But some of them turn out to be masses, leaves and leave, stacks and stapled bunches of archives. Childhood drawings. Notebooks. Sketchbooks. Lists. Dreams. Stories. Poems I wrote in secret at 14. Rubbish I wrote to show people at 15. Copied-out bits of other people’s writing. Letters. Postcards. Oh my god. Just every kind of bit of detritus and precious papery memory a person could possibly find. It’s absolutely wonderful, in a terrifying kind of way.

I might keep finding bits, and out of sheer bemusement, posting them up here. Why not? But for now, this is a Credo I found this morning, written in my best handwriting (and framed with careful pink-highlighter lines), dated April 1986 (so I had just turned 14). It says:

“I BELIEVE

THAT all people are equal and different and important: and the importance is that they are equal and different.

No one is inferior in any way: we are all perfect in our own ways; we are all perfect at being ourselves. Some people just:

i. haven’t or dont know how or are scared to reach themselves

ii. sometimes hurt other people and things because of this

iii. sometimes can’t cope with their problems or don’t know how to so they get their frustrations out in different, often violent ways.

iv. sometimes don’t realise the harm they are doing to themselves and/or others.

THAT all people should be happy and peaceful and should all strive to achieve this state and then maintain it for themselves and other people and things. And that people should never inflict harm or a threat to another’s achievement of this state or the stage of development relating to this state.

People should have as much privacy as they require or want but they should be willing to talk about and seek help for their problems, and they should be happy to accept their faults and weaknesses and try to improve them without shame.

People should never be ashamed of themselves unless they have in some way hurt some one but if they have so wish they should be free to change and improve themselves physically and emotionally.

People should accept everyone else as they are and never make fun of them in any way or try to change them unless it is for the better as that person sees fit.

And a main aim of life should be to understand yourself and everyone else, their views and the reasons for their behaviour.

THAT everyone should accept death, risks and misfortune as an inevitable part of life but they should attempt to convert the triumph over these problems into not a keeping-back of disaster but as a step forward to total happiness. Violence and discontent should be expelled from a person’s body or mind in an effective way that does not in any way jeopardise another person’s happiness.”

It’s a wonder that with such a grasp of language at 14 I didn’t go into the public service writing meaningly formal crap; but you have to admit, my idealism was pretty adorable.

Writing is Grace

My fourth post – I had intended to write twice as many, in an inspired burst of blogging hyperactivity, but after peaking early in the early 2000s with a regular blog (back in the frowsty old dear days when people said, ‘A what?’) I have never again recovered the focus and the steam and the dedication, and alas, this month of February hecticness and an especial dose of personal frenetics too fell victim to lack of puff and excess of distraction. So, many thanks to Southerly and its people for inviting me to burble away here, and thanks to anyone who read said burblings. It’s been nice.

I’d like to conclude with something that I think hopefully expresses a sum emanation from my previous posts (about moving books, vanity/embarrassment when writing, and reading). Common to both reading and writing (and, no doubt, collecting books) is, I think, the importance of humility.

It is a great privilege to pick up a polished piece of writing, someone else’s work. Their toil, their care, their thoughts, placed in your hands and your mind. No word on a page arrives there randomly, or without some effort. Words don’t just waft down like autumn leaves. They’re chosen. Placed. Considered. Changed. Deleted. Replaced. Challenged and defended. Every single word, every single sentence, bit of punctuation, choice of tempo, selection of layout, is the product of thought (subliminal or conscious). Writing isn’t like breathing. Writing is a choice and every choice is work.

The writer didn’t have to publish his labours; share her dreams; even re-draft a single word. That writer might just have discharged the imagination and wandered off again. Might have tired before the work was properly caressed and bashed into shape, might have shrugged at the editor’s enquiring look and said, ‘It’ll do’. Might have declined the chance to terrify his soul with the prospect of impending publication and potential mockery; might have kept her best thoughts and phrases and understandings of the world jealously to herself, and burned her diaries or notebooks every ten years instead of digging through in search of inspiration. Might have saved the money spent on the creative writing course. Might have baulked after the first negative feedback or the first meeting with the dreaded workshop ogre. Might have let despair and fright triumph. Might have watched telly and eaten chips instead.

Writers do not generally get paid a great deal. Writers do not generally get published a great deal. Vanity is an emollient and a wage, but it’s not sufficient to explain all the writing that is made and cared for and dared and shared. There is generosity here. There is offering. A page held in your hands is like a cheek laid in your palm.

Likewise, it’s a great miracle when someone cares to pick up your own writing, and spend their time, their focus, their curiosity on it (rather than any other piece of writing by any other writer; watching sports on tv; plucking their eyebrows; going for a jog; masturbating; eating chips…). What a privilege indeed! Someone spent precious minutes of their life experiencing your thoughts.^[1] Someone chose to read your work in place of that of the millions, millions of other authors’ millions, millions of other works (although Geoff Dyer, as I discussed last time, shares with me a horrid compulsion to instantaneously and almost inevitably wish I was also reading something else, in my case for fear of running out of time for the really good books…). And while a paying reader who selected your work from among all the others on the bookshelves and spent hard-earned on purchasing it is perhaps the most obviously bejewelled of tributes, I reserve a special awe and gratitude for readers who recommend, lend and gift my work to friends, and to those friends who accept the recommendation, and even more gorgeously, come to tell me if they were glad they did. Never mind the royalties missed when a book is passed between friends and family, the sheepish apologies of ‘It’s done the rounds’ as a battered copy is passed over the desk to be signed. I am totally, utterly thrilled when someone has wanted to make someone else spend their time on my work.

If our work is noticed by critics, selected for review, mentioned in media, discussed in literary circles or given time in writers festival panels, extracted in journals, interviewed about, rated in street press, promoted in the Qantas magazine, cited in vox pops, even ostentatiously ignored by our enemies, we are hugely honoured. In 2010 Google estimated that there were 129,864,880 books in existence (i.e. published). Only a fraction of them is available or originated in Australia; but still. Any writer who gets a skerrick of notice amongst all this noise is singing the right kind of song.

And if we are very, very lucky, readers even take time to express how they feel about our work. They post reviews on sites like Goodreads and Amazon, they pen little précis for their bookshop newsletter, mention it on their blogs and in other blogs’ comment threads, they suggest the work for book clubs and sit around there on Thursday nights saying what they thought of it. They might even go to the trouble of tracking down the author through publishing house or Facebook or Twitter and sending a personal message. And if we are so lucky as to receive these messages – even if they’re not complimentary! – we are honoured. There are several hundred million other things that person might have done with their time. Writing to authors is not, generally, a major priority in anyone’s life; and yet people do it, and they do it sweetly. Never should we take for granted a single pair of eyeballs fixed on a single word we’ve offered.

And, at the end of the day, I find it humbling even to witness and experience my own ability to write. Not always write very well, but – well, to be able to write at all, in a world with still high numbers of people who can’t, or poorly (somewhere between 50 and 70 per cent of Australians have sub-sufficient literacy) and to be able to write fluently and to have written adequately enough to be published. There are the operatic rapturous moments when the muse kisses you deeply and the magical words fly from the ends of your fingers, when you’re surfing towards the bottom of each page, when a day’s work is like flying… and there is the simple, much humbler appreciation of being able to communicate and express in a form which is not transient in the way conversation is, or ephemeral in the mind’s eye images, impressions and memories that we share with ourselves, or mumbled and incomplete the way speech is. Writing fixes things, it allows articulacy and elegance where we might be shy in person; it gives us the time, as we cogitate each word, sip the tea, stare out the window, pat the dog, to evolve our thinking carefully; it permits the retraction of a mis-thought and the replacement by a better one. Writing lets our thoughts – formed in the very material goo of our fleshly brains – live on for millennia (just ask Seneca, who took his own life but still scolds from two thousand years ago). And writing is an act of grace, isn’t it? I don’t mean to end on a gushy, sentimental note. I’m not talking about eye surgery on the poor. But writing is grace, and humility is the nicest way to receive it.

[1] For a reminder of just what this signifies, what an immense gift a human’s time is, I recommend the Stoic Roman writer Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, in which he points out that we resent thieves of property, respect, rights, money, and so on, but freely give the single item which is absolutely not replaceable: the time we have before we die

Reader’s Block

Ironically it was tonight, a hot, smothering, still Melbourne summer’s night when it’s all I can do to keep my dull eyes fixed on the telly, never mind think about great literature, that I had one of those moments when something true about my life with books hit me. I was trapped on the couch under the warm, soft weight of my little cat Boo, who was giving me a very rare and precious honour by taking her siesta on my hot lap, and thinking idly of how great it would be to get into bed later, and read for a while. It’s been a horrible, stressful, demanding day and the idea of bed, bed and a book has a reliably totemic, analgesic effect on nearly any spasm of stress I might have. At the end of the day, there’s always, always bed and a book. A bower of comfort, and a cushioning, almost like a very comfortable mattress, between you and the gravity of the world. It has saved my sanity in the harshest of times and an evening concluded without a few pages in bed, even when I have company, is rare.

But it was still hours before bed-time, and the cat was upon me so I couldn’t stir, and the tv remote was too remote indeed on the other armchair, and there was nothing to hand except a folded-over print-out of an essay I’d found in unpacking the house which I’d chucked unopened into the lounge room, hoping to get it read during the sports bulletin on the nightly news, and thus be free to briskly discard it. I’ve been unpacking five million books all week, having spent the previous two weeks packing them up and am absolutely rabid by this point to cast off any superfluous printed material. So I picked up the sheaf of pages.

It turned out to be a review from The New York Review of Books, by Giles Harvey, of two recent publications by one of my favourite authors, long-time-no-one-else-knew-about-him, British wunder essayist Geoff Dyer. (I have a whole long and dramatic Dyer-esque anecdote about meeting and not-meeting Dyer at a writers festival, but I think you had to be there. Suffice it to say that my rueful frenzies of regret have not diminished my appreciation of his talent.) Dyer is fairly well known here now, not least for the 2012 collection of pieces, Working the Room: Essays 1999-2010 and his most recent, Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room (2012), both of which were being reviewed in this piece. Harvey writes very nicely and deftly about Dyer’s very nice and deft writing, and I was enjoying the simultaneous play of a good review about a good book. I was thinking, I should re-read some of Dyer’s older stuff. I was thinking, oh for that bed, later, and a book, even though last night I finished the one I was reading and will have to start another, and shall it be the one I’m meant to read immediately for my studies or one of the two I’m meant to be reviewing, oh, what it is to have to read what you’re meant to instead of what you want to, wasn’t I going to try some Patrick White, well, don’t I always think that? – and having that familiar pang of regret that whenever I’m seized by the ferocious desire to read (or re-read) a certain book it’s always at a moment when that is quite impossible – when I came upon a reminder in Harvey’s review that Geoff Dyer himself is enjoying reading less and less as he gets older. And I thought: OH GOD. ME TOO.

And, reading this nice deft review of a wonderful book I thought: He’s right. Most of the time I can’t stand reading. Most of the time, to be honest, it puts me in a terrible state of tense irritation.

That is, I love reading. There are still books that make me squee and clench. Actually make my heart beat faster. Revelation. Glee. That’s still possible. I am thoroughly, thoroughly enjoying slowly eking out John Julius Norwich’s 1967 history of Norman Sicily The Kingdom in the Sun, and just rapturously appreciated Elizabeth Knox’s Billie’s Kiss for its Hilary Mantel-esque cleverness, and was re-ravished last year by Lolita… But, looking back just now through my notes on what I read, I am hard put to pick those gems from the mud. I read quite a lot of books last year, and the year before, and I cannot imagine a life without my beloved books and that beloved bed and book at the end of the day (sorry; no, I can, I had that life for a time once, and it was grim and gristled, all the flesh sucked off the days). And most of the books I have read in recent years I may as well not have read, for all they mattered, or stirred me, or might be recalled. Too often, in fact, I turned a book, mid-sentence, looked thoughtfully at the cover, calculated that I was half-way or two-thirds of the way, or two chapters through the book, and realised that if I put the book down there and then and never picked it up again, my life would not in any way be diminished. Nor was it, when I did just that. I would never miss finding out the end to that story. I would never regret not getting to know those characters. The book would, very likely, never again enter my consciousness except as an object to be packed, given away, or thumped thoughtlessly into a pile. It, and I may never have met. And to be honest, the vast majority of books I read are of that category.

I’m not going to sledge, here. This is not a complaint about contemporary literature and its accidie. I was just struck by the nerve of Geoff Dyer, a writer known for his erudition and sensitivity as well as his legendary supposed procrastination and shiftlessness, in admitting that he, a writer, is less and less enamoured by reading. It’s not what we’re supposed to say. We are supposed to bang on and on about how we live to write, live to read – how we are storytellers, in whom storytelling burns like an unquenchable ember, the desire to share stories and absorb them and surround ourselves constantly with stories. We are relied on to be the readers of each other’s works and be nice about them all the time and persistently clamour for more publication, more voices, further opportunities, more and more things to read. We, as writers, if no one else, must be the champions of reading.

I’m all for reading. But I notice that less and less can I justify the time I spend on it myself. Dyer, in the essay ‘Reader’s Block’, admits that in moments of pretentiousness he calls his condition the Mir syndrome, “after the cosmonaut who said that he didn’t read a page of the book he’d taken to the space station because his spare moments were better spent gazing out of the window.” I can understand that. There’s not a great deal to look at outside a curtained window at 11pm in a Melbourne suburb, but I know what he means. I also understand Dyer when he talks about the conscience involved in choosing (or being obliged to read) one book rather than another, lamenting that, “the opportunity cost of reading a given book is always too great.” I am possessed with constant violent anxiety and anguish over my choice of reading material – if I am reading new releases I am neglecting classics; if I re-read an old favourite I am missing out on a yet-unknown treasure; if I capitulate and read something middling-oldish, like Iris Murdoch or Graham Greene, tonic though they are, I won’t know what everyone is talking about when the Miles Franklin shortlist comes out (I never do, anyway). So when I pick up a book, from the – literally – five metres (by spine width) of unread books I have next to my bed, it had better be worth it. It’s like saving only one orphan from the orphanage. It is going to have to be utterly, utterly charming or back it goes into the cupboard under the stairs.

You can imagine my chagrin when, having committed to one out of the hundred imminently awaiting my attention next to the bed, or the thousands and thousands in the shops, or the hundreds of thousands in the library, it turns out to be a waste of my time. I have only a limited number of hours of life left to me (and I am only forty yet), limited reading hours; an average book takes, say, eight or nine hours to read; perhaps one book at week unless I’m very efficient; about eighty books a year on average; almost nothing is worth a full two weeks of my reading schedule.^[1]

And each disappointment (like the peevishness of the three bears, finding each volume too rictus-tight lyrical, too terse and manly – please, not the dreaded ‘McCarthy-esque’! – or too flaccidly pitiful) puts me in a more and more heightened condition of crankiness. By this stage I am pre-cranky with books. I open each one with a De Niro scowl and mentally stand, hand on cocked hip, lip curled, demanding to be impressed. Demanding to be satisfied. I am too old, too sleepy, too well-read, too arrogant now to finish a book unless it is absolutely fucking astonishingly good.

And I don’t think that is too much to ask.

In a more charitable frame of mind than myself, Dyer suggests

If reading heightens your responses, shapes your idea of the world, gives you a sense of the purpose of life, then it is not surprising if, over time, reading should come to play a proportionately smaller role in the context of the myriad possibilities it has opened up. The more thoroughly we have absorbed its lessons, the less frequently we need to refer to the user’s manual.

I would so very much like to think it’s because I’m wiser, that I don’t need reading as much anymore, but I doubt it. I would adore to think I’m such a great writer I don’t need to study great writing any further, but I know absolutely this is not true, and never can be – god, as if. I’m just bored. I’m just restlessly, shiftlessly, frequently totally bored by most of the books I so much wanted to read. Is it the lack of fully realised story (what Michael Chabon so gorgeously calls “plotless [stories] sparkling with epiphanic dew”)^[2] or the turgid style, or the insensible formulaic construction or is it the fault of creative writing courses or not enough creative writing courses or is it modern malaise or is it shoddy neglect of editing or is it hype outsizing actuality or is it production-line commercialism or is it uncooked writing or overboiled writing… is it the writing or is it me? Who knows. It’s not even very interesting, that I’m not so interested in reading, or rather, so dissatisfied with it.

I want a book that tells me something I don’t know. I want a book that shows the author took care with words, which throws glints of gorgeousness and flashes of fangs, which galumphs along with a cracking story and lingers tenderly over moments of grace. I want a book that’s muscular, tight, jointed so the sinews flex with every line; I want a book that’s generous, even baggy, discursive, confident: more than anything, I want to read something that feels as if the author enjoyed writing it, and wasn’t typing with tense, close-bitten, freezing fingertips attached to a mind feeling grim. Writing, just as much as my experience of reading the product, shouldn’t feel like a dreadful chore.

Look, doubtless, as it is with Dyer (who mourns that he’s left it too late to enjoy The Brothers Karamazov), it’s not really the books. Or not entirely – I do suspect fiction in general is becoming more insipid – and not always. It must also be me. A searching, hungry, dissatisfied griping of restlessness in what I want, and a persistently shifting set of criteria. Perhaps I don’t really know what I’m searching for. For a few months, as I was working on one of my own, doubtless extremely flawed, novels-in-endless-progress, I found myself mooching distractedly around bookshop shelves: haunting the crime section, the fiction section, the fantasy nook… What was I looking for? I picked up volume after volume, but barely glanced at each before I replaced it, and left without buying anything, and with the sensation that I’d forgotten the name of a book I was long yearning to read. Eventually I realised: weirdly, I was looking for my own novel – the one I was still working on – my own unpublished book, hoping to find it on the shelves and discover how it ended. Not surprisingly, it still hasn’t been found.

So I desperately want to locate good books: satisfying, chewy, juicy books which I can be glad of discovering. I want to be able to receive and devour them as they deserve. I want to find focus and offer devotion to something worth my time. There are lots, lots of books like that out there – old ones, forgotten ones, books which are at this moment still being written.

But, having just moved well over a thousand books because I love them so, I wonder why so many of them, though beloved and cherished and gorgeous, have never been read again (though I yearn for that, often), and why so much of my collection is from my younger days, and so many of the books that have come my way in the past ten years are no longer with me, on the shelves, in the new house, or even in the archives of my memory. Why I read as much as ever, and yet, like some character in a fairytale, feel less and less nourished by most of the magic pudding.

[2] But I am afraid to say, Chabon being one of the very few authors who generally make me swoon in ravished delight – see The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) – the other day I gave up on his newest, Telegraph Avenue, halfway through. He was just trying way too hard to be wonderful. It really burned.

On changing my life…

On the temptation of drugs…

On my ‘show and tell’…

and there are three others if you visit the page.

I just heard Richard Ford tell Margaret Throsby on ABC-FM that, in writing, what writers do is make themselves smarter than they really are. He likened the creative process to a crucible, one which was hot and focused, and which made him seem smarter than he is. And this fits in perfectly with what I was thinking last night: that writing is very much about vanity, and embarrassment.

It’s always astonishing to me how little we talk, in essays, interviews, in teaching students, about the psychology and emotions of writing. Those things are what brim in us every time we sit to write. Fear, often. Glee. Pride. Astonishment and assurance. Fear again; stronger: terror. And often at the heart of all these and the other fugitive things we feel are the questions: how dare I think I can do this? And, why would I think I can’t?

I’m finding it difficult, Southerly readers, to get down to doing these guest posts, because I realise I haven’t done any writing since last September. Life has been busy since then: there was a holiday of tiring travel and then Christmas and then January torpor and February frenzy, and I just haven’t had the focus (only the remorse) and now I’m unpacking the house and it’s all I can do to find my desk under the boxes. But it’s also because I think I’m still coming down off the back of the six and a half years of writing a personal column for the Age, which ended abruptly last April, and the massive carnival ride of hubris and sheepishness, confidence and crisis that is involved in producing even a single published personal piece, and which occupied a disproportionate amount of creative energy simply in the management of so much writing-oriented emotion.

The column ran fortnightly in the A2 (later called Life&Style) Saturday section of the paper, on page 3 and then the back page, for years longer than I imagined – six and a half years more than I imagined. When Jonathan Green first rang and offered me the gig, just after my first book In My Skin came out, I was astounded. There was nothing in my idea of myself that said that I had anything to offer the public beyond the story I’d told in the book, and the tangents of discussion that came out of that story in publicity events, and even that all seemed like some ludicrous misunderstanding, half the time. You’ve made a horrible mistake, I said. Surely there’s someone else. There’s got to be. Someone actually clever. Honestly, Jonathan, I said, I’m an idiot. But he insisted I have a go. So every two weeks I would have a preliminary pee, clench a cup of coffee, swallow the fear and sit down on a Tuesday afternoon to write 750 sheepish words of me, me, meeee.

Of course I could have written about anything, but apprehension of breaking some implicit pact of confidentiality with my friends, and my total inexpertise in any other subject other than my own solipcism, meant that generally I fell back on using myself as a prism through which to talk about issues. So to the admixture of vanity and embarrassment I added narcissism/neurosis. Not that I’m complaining. It was a fantastic gig. I needed the money, enjoyed the challenge, loved the rush, learned a lot, received lovely feedback, got my name out and about. People, not everyone, but enough, seemed to like it. And I knew how lucky I was, how coveted a position it was, a regular gig in the Age., and the chance to share my thoughts. It’s only that it brought home, like a pulse of dread in the throat, just how volatile it is, the confidence and the humility required to write, and how vaporously they can rise to smother you; or evaporate away entirely just when you realised that, after all, you need them.

Every time you write something with the idea that it might be published (in any format) you have to confront these two fears (or at least I do): that I am too good, and that I’m too bad. It’s like Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death forces. One of the voices inside me says: Really, they’re lucky to have you! You’re so clever, Kate. You and your lovely words, your delightful turns of phrase, your perceptive wisdoms. What charm, what élan. You make it look easy. Honestly. And the subtle things you think: the way you capture life’s truths, the humanity that glows from your page. It’s amazing. So young, and already so wonderful.

It’s all about making myself look smarter than I really am. Trailing my cape, flourishing my polysyllabic Latinate adjectives and my elegant way with semi-colons; it’s making myself, in the privacy of my office, sit a little taller and think, You know, it’s true, I really am a clever girl. I can do this. I can do this so well. How gorgeous, that I’m getting the chance to show everyone! – and myself. And show myself.

I would think: no, actually, it’s not vanity: this is the attitude of a professional. I know my skill set. I am aware of my assets. I’m confident in my work. This is how a real writer thinks: that they’re a real writer. I must be: look, I’m writing!

And the other, inevitable, inexorable voice says: BULL. SHIT. God. Pathetic. It’s exactly that kind of arrogance that produces bad writing. Slack writing. You’re hardly even trying. Disdain for your readers. What’s that, you just sat down and wrote something in twenty minutes and barely read it over before filing? You’re riding for a fall, young lady. Everyone can see how hopeless you are: and how up-yourself. It’s worse that you don’t even know it – that you’re so mediocre. So embarrassing for you. Week after week you expose this delusion that you’re cute. You’re not just as boring as everyone else, you’re worse, because you imagine you’re interesting. And who do you think you are to be taking people’s time? They could do anything else with that five minutes it’s going to take to read your drivel! You! Why should anyone listen to you?

And then it’s so horrible, even the act of putting down words, even spending time thinking up words. Who are we, these monstrous things called writers? Us parasites, us self-absorbed ninnies, crawling creatures of vanity which we then impose on others. Surely we could be better used digging latrines for the poor, or distributing soup, or just pointlessly breaking rocks in the sun. Wankers. Losers. We should all be whipped.

In the midst of this clamour, this screeching, the words must be put on the page. The fingers must type. They must hear the third voice, the one that’s trying to dictate, ever so humbly, some thoughts into the ends of your fingertips on the keys. For the duration of the writing, you have to shut up those voices. There is, I tell myself, plenty of time for them later. On the tram. Washing up. In the dark of the night at 3 a.m. I can listen to those harpy howls of disagreement as to my fundamental worth as a person and as a writer any time and I shall.

But for the moments I spend with the thoughts and the keyboard and the page and the work, I have to shut them up.

And yet… we do need them. We need the caution of them – don’t take it for granted, this talent! don’t waste your chance! don’t forget: someone has asked you to write this, they must think you’re worth it – and we need the energy of them too. Like actors who love their stage-fright, writers need the surge, the electricity of shame and superbness. The catch of breath in the throat. Otherwise we’d just sit here, plonking out words, dull as porridge, glum as mud. And none of it would be any fun – to write, or to read. It would be nerveless, neuralgic. Then we really should be whipped.

:::

At this point I’m going to leave this… because I don’t have the nerve to imagine, right now, that I have too many other ideas to share in this month of blogging, and I must also listen to the voice that says: tempo, tempo, tempo…. So. More of my asinine, mediocre, commonplace/wise, luminous and valuable thoughts on this next week.

This post is a little late: the dilatoriness due not to lack of enthusiasm but the fact that I am in the middle of one of life’s cataclysms – moving house. And by ‘moving house’ you know that I, as a writer, primarily mean standing, hands on hips in the middle of my living room, gazing with an abruptly urgent sense of incredulity at the dozen or so tightly packed shelves that form the main decoration of my home. Moving house, in other words, means moving books.

I am a forty year old writer and arts graduate from a bookish family. This suggests correctly that one of my greatest forms of entertainment is logging an inventory of all my books on LibraryThing, the online personal repository of such lists. It is a treat I have been eking out over the past year or so: because it is truly delicious thing to take an armful of slightly dusty books from a shelf, carry them to my desk (it barely occurs to me that I could bring the laptop to the shelf; the opposite is now my delightful ritual) and, one by one, enter the title, author or ISBN into the fields on the screen and find the correct listing; select it; and see an icon of the cover of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept or Selected Poems by T. S. Eliot or Out of Sheer Rage float into its place in the virtual library shelf of my inventory. Attending to each volume individually is a way of remembering, revisiting and re-cherishing it. Oh, I’d forgotten One More River, The Greengage Summer and All Quiet on the Western Front! I’d forgotten the treasurehouse of stories and worlds I have sitting so inaudibly around me. I’d forgotten what a splendid collection I have.

On occasion I have been seen to lift one of my neglected beauties and deliver it a rapturous, utterly sincere, literal kiss of love.

So LibraryThing tells me that – so far, and there are a couple of big shelves still to go – I have just over a thousand books. I’m a little disappointed, to be honest. Only a thousand! My father claims ten! I’m at capacity for my little apartment; one reason to move home is: more space for books! But now, standing before this mass of items, simultaneously proud and appalled by their number, and contemplating the putting of them into boxes, I understand the weight of my custodianship.

Literally. I have just booked a five-tonne truck.

Now, why not spare yourself this antidiluvian dilemma, people may ask. Why not go digital? I am yet to get an e-reader. (I have an iPad, an old one, but never in my life does it occur to me to pick up its brick-like heft and read a book on it.) Oh god, does this mean I am getting fusty? But I just… don’t want one. Every three months I have regular spasms about getting a Twitter account and a Kindle, and every time I decide to stroll on and wait to see if I need one. So far, no. There is not a single moment in my life when I envy those with tiny little whosis and their creepily vacuous pages. And though my lower back is going to screech about the number of books I am going to lug for the tenth time in my life into a five-tonne truck, there is no fucking way on this earth I would give up my paper books. I’d as soon sleep on the floor. Give up showering. I’d as soon knock out my own teeth.

A few years ago, traveling in Vietnam, I visited the Museum Alexandre Yersin, shrine to one of Vietnam’s most beloved foreign citizens. Monsieur Yersin was a Swiss-French doctor who relocated to Vietnam in the late 19^th century for the Institut Pasteur, where he immediately identified the plague bacillus and set about establishing the country’s immunisation programs, saving millions of lives. This is the man who helped stop the black plague. He was an extraordinary man: fearless explorer, anthropologist, pioneering documentary photographer, botanist, agronomist (he introduced rubber and Cinchona—quinine—plants to Vietnam), research scientist and physician. His handsome, bearded, soulful face gazed out of photos with thoughtful eyes, a sensitive mouth, a reticent demeanour. As a student, according to a colleague, he “showed no emotion, except when confronted with the suffering of children.” Evidently a great beardy boffin, he had a taste for technology: brass anemometers, Morse transmitting antennae and a gigantic telescope are in the museum; in 1901 he bought the first car in Indochina; he thought about buying a plane in 1910, only seven years after the Wright brothers’ first successful flight. He conducted atmospheric readings by kite, owned one of the earliest radio sets in south-east Asia, possessed an alcohol-fuelled bicycle, and regularly took the ‘Air Orient’ route from Indochina, through Syria to France, a journey of many days.

His tenderness to the local people was legendary but, monkish, he loved solitude. And he loved books. His collection is preserved in the museum, and it was for this above all that I fell, for his reading included books on aviation, mountain climbing, physiology, mathematics, radiotelegraphy, geography, military history, the history of England, Bedouin costumery, Homer, navigation, astronomy, Rousseau, a full assemblage of Latin classics. And, for the slow warm humid evenings, something lighter: French translations of Agatha Christie, Walter Scott, Edgar Wallace’s, H. G. Wells’s and Jules Verne’s science fiction, 1001 Nights, and some racier titles such as Les Pirates de la Mer Rouge, La Caravane de la Mort and La Femme aux deux Sourires. Yersin’s armchair is next to the shelves: I pictured him, lean with age, settling down after a long day’s work to lose himself in penny-dreadfuls, their yellow covers cupped in his weathered hands.

This beautiful man was honoured during his lifetime, not least with the impressive ‘Ordre Imperiale du Dragon d’Annam’ by the area’s Emperor, and the Grand Croix in 1935. The Vietnamese have made him into a guardian spirit, and erected a pagoda to his memory. But I think the little museum of his notes, and countless letters to his mother, and those evocative bookshelves, are the best tribute of all.

I fell in love with Yersin for his wonderful eyes (still gazing at me from a postcard portrait in my kitchen—soon to be packed up too) and his library. Through seeing it I could see a part of him – a man long dead, but so present in the constellation of his reading. And I think my reluctance to embrace electronic books is to a large part due to a kind of horror: if all my books are held invisibly (frictionlessly, weightlessly, ineluctably) on some digital device, where no one but a deliberate browser can see them – not the visitor to my home, not the curious fellow-passenger on the train – then how will anyone know who I am?

It’s true that few of my friends need to inspect my bookshelves to know what my preoccupations are – I broadcast them vocally at every meeting. But I look around my home, and my books, and the assemblage of my reading – which is already missing the library books, the discarded books, the loaned books, the lost childhood books, the thousands of newspapers, the abandoned magazines, the ephemeral advertising material that I have read in my forty years – and to me the contents of the shelves are not just ornament, not simply aides memoires, not merely archives, but a literal manifestation of another intricate jewel: my own mind. These books are part of what has made me. They have burnished me, moved me, formed actual tracks in the material of my brain, transformed me and finally, given me their souls.

It seems the least I can do, to carry them gently to a new home, and love them anew there too. Five tonnes? It may not be enough.

So yesterday I was working through a draft of my novel, which I started what, seven years ago? and have been desultorily hacking away at ever since, in fits and starts, leaving it to soak, coming back to it for a good scrub, leaving it to soak some more…I was just noodling through the draft, correcting words here and there, taking my time, enjoying the wonderful originality of my plot, my exceptionally interesting protagonist and my clever use of arcana.

And two hours later I was in a movie cinema watching ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ and biting my fist in an effort not to scream. Or possibly vomit.

Because the plot suddenly included a mention of the Old Testament book of Leviticus, and quoted some passages from Leviticus. And two hours earlier I had been looking up passages from Leviticus to put in my novel. The same passages. The very same, particular, exact passages. Out of all the mad-ass, haphazard, random passages in that especially bizarre Biblical book: the very same ones.

Now, I have spent much of the past few years diligently avoiding Stieg Larsson’s famous trilogy, mostly on the principle (gained while bookselling and in charge of bookclub reading lists) that anything everyone in the world is reading must be shunned, at least for a few years til the fuss dies down. I’ve been told countless times how good the trilogy is and so on, but I managed to avoid reading any of the books, any excerpts, seeing any of the Swedish films, etc. All I knew was that it features a young woman who’s raped and is then very angry about it. That was it. Truly. That was all I knew.

So I go from working on my book that features a pale, misanthropic, boots-wearing, knife-carrying young woman who slips quotes from Leviticus under people’s windscreens before going on the hunt for the killer of ritually murdered bodies covered in tattoos (shut up, it makes sense in the telling)… to watching fucking Lisbeth Solander, a pale, misanthropic, boots-wearing, taser-carrying, much-tattooed young woman on the hunt for the killer of ritually murdered bodies which have something to do with Leviticus.

*SILENT SCREAM*

And no one, no one will ever believe that I didn’t read the fucking trilogy and shamelessly rip it off! No one will believe that I made up my dear character Bailey seven years ago. That I was including Leviticus just because of a vague memory that it contains some hilarious words about mould, had put them in the text but then wondered if there was something perhaps a bit nastier that I could include, and when I checked its text yesterday there were actually some more dramatic and apposite bits about ‘if a woman be a medium or a sorceress…’ which I REALLY WASN’T EXPECTING to find on the movie screen a mere hour and a half later.

FUCK. Well, that’s what you get if you dither and take seven years to write a book. Some dead Swede will write it for you.

Please consider this post date-stamped and evidence that I really, really didn’t know anything about Larsson, the hive mind is alive and well, genre fiction is, after all, a matter of rearranging hallowed tropes, and I can only wish that my Bailey ever becomes the tiniest bit as famous as Ms Solander. That is once I take out all the Leviticus quotes and give my heroine a tan.

The movie, by the way, was pretty good. Unfortunately.

I felt that many books I read this year, especially novels, were bloated, presumptive, over-earnest, tediously posturing, lazily derivative, badly unedited or simply mediocre. On the other hand, as I worked on writing two novels myself this year, I have to give immense kudos to anyone who finishes and publishes one. I just felt so frustrated and bored by some books, and resolve in the future to piff any recalcitrant or pompous books if they’re not earning my love by page 20. It’s a sad thing to be disappointed by a book — and, of course, a very subjective disappointment. Mostly I would think, ‘Will my life be diminished if I put it down right now and never go back?’ and when I realised it wouldn’t, down would go the book.

But there were some books which set me on fire and made my heart race with sheer pleasure and send me to bed early every night to snatch up the pages and dive back in. They were all characterised by my sense that this was something I hadn’t read before, and that the author enjoyed writing it. I don’t think that’s too much to ask of a book. Here are my top reads of 2011 (details of each one in the list that follows):

A Time of Gifts / Patrick Leigh Fermor

Indelible Ink / Fiona McGregor

Year of Wonders / Geraldine Brooks

Ghost Story / Peter Straub

Music and Silence / Rose Tremain

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union / Michael Chabon

The Sisters Brothers / Patrick DeWitt

You’ll be Sorry when I’m Dead / Marieke Hardy

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay / Michael Chabon

And the total list of wot I read:

Beauty of the Husband / Anne Carson

Anne Carson, a classicist as well as poet, wrote ‘The Autobiography of Red’ which is one of the most exquisite long poems/novels I know. This is beautiful also but didn’t stop my heart quite so much.

Beautiful Thing / Sonia Faleiro

An extraordinary non-fiction portrait of a bargirl in Mumbai, and the lives of poor women in the slums there. I got to interview Sonia at Sydney Writers Festival and it was a total pleasure.

A Time of Gifts / Patrick Leigh Fermor

I adore Paddy Leigh Fermor, and he is a long-standing hero to my family. My father met him and had lunch with him in the late 60s. This is the first part of the most incredible travel story from the 1930s when Fermor, who died this year at a great old age, walked from London to Constantinople.

Mani / Patrick Leigh Fermor

A book about the Mani area in southern Greece, full of tales, history, arcana and the spirit of a vanished world.

Pleasures of a Tangled Life / Jan Morris

Morris is another family hero(ine), and this is a collection of short essays about things she likes.

Palimpsest / Catherine M. Valente

Speculative fiction, very good but a bit overworked.

Roumeli / Patrick Leigh Fermor

A companion to ‘Mani’, similar, entrancing.

Reflections on a Marine Venus / Lawrence Durrell

Fermor’s friend, and a man my father also met (I might nearly have been Durrell’s granddaughter if my mother hadn’t been at lunch as well when his daughter made a pass at my dad). Memoir of his time on Rhodes after WWII.

The Witch of Lagg / Ann Pilling

Loved her earlier books in the series when I was a kid. Schlocky but well done children’s horror story.

Spirit of Place / Lawrence Durrell

Durrell’s letters and short collected works. Bit annoying, to be honest. These try-hard young men!

Bitter Lemons / Lawrence Durrell

This time, about his years on Cyprus in the 50s and political strife. My ignorance of Cypriot politics made it a little hard to follow.

In Tearing Haste / Patrick Leigh Fermor

Letters between dear Paddy and the Duchess of Devonshire, very arch and British, entertaining.

Meanjin 1 2011

Now under editorship of my friend and former editor at A2, Sally Heath.

Affinity / Sarah Waters

I adore Waters and I liked this but it wasn’t quite as wonderful as ‘Fingersmith’ or as scary as ‘The Little Stranger’.

Dark Roots / Cate Kennedy

I read this on the beach in WA after having shared a small writers festival and house with darling Cate. Impossible to believe the sweet, warm woman can write these tense, shadowed, brilliant stories: but no doubting her intelligence as well as generosity. One of Australia’s treasures.

Indelible Ink / Fiona McGregor

Read, also, on that beach, just before hanging out with Fiona at Perth Writers Festival. The Sydney ‘The Slap’ as it’s sometimes described, I loved it entirely, this portrait of a modern family, and was so fucking happy it won at the Age Books of the Year awards later.

Lambs of London / Peter Ackroyd

A slight novel by the promiscuous and prodigious Ackroyd, about Charles Lamb and his sister in the 19^th century and a Shakespeare hoax.

Reading by Moonlight / Brenda Walker

Exquisite, pensive, moving and erudite discussion of reading and illness. Brenda is a quiet woman but a wonderful thinker about books and meaning.

Me and Jeshua / Eleanor Spence

Re-read this treasure from my childhood, about Jesus as a child, a surprisingly unsentimental and evocative portrait, beautifully written and full of the atmosphere of warm Levantine nights.

Harbour / John Ajvide Lindqvist

I love his stuff (author of ‘Let the Right One In’), just a great mix of violent horror and dark humour. Great for when you just want a book that’ll take you somewhere and make you flinch.

Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Universe / Douglas Adams

The classic. No words. The manifesto of my adolescence.

Your Voice in my Head / Emma Forrest

A scintillating, wildly written, astute and wrenching memoir by a young woman about her mental distress, a love affair, and her relationship with her therapist. I got to do a wonderful panel with Emma at Sydney Writers Festival and hang out with her: she’s great.

The White Earth / Andrew McGahan

I’ve had a crush on Andrew McGahan ever since ‘Praise’. Grand, gothic, melodramatic and haunted novel about rural Australia in the Mabo era. Kudos for just going for it without embarrassment.

Cloudstreet / Tim Winton

Re-read it for the first time in twenty years, still astounding. I wept at the end. It shimmers and shines.

Bereft / Chris Womersley

Less said about this the better. Sorry.

My Brother Jack / George Johnston

Couldn’t finish it, alas. I just didn’t give a shit.

Love Letter from a Stray Moon / Jay Griffiths

My total hero and role model, her first novel, a short and incandescent fiction about Frieda Kahlo, love and sorrow.

I Hate Martin Amis Et Al / Peter Barry

Read it for a review for ABR, unsettling, clever, challenging, brutal, rather unpleasant, sardonic novel.

Traitor / Stephen Daisley

I met Stephen at various festivals this year, he’s a sweet man. This is a delicate and sorrowful novel set in and following WWI and with a surprising friendship.

The Sooterkin / Tom Gilling

Recommended to me by its editor, a lovely change from the grim and earnest male Australian writing: a clever and original little tale set in early Hobart, with a woman who gives birth to a seal.

Presence of the Past / Penelope Lively

Lively, another of my role models as a writer, in rather serious mode about British landscape.

Museum People / Thompson

A delight of a book I picked up in an op shop, portraits of all the staff at the Smithsonian Museum in the 1970s. It made me want to go and volunteer at the Melbourne Museum. Fascinating.

Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds / Gregory Day

A lovely warm novel set on the Great Ocean Road coast by the delightful Greg. He writes various novels set in his fictional town and brings characters to life with sweetness and truth.

The White Garden / Carmel Bird

Strange, original, rather abstruse novel, dark and suggestive. Very 80s, but that’s not a bad thing.

Year of Wonders / Geraldine Brooks

Fabulous historical fiction, in crystalline prose, set in the 17^th century during the Plague. Loved every word.

The Dress Lodger / Barbara Holman

Gothic historical fiction, not bad but not memorable.

Red Shift / Alan Garner

Stunning, stunning bit of 1970s time fantasy/mythos. Set the bar for everything else in the genre.

The Sea Kingdoms / Alaistair Moffatt

History of the Celtic kingdoms from Bronze Age to present. Part of my perpetual ‘Time Team’/British archaeology mania.

The Invention of Dr Cake / Andrew Motion

Odd, pleasant little fable about a dying old man who may or may not resemble a surviving John Keats.

Ghost Story / Peter Straub

A book like a nice rich casserole, full of inventiveness, good horror, twisting plots, and chewy scenes. A classic of horror.

A Leopard’s Kiss / Maria Fazio

Small and slight prose and poems based on the life of De Lampedusa, writer of  the classic ‘The Leopard’.

Music and Silence / Rose Tremain

Beautiful, beautiful novel, rich and plangent, sweet and sad, a great work of historical imagination and humanity.

Breath / Tim Winton

Re-read this for a Wheeler Centre bookclub gig, loved it the first time I read it, admired it the second time, and suddenly, in talking about it onstage, decided it was rather flawed. I don’t quite know why, but somehow I liked it less once I began to think about it. A book perhaps best absorbed and felt.

Melbourne / Sophie Cunningham

Read it for an Age review, a really nice portrait of urban Melbourne, especially those bits habituated by people like me and Sophie (*cough*artsytypes*cough*)

The Woman in Black / Susan Hill

Classic terrifying ghost story: actually, the 1980s tv version was even scarier, until I re-watched it recently and wasn’t as scared as I hoped I would be. But Hill does a great deal of good stuff in only a few pages. Incredible foreboding…

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union / Michael Chabon

Fabulous, wonderful, energetic, original novel that helped salvage my opinion of fiction this year. A putative Jewish homeland in Alaska, not Palestine; and a noir crime story with Yiddish slang. Supposedly to be made into a film by Coen Bros – that would be perfection. Just fucking great.

Queen of the Wits: Life of Letitia Pilkington / Norma Clarke

My mum lent me this, a great (if rather lengthy) portrait of a now-forgotten legend of 18^th century Irish and London letters, a woman who lived by her wits and her pen, despite perfidious male jealousy etc.

The Family Law / Ben Law

Ben’s delightful, fucking funny and surprisingly heartbreaking memoir about his family. I needed this book like a sherbet to wash down more glutinous fare, and it worked a treat. Just great stuff. And a smashingly nice bloke.

Change of Climate / Hilary Mantel

I have now read all of Mantel’s books, and my awe of her never grows any less. This is from her middle-class 1980s phase, probably my least favourite of her moods, but still, a perceptive and mordant family drama.

The Monsoon Bride / Michelle Aung Thin

I launched Michelle’s book at Readings this year, and as I said at the time, considering how grumpy I was with reading at that moment, I was really glad to enjoy her debut novel so much. Set in Burma in the 1930s, ‘steamy’ is a word that has to be applied to it, but also ‘elegant’.

Case Studies / Kate Atkinson

A friend recommended this to fix my reading malaise; good fun, shockingly dark in places, ultimately a bit silly but a good holiday book featuring one detective chasing four connected crimes.

Fair Cop / Christine Nixon

I read this for a panel on memoir I did with Christine at Brisbane Writers Festival, and enjoyed it more than I expected: a feisty, admirable and self-possessed woman. We need more of them. She was very nice company on the panel and gave me a hug after.

Street Fight in Naples / Peter Robb

A bit disappointing, much devoted to 17^th century Naples, and kind of all over the place. Interesting stuff though, and made me want to go back to Napuli very much.

Meanjin 2 2011

Griffith Review: Such is Life

A Walk in the Woods / Bill Bryson

Ah, Bryson, he makes it look so easy. A nice ramble of a book about a ramble.

Danse Macabre / Stephen King

As I’m writing horror, I read this about the arts and wherefores of horror writing; very interesting, anecdotal, informed and perceptive stuff. I also highly recommend his book on writing in general.

The True Deceiver / Tove Jansson

As a life-long devotee of the Moomins, I am exploring Jansson’s other work (‘The Summer Book’ and ‘The Winter Book’ are both gorgeous) and this adult novel is quite dark, serious, strange but compelling.

Haphazard House / Mary Wesley

Apart from her adult novels she also dabbled too briefly in childrens’ fiction, and this is a wonderful, original time-slip take on ‘Last Year in Marienbad’-style fantasy of a peculiar old house in the country, featuring a complicated family. She never talks down to children and this book weaves a spell.

The Sisters Brothers / Patrick DeWitt

Shortlisted for Booker Prize, like a Coen Bros western in prose, just great fun, dramatic satisfaction, fantastic voice and a horse that made me actually cry.

Meanjin 3 2011

Among the Islands / Tim Flannery

Tim’s new memoir about his days exploring for mammals in the Pacific islands, full of interesting biology and funny stories.

Over Sea, Under Stone / Susan Cooper

I finally gave myself permission to just indulge in re-reading this series, one of my all-time favourites, a splendid, original, powerful mythic fantasy work for young adults. I was so happy that I loved it as much now as I did when I was 14. Stunning.

The Dark is Rising / Susan Cooper

The Greenwitch / Susan Cooper

The Grey King / Susan Cooper

Silver On the Tree / Susan Cooper

All That I Am / Anna Funder

I enjoyed the second half of this more than the slightly awkward first part, and emerged moved and informed about German anti-Nazi activists just before the war.

Travels with a Medieval Queen / Sileti

Following a 12^th century Sicilian queen journeying from Germany to her kingdom. Nice travel stuff and a lot about the complicated history of that period in Italy.

You’ll be Sorry when I’m Dead / Marieke Hardy

Marieke’s bravura memoir essays, funny as hell, sometimes sad, very brave, and perfect for reading on a couch in one big savoury gulp.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay / Michael Chabon

The book that got me back in love with reading after a rough few months, totally energetic, imaginative, generous and both funny and terribly sad. Big and bolshy.

One Man’s Meat / EB White

Gorgeous columns from the 1940s by this master of style, lovely warm tales from his life on a farm in Maine and reflections on life and humanity. I learned a lot about column-writing from this, and got dozens of quotes to pop (credited!) into my own work. A delight to read slowly over many afternoons with a cup of tea.

The Secret History / Donna Tartt

Oh my god how I loved this book when it came out. It felt it was written especially for me, a classics student who wore men’s 1930s suits at a sandstone uni, was completely isolated and melancholy, and liked horror and ghost stories. Re-reading it this year was an exercise in complete delight and satisfaction, and envy of her confidence. Come on Donna, write another book already.

The Great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald

First read it as a uni student; began re-reading this year it as I keep hearing how it’s so many people’s favourite book in the world. Actually I found it mannered and a bit tedious, and put it aside half-way through (and it’s not even a long book). Oh well.

Griffith Review: Fiction

The Final Solution / Michael Chabon

A slight and wistful tale set in England with an elderly Sherlock Holmes. Quite different to his other big novels. Okay but not as wonderful as I hoped.

A Model World / Michael Chabon

Short stories/novellas, very carefully written, Richard-Ford-esque, beautifully turned but again, not as ebullient as Kavalier & Clay.

Gentlemen of the Road / Michael Chabon

His books seemed to get thinner and slighter as I went along! This is a historical picaresque, enjoyable but forgettable.

The Last Thread / Michael Sala

Memoir I read for a review for ABR, very nicely written, frustratingly self-conscious.

The Little Friend / Donna Tartt

Quite different to ‘The Secret History’, a big sprawling Southern Gothic novel about a young girl in a sinister world. I liked it very much, and more and more as I read, though I felt I could sense Tartt’s confidence creaking at times and there were (I can’t believe I’m saying this) too many adjectives. Still, I was sorry when it ended.

The Mortgaged Heart / Carson McCullers

The library didn’t have her classics so I tried this, short stories and bits and pieces from her beginnings, nice if self-conscious little stories with memorable imagery and suggestions of great things to come. I’d like to read her more famous works now.

As I Lay Dying / William Faulkner

Another famous classic that defeated me, just days before I saw Marieke on television extolling its virtues. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood.

Man in the Dark / Paul Auster

People keep telling me how great Auster is, and I keep trying him, and wondering what the fuss is about. Did I even finish this? I can’t remember.

Constantinople / ?

Some book about the fall of Constantinople (a perennial fascination for me), which sadly I ran out of time to finish and don’t remember the author’s name. It was interesting, though.

American Gods / Neil Gaiman

I bought this in the quest for sure-fire, bona fide good reads, and enjoyed it and its mixture of horror, mythos and picaresque, but began to get a bit tired towards the end (it’s a big book). I’ve only read a couple of Gaimans, funny since I write a bit in that vein myself.

To the Ends of the Land / David Grossman

Read this in a burst of interest in Middle East politics, and after an inspiring review in NYRB, and it was good, it was okay, following two friends going on a hike in Israel and talking about life and love and their history, but then one night I realised my level of interest was almost zero and there were another 200 pages to go, so that was that.

White Teeth / Zadie Smith

Managed to finish the year by finishing a book! I loved, loved ‘On Beauty’ and this was good too, though that first chapter wouldn’t have got a million-pound advance from me. Uneven, bit saggy and sloppy, but steadied by her fabulous ventriloquist rendering of dialect and voice, and her diligent summoning of her characters and all their perversities. I did enjoy it.

To sum up: read 29 works of non-fiction, and 57 of fiction, total of 86 books, though some of them I didn’t actually finish. That’s one book every 4.2 days! Well, some of them were short and some of them were long. Let’s see how many of them I even remember in a year’s time.

I actually didn’t get to see a single event other than my own, due to most of the ones I wanted to go to being, inevitably, scheduled at the same time as mine, or just before or after (when I had to be in the Green Room or signing books). Shame. I heard there were some great ones: Sonya Hartnett, David Mitchell and others.

Mine were great — one where I interviewed Sonia Faleiro about her extraordinary account of bar dancers in Mumbai, Beautiful Thing; one on the so-called ‘Porn Wars’ which was a very, shall we say vigorous debate, chiefly between Gail Dines (author of Pornland) on one hand, and Catherine Lumby and Leslie Cannold on the other side, and me in the middle (it was filmed by ABC Big Ideas but isn’t online yet); then one solely on The Romantic, in conversation with Anne Maria Nicholson which was very enjoyable;  then a final discussion of memoir with Georgia Blain and Emma Forrest, author of Your Voice in My Head.

Here’s a quick interview I did with Sydney Writers Centre at the festival, talking about both my books, memoir writing and writing in general.

Dream-like hazy sunshiney warm weather, thousands of people lounging and strolling on the wharfs, constantly bumping into writers I know or was eager to meet. It was wonderful. Exhausting. A pleasure.

First, the story of how In My Skin got published. It is not the typical way, and I hasten to say I was very, very lucky in my circumstances. First, when I was still a sex worker, I was already thinking and saying aloud that I’d like to write a book about the experience. It so happened that around this time my father, who knew this, met a woman through his work who asked about his children, and my dad said Well my daughter is currently a sex worker, but I think she really wanted to be a writer. And the woman said Oh, my husband is a publisher, he might be interested in a story about that if she’s writing something. And (now I think: how bizarre! and what nerve I had!) so in the dawn hours after one shift I wrote up a few proposals of how I might write that something (I was so naive, I did it in fancy font and fancy language, oh my god how embarrassing) and sent it to him, and he actually rang me and said, I like the ideas, send me something when you write it and I’ll have a look. But I was too tired and too busy trying to survive, and I never did anything more except start writing fragments and think that there was definitely something in them.

A few years later I was clean, doing my writing course at RMIT and working on the manuscript of In My Skin. A commissioning editor from a big publisher  came to meet us and expressed interest in the book, and my lecturer encouraged me to send it out to other publishers; of course I thought of Michael Heyward, now impresario at Text Publishing, and how he really had first dibs as all those years ago he’d been so kind and interested. So, sure it was a shot in the dark, I sent the first chapters to him, and he rang me and said Oh my god! You! We wondered what happened to you, we were waiting for you to write something for us! So I showed him the rest of the what I had and he offered to sign the book. I say that rather calmly but I can say it was one of the more joltingly marvellous moments in my life. I ran down the street going EEEEEEE! EEEEEE! and then had to lie down and do yoga breathing.

Then I had a thrilling but totally nervewracking time with two publishers wanting to do a deal. But I wanted to go with Text and so I did. A happy day indeed. And Michael said, See, we kept this the whole time: and handed me the ridiculous sheets with my fancy font and smart arse proposals that I wrote up so tiredly back at the start with my hooker makeup still on and all the world asleep at 5am.

So, that’s my fortunate and not-typical way of getting published. But though I had the lucky contact with Michael early on, I basically did what is recommended, and made him a proper official proposal of a book, which is a well established protocol. Here’s how that works (and there are many websites and books which detail hints on how to do this):

The Agent I don’t have an agent and it is a much-debated issue in writerly circles, whether to have one or not. Many writers swear by them, the better deals an agent can obtain, the fact that agents form the main access corridor to publishers’ desks (especially when most publishing houses in Australia do not accept unsolicited manuscripts) and that it makes it easier for a writer to concentrate on creativity and avoid the awkwardness and ineptness of negotiating a contract directly. Myself, I jumped in the deep end on my own, frantically learned as much as I could about contracts, braved the meetings, and saved the agents’ fee with both my books. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t seek an agent in the future, but independence has paid off for me so far.

The Proposal This is the main wedge of your strategy, whether submitting it to an agent or directly to a publisher. (As I say, most publishers in this country don’t take unsoliciteds, so check their website to see if they do, and don’t waste your paper and postage if they say they don’t; also look for any guidelines they might provide.) The proposal is made of three parts: a cover letter, a synopsis and/or brief outline of characters or chapters, and a sample of the writing, usually the first three chapters or 10,000 words–NOT the ‘best’ bits but the opening which is, of course, well worked and already structured to seize a reader’s interest.

The cover letter is in many ways the most important part, even more than the book itself. I TOILED over my cover letter even to Michael whom I’d met; it has to be no more than one page in which to introduce yourself, the project, and cover some crucial issues: what the book is, why you are the person to write it, why it’s unique, how it fits in contemporary publishing and if it is similar to/different from any bestseller in the same frame, why it will be attractive to readers, which readers you envisage buying it, and why this publisher (do your homework) should particularly want to read it. This is your moment to grab the attention of a busy, jaded and judicious publisher or agent, or their paid manuscript assessor. Don’t be too arrogant, don’t be too humble, be confident, direct and take your chance as well as you can.

If this does its work (but remember that it might not; you can send your ms to several publishers/agents at once, but you must do them the courtesy of mentioning that you’ve done this) then you meet the publisher/agent and negotiate a contract. If like me you go straight into this with a publisher then there are some things to learn before that meeting.

The Contract. I nearly had a nervous breakdown doing my first contract negotiation. A lot rides on it but of course it is in the context of quite understandable emotional feelings. Massive, humble and unctuous gratitude to the publisher can make it hard to be a brass-nosed, steel-nerved negotiator; you don’t want to push too hard in case they change their mind; you think, Why quibble over film rights when I’ll be lucky to sell three copies of the book; and of course you don’t have any idea of what is reasonable and what is robbery. Educate yourself. Read books (the Victorian Writers Centre publishes an excellent one) about publishing contracts. Consider using a contact assessment service (again, VWC does this for a fee) or a lawyer to go over it. Get the Australian Society of Author‘s model of an ideal contract and compare it. Ask writer friends about their contracts. Learn the terminology. Take it seriously. You don’t know what will happen with the book; it’s better to peer at every clause and believe that one day the audio book rights will be applied, than ignore all of that and regret it later. You won’t look a fool, you’ll look like a serious author.

That said, there is give and take in contracts and compromises must be made. You might be offered a small advance but better royalty terms, or the other way around. Find out about rising royalty rates (where the rate goes up after a certain number of books is sold) and look carefully at the other clauses such as indemnity for the publisher (where you are responsible if there are any legal issues after publication, such as defamation suits), or delivery date clauses. Much of a publishing contract is ‘just how it is’ and you have to accept that you are somewhat at the mercy of a commercial proposition devised over a long time by the industry which itself, let’s remember, doesn’t make a huge profit. Authors have a rough time with contracts in general, but at least you can defend your right to be paid and respected as a significant part of the industry, not a humble serf who’s lucky to work basically for nothing.

You may be shocked by how little authors are paid (standard royalties are around 10% of RRP minus GST, and only after the advance is paid off; plus reserve-against-return means that for the first year or so 30% of your royalties are held back to be paid later). Get used to that. It’s a fact of writing that hardly anyone in the business makes much off a single copy of a book: not the writer, nor the publisher, the distributor, nor the bookseller. It’s possible to make good money from writing (despite what you hear) but it takes a combination of many sales and good contract terms. All the more reason to put a lot of effort and thought into doing the contract, and not just leap in crying gratefully ‘Thank you! thank you!’

And there you are, you have a publishing contract (I don’t know if all this applies to agent contracts as well, never having seen one). It’s a bruising but thrilling process, and at the end hopefully you’re happy and ready to go back to the writing part. It’s important though to remember that being a writer is not all about sitting, quill to pensive brow, in a shaft of sunshine cogitating profundities. A lot of it is about business, and authors seem generally to err on the humble side in this respect. We shouldn’t be humble, we shouldn’t be afraid to talk about money, and we should do ourselves the favour of getting ourselves the best deal we can as well as getting our work published. And by gum, it’s an educational revelation!

Then after all that, you commence the editing process and moving towards having a book on the shelves. But that’s another story.

PS All this is absolutely my own personal experience and opinion, I’m not a qualified agent or lawyer and some might disagree with what I’ve written, but it’s what I’ve found to be true. The more you ask around, learn from others’ experience (which I certainly did before I did the second book contract) and try to be savvy, the better–even if, as I found, you end up with conflicting advice and more headache. Getting published is thrilling, getting smart about the business aspect is essential.