was that a useful tool for making everything
(14:41):
from Brexit to COVID to Boris Johnson a key element
of the story.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Yes, that was the only way I could think of
to bring it in in a way that was natural
because when I moved over, maybe because I come from
a colonial mindset, I had this vast reserve of knowledge
about British politics that I was keen to show off,
and making Adam a political journalist seemed like the best
(15:08):
and most natural way to shoehorn it into a book.
And I also just had spent so much time. I
think it's hard to explain to people who weren't there
the way Brexit gripped the UK, because we really didn't
know from one minute to the next if we would
have a government, if we'd have a prime minister, or
(15:30):
even if we would have the ability to import toilet
paper or the chemicals for clean drinking water, and so
watching the news at ten o'clock became almost a matter
of life and death, and so I thought making Adam
a political journalist could really vivify that for the readers.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
It also carries with it that thing love external pressures
on a marriage and on a relationship, because that's his
professional sphere. It's very clear that it any moment, you know,
as you're reading it you have this kind of anxiety.
You understand the pressure they're under, You understand how close
at times to the edge Coraley is feeling. And you know,
(16:10):
if you have a passing acquaintance with UK politics, that
just around the corner is going to be something else.
That means that Adam is not going to be present
in their marriage again.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Yeah, exactly. And I think that the news environment, whether
we are really following news in depth or whether it
just comes to us through our feeds or in snippets.
It does have the ability to change our entire state.
And I have had the experience of being at home,
(16:43):
having a lovely time with my children, then glancing at
my phone and suddenly my life is ruined, or at
least my day, because of some horrible political thing that's
happened to me. And I felt that, rather than that
being something secret or private that have happens to everyone
in their house every day, why not bring that out
(17:04):
through Coraly's experience and make it something that we can
talk about and notice in ourselves the way that politics
can really have a real world impact on people that
it's being done too, because I think politics is something
that some people do, and mostly it's something that we
have done to us, and I really wanted to show
(17:27):
that from the perspective of someone having politics done to them.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
You said before that your starting point wasn't really so
much the traditional rom com. But it's interesting how quickly
that shift between a meat cured, a grand romantic gesture,
a kind of rescue child from upon all those beats
that are so familiar to us from pop culture. There
is something about the long aftermath of that that feels
(17:53):
relatively unwritten about.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
I agree, maybe I'm just blanking, but I don't feel
as though there are men any in depth domestic strife
novels where two people are good, conscientious, thoughtful people who
don't have some kind of dramatic issue in their relationship.
They're just two people struggling to do their best. And
that's really what I wanted to show if I could.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Yeah, there's no false drama in there. There's no gender Bokay,
this person has suddenly done this massive act of betrayal
or whatever. It's just it's kind of hard to get
on with life and work and a creative life or
a kind of independent, imaginative life and parenting and all
that other stuff. How important to you is the conception
(18:38):
of yourself as a writer. Have you always thought ultimately
you would write books?
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Actually, when I was young, reading was such a huge
part of my life, and I really clearly remember when
we lived in Parkville. My parents would take me to
the library all the time. But there was a night
when the North Carlton library stayed open late, and so
I would go in my pajamas and dressing gown and
get my books for the week, and it was just
(19:06):
an absolutely mandatory part of my life to escape into
a book. It was almost like a life support system.
And in my house, books were venerated and authors were
as important as God's and so I just didn't consider
that I could take my kind of love of reading
(19:29):
and my love of writing and actually turn that into
a book. So I spent so long kind of trying
to earn money on the basis of it by being
a copywriter and that sort of stuff. And I didn't
start writing until I was about thirty, and my first
book didn't come out until I was forty. And so
that's a lot of life where I haven't conceptualized myself
(19:51):
as a writer. And so now when I'm filling in
the card when I come into Australia to say what
I do, I write no list And that makes me
very happy. But no, I wasn't one of those people
who thought, yes, that will be me someday. And I
take a lot of inspiration from people who came to
it very late and make it their life. Pelbie Fitzgerald,
(20:15):
who didn't start writing until she was about sixty. I
need a Bruckner people like that. So there are role
models that I could look to.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
It's funny many of those examples, many of those role
models of writers who come to it later are women.
That women's lives by and large don't allow for the
kind of space needed to give over to creative practice.
And so again and again you'll hear in these interviews
women who need to make that choice later rather than earlier.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Absolutely, and I have had to grow as a person
to be able to communicate to people who love me
that four hours a day minimum needs to be put
aside for me to be perfectly alone. And a lot
of women can't do that for a long time, whether
(21:07):
for personal reasons or just how their life is set up.
And so everyone who is struggling to do that, I
really feel for them. And I was that person for
a long time, so I get it.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Much like the rhythms in Consider your Self Kissed, there
is something too about time and being able to kind
of you know, I quite like the conception of not
really starting to write until you're thirty, not having a
first book till you're forty. Is if you can write
and write for pleasure and hone your craft and work
(21:42):
out the stories you want to tell them, the things
you want to capture. Not having that sense of being
in a hurry, I think can only be a good thing.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Maybe, yeah, I agree, I think so.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
The thing for me, part of the important part of
it was that sense of being an active reader from
an early age like that. Reading was very important to me,
but it wasn't just a passive experience. That to read
something was to add something to the world. Part of
that is yet, how is reader or a job? I'm
not sure. I hope it is. Well.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
For me, reading was pure freedom, and so I would
go into the library, get my ten or twenty books,
and I would deal with the words as they came
into my body and became emotions and images. And even
now I tend to read in a way that is
extremely agentic, so I never feel as if there's a
(22:32):
book I must read. I only read what I want,
and when words are coming into me, I can let
them wash over me. It is just the area of
my life where I feel totally on solid ground, totally
able to experience what the book is giving. It's something
I don't have anywhere else in my life. But it
(22:54):
makes me feel strong and happy.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Jessica Stanley's law consider yourself kissed is available at all
good bookstores. Now, before we go, one last value judgment
about what's on your bookshelves. If I come into your house,
I am not a fan of the color coded bookshelf.
(23:19):
I know it's pretty, I know it's ornamental. But for me,
there is a deliciousness to random happenstance when it comes
to how you around your bookshelves. Maybe by author, maybe
by when you bought them. But I like to stand
and browse endlessly, not to see that this book's read,
that book's blue, and that one's green. But that's just me.
(23:39):
Your mileage may vary. You can find all the books
we mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it
for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
your friends read and review us, share your favorite episode,
write about us on your blog, spread the word however
you can Next week and read this I'm chatting with
New York Times best selling author Wilson about his brand
(24:01):
new novel Run for the Hills, and Kevin reveals why
he wanted to become a writer.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
I loved reading so much, and I think it's just
like anything. If you love something enough like your your
experience of it, you love it so much that you
want to see if it's possible to make something not
to be better than or as good as, but to
just feel it touch up against the things that inspired you.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Read this as a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
the general support of the IRA Group. The show is
produced an edited by Clara Aams, with mixing by Travis
Evans and original compositions by Zolton Fetcher. Thanks for listening,
See you next week.
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