One Year On

It seems peculiarly apt that, a year to the day I flew back home, I will be moving out of Sister’s and into my own place.  I will have to get a divorce from the coffee machine.  This is heartbreaking. It has been a haphazard year.  Every second that could be spared — from thesis corrections and conference presentations; finding a job and enough money to stay afloat while writing; babysitting, cooking and cleaning; making new friends and flirting; cycling, running and swimming; travelling up and down the East coast to home, to Bundaberg, to Canberra and Sydney — was spent on my novel.

The patchiness showed in the text, my agent said, as she found it hard to figure out who the characters were and what was going on.  It jumped around a great deal.  I had been jumping around a great deal also.  So I battened down the hatches and did another draft, and I will have to finish it amidst the move, surrounded by boxes.

Despite my unsettlement, it has been heavenly to start life again in Brisbane.  There has been much good coffee; Turkish Delight and Oriental lilies from the markets on Saturdays; my sister and her captivating children; bookclubs at Avid Reader and dance classes; drinks with clever people on Friday nights; a fluffy puppy that sits at my feet as I write and runs with me in the afternoons; old acquaintances who have become good friends; babies to play with and hold; a river to ride along; lush vegetation and, above all, the gorgeous, abundant, glorious sunlight.

Even though I still often get tired, I think of how miserable I was for years in London, and I count my blessings.  For now I am as happy as I was when I was a little girl, running madly along the verandah before the summer storms.

London Launch

On the morning of the launch I woke up from a bad dream about H going to the doctor for a checkup and being diagnosed with leukaemia. This did not bode well. I don’t dream about H (or other family members) dying as often as I used to, but it’s still disturbing, and I went to work accompanied by the most dreadful, morbid feeling. I was also abysmally tired and so struggled through the morning, misinformed various students about various things, then went home and slept.

Fortunately in the evening it wasn’t too cold, otherwise my legs (which my frock only half covered) would have done their unappealing mottling thing. However my gold, sparkly shoes, which I’d only worn once before, turned out to be another of those beautiful pairs that come from hell. By the time I reached the venue they had cut away a lot of skin, leaving coin-sized weals, and I had to ring C- to ask her to bring bandaids. Will this stop me from buying gorgeous-but-crippling shoes? What a stupid question.

The room was lovely, with big windows and comfy furniture, and it was wonderful to see so many London people there. To go from knowing no-one but my brother when I arrived 2 and a half years ago, to being friends with this roomful of people, was a really nice feeling.

I- (looking more splendid than usual in all black) gave an excellent introduction, apart from his joke about my doing good work only when I applied myself to it. I gave him a rather sour look at that, as it’s a sore point and my sense of humour fails me when it come to sore things, especially as pleasing I- is sometimes my sole reason for working as hard as I do. I was impressed by him referring to the novel as having sheer 'hard, feminine muscle' at its core; I liked that a lot. Then I got up and said my speech, which I’d finished writing on the bus, and I made people laugh, which always makes me happy. I’ve put the speech after this for those people who weren’t able to make it, and for those who are in Oz.

There was lots of chatting to do afterwards, and like the last launch it felt like a wedding with not enough time to talk to the people you want. For my mother’s sake, I forced myself converse with the B’s, who we’d known back home. Mr B is nondescript, Mrs B is a disgustingly outdated snob, whose hair was the colour and texture of straw. As we stood outside, discussing dinner, she brayed out options like ‘Hakamana’, which I can only assume was her version of Wagamama. M, leaning against a signpost, gave me a wink and I had to fight to keep my laughter from spilling out. We ended up going to my favourite Thai restaurant, and H, due to his foot-and-mouth disease, insulted the waiter within earshot again, so he isn’t allowed to go there anymore. Then we found a nice pub, which I’d been to once before. M entertained me with his witty banter and I borrowed some more bandaids off H_ in order to totter home.

So here’s my speech.

I need to start by thanking I- for his introduction, and for being the best supervisor I could ever have hoped for. His unwavering support and consistently positive attitude helped me to get through my darkest days in London, and I’m quite sure I wouldn’t still be here without him. He’s also been very patient, because I was editing this novel for the good part of a year, and in that time I was supposed to be writing my thesis, so am just a little bit behind now …

Anyway, I’m very glad to be having a second launch. The first was in Sydney and I was so nervous I was hyperventilating – the manager of the bookstore made a recording and on it I sounded very breathy. Also, I wrote my speech in the taxi on the way to the bookstore on a tiny scrap of paper, but this time around I’ve been organised enough to actually type it up and print it out, although I wrote half of it on the bus on the way here.

The novel is selling very well back home. It’s going onto its second print run, less than six months after it was published. This edition has 2 mistakes in it – one was found out by a friend back home, who pointed out that a property couldn’t be west of Busselton, because if you went west from Busselton you’d end up in the sea! So if you buy a copy tonight you might be buying a collector’s edition which will be worth millions when I follow in my relative Patrick White’s footsteps and win the Nobel Prize. Not that I’m a megalomaniac or anything like that.

So on my interminable bus journeys to and from work, I thought about what to say to an audience of Londoners. I do a lot of thinking on buses: I think about my life, about the lives of people who get on the bus, about my constant state of sleep deprivation, about things that make me laugh and, most frequently, I think about home. And so it was that yesterday I remembered my bus trips from our farm near Boggabri, to primary school, which took about half an hour over gravel roads through the scrub. Every morning and afternoon, five days a week, I would switch off my hearing aid to cut out the sound of screaming kids and concentrate on my book. Every now and then I’d look up and see my cousin punching my brother, or another cousin (at one point there were nine of us Whites at that school – that was almost one-tenth of the school’s population) sawing away at the plastic seat with a nail file, but I would ignore them and stare out at the landscape. And so it was that for all of my childhood there were journeys, the bush, and words.

These three things are now the foundations of my life. From becoming an avid reader of books, I became an avid writer, and now I can’t seem to be able to write about anything without referring to the Australian landscape. As the poet Dorothea Mackeller, who grew up not far from me (in Australian terms), wrote, ‘Core of my heart, my country’ and her words could have been my own.

In this novel, the landscape is one of the most prominent features of the book. It defines Ingrid, who is a botanist looking for specimens, it moves the plot along and it represents the central themes of growth and acceptance. At first, Ellyn, an Englishwoman, finds the Australian flora disturbing, because it’s nothing like the flora of England, whereas Ingrid, an Australian born and bred, thinks its strangeness is delightful. In this she was mirroring the views of English settlers in Australia, who were horrified by the bizarre flowers and animals that they encountered. However, as they settled in the country, they came to love it. This then became a metaphor for acceptance of what seems different, whether it is a flower, an individual, or a minority group such as lesbians.

And this brings me to the theme of growth. The characters of Ingrid and Ellyn were based on myself – Ellyn is as I used to be – shy and not very confident, and Ingrid is who I am now – headstrong, demanding, passionate and opinionated. You’re probably wondering what happened in between … and you can blame my mother. I’ve been deaf since I was 3 and a half, when I got meningitis. I have no hearing in my left ear and half in my right. Since it was so difficult to communicate with people, I was happier being left alone with my book, but mum forced me to go out and socialise. I absolutely hated it – and sometimes I still do – but because I loved my mother and because it was a challenge I wanted to beat, I did it. Which is why, now, people don’t realise that I’m deaf until I tell them. And during this process of gaining confidence – which took something like two decades, I learned to accept myself, just as Ellyn – and other English settlers - grew to love the Australian flowers. This doesn’t mean that it’s been easy. When Ingrid says to Ellyn, ‘Predictable people have predictable lives, but for the rest of us, it’s terrifying,’ I was drawing directly on my own experiences.

But why lesbians? people have often asked. Aside from the fairly obvious motivation that no-one had really written about two women in the bush before, I wanted to show how two women could exist on their own without the need for a man. People who know me – or more accurately, people who have heard me rant – have been tempted to accuse me of disliking men. On the contrary, I find some of them very appealing – and the relationship between Ingrid and Ellyn was also based on a relationship with a man back in Australia. However, I am a very strong feminist and I believe that, as a writer, I have a duty to write about - and for - those who don’t have a voice – not just women, but other minorities like Aborigines, people with disabilities, and immigrants. I’m aware that to be so outspoken is to run the risk of being disliked – particularly as feminism is becoming a dirty word, and particularly where a woman raising her voice is seen as something ugly – but frankly, I don’t care.

And what has all this to do with bus journeys and with London? It’s to do with travelling. It was through travelling, and exposing myself to new people and places, that I learnt to become self-reliant, and grew from that small, deaf girl into the woman you see before you now. Likewise, it was no coincidence that Ingrid travelled across the country on her own.

Writing the novel has been a journey too - one that I’m very glad to have finished because I was utterly sick of it by the end. When I describe the writing process to people, I tend to use botanical metaphors. The idea began with a seed – the question of what a woman does when a man leaves her. I planted into the soil of my mind and began to write. It grew for a while, and then it grew out of control – at one point it spanned 130 000 words, so I had to prune it severely, hacking out the first third of it. Then the voice wasn’t right, so I took it out of the soil of third person and put it in the form of journal entries – one written by Ellyn and one by Ingrid. However this still didn’t feel right so I transplanted it again, into the soil of first person, written in Ingrid’s voice, and that time it worked. For at least another year I trimmed and rewrote and trimmed some more, until I got to the point where I just wanted the whole lot to burn in a bushfire. Fortunately though, that didn’t happen, and now I have a beautiful novel to show for my pains.

The Launch

Monday was my last chance at finding jewellery to go with my outfit, so H and I paid a trip to The Family Jewels and luckily found a necklace that ended most conveniently just above my cleavage, and a pair of (more subdued) matching earrings. Tuesday I had an interview at the ABC studios in Ultimo about Georgiana Molloy, which went very well despite feeling groggy because I’d eaten a plate of couscous the night before and my body didn’t like the wheat. The interviewer was a very intelligent woman and it was refreshing to be able to talk about my book on a more intellectual level.

On Wednesday arvo, I assembled my outfit and it looked splendid. H and I caught a cab (more lovely cabcharges!) to Redfern where mum and dad were staying. En route I madly rehearsed my speech, scrawled on a tiny bit of paper. We found mum and dad in an airless hotel room with our sister, who was capering about making lots of noise as usual. She told us not to tell any stories while she was in the bathroom because she didn’t want to miss them.

I was nauseous with anxiety, so I made everyone get a move on, and we ended up in Glebe early. Mum flaffed around trying to find money for the parking meter while we had a coffee in the back garden of a café down the road. Some men were sitting a little further down, smelling odiferous. There was a swing, of the nasty plastic variety, at the back of the yard so we sat in that and dad took a family photo – the first one in a year.

Then we headed down to Gleebooks and I introduced myself to M, the lady running the show, who turned out to be a good friend of A+’s. Then the people started flocking in – most who I hadn’t seen for years – and it was hectic, and hard work too, trying to hear them all. I knew pretty much everyone there but the strangers spun me out, because it was hard enough trying to communicate, let alone with people I didn’t know. By the time I got onto the stage (after waiting for L, who was stuck in traffic) I was hyperventilating.

A+ gave an excellent speech and said lots of good things, and described an argument we’d had about my use of the word ‘gleam’ in a poem, which he was against and which I had adamantly refused to change, so he was forced to concede the point. I couldn’t remember this transaction at all but was in no doubt of it having occurred, as it sounded like one of many conversations that we’d had. I was glad that my talk was quite perfunctory in comparison because M had told me not to go on for long, as people were standing and wanting to get back to the wine. I made them laugh though, and that was the important thing. Afterwards I was hurried to the writing table and began signing books. It was only when R* handed me her nice black pen to sign her own book with that I realised I should have been using something fancier than the blue Artline pen A* had given me in Melbourne, because I’d been penless then too. Anyway I will get it right next time.

After a few hours, people began to leave, and I shepherded out the last of them because M was wanting to pack up. We repaired to the Mexican restaurant down the road, and to H’s and my astonishment, my parents, and most of their friends, hadn’t ever had Mexican before and didn’t know what to order. H ordered for them, while L and a friend of R’s from uni got trolleyed on the sangria. I was utterly drained by this point and just wanted to go home, but when I finished dinner I joined E and S-j down the road for a chat, then H and R swung by and said they were going to a Spanish bar up the road.

E and S-j walked me up there, saying, ‘You’re not going on your own dressed like that!’ and my shoes were pretty hard to walk in so I wouldn’t have been able to effect any fatal self-defence moves (apart from a stiletto heel in the groin, but even then my shoe might have gone flying before making the necessary contact), and agreed it would be good to have their company. E knew the bar, so I waited with her out the front until her man picked her up. H generously bought me a Toblerone cocktail and I joined L and R, and L’s toyboy who’d also come to the launch. Then J, who H was hoping was single and available, turned up. He was a lovely man, but unfortunately I was too tired and drunk to chat to him much. There was some kind of metal peacock attached to the wall, its tail fanning out across the wall while the bird itself stuck out of it in a sculptural way. J used its beak as a back scratcher and then, when I got up to go to the loo, my dress got stuck on the wire and I panicked, and J gave an excellent rendition of a peacock squawking violently. It was all very confusing, amusing and worrying as I sought to detach myself without damaging the dress.

After my second cocktail I was pretty much losing the plot and, to the discomfort of H, R and I (J was probably just amused) L was making out with the toyboy with increasing intensity.  I was exhausted, and J had to work the next day, so we called it quits without H being able to make much of a move. We used my final cabcharge to get home, and H got sick with a cold that night because he didn’t turn the air conditioning off.

So it was a wonderful launch, the only sad thing being that I didn’t have a chance to talk to people properly, when they’d made an effort to come and see me.

The next morning we had to get up at 9am, having had a protracted argument with our mother about the absurdity of the hour, but she’d refused to get there any later, saying that she and dad would have nothing to do in the hotel and had to be on their way. When they arrived we had a coffee at the café down the road (which has Rick Hatch pottery) and I painfully mustered some conversation, then they took H home and I went down the road to buy some wine for L and P for having us to stay, then went back to bed. That evening I flew out to Brisbane and my sister met me off the plane, in even worse shape than I was, because she’d had to fly back that morning and go to work, so I decided to stop feeling so sorry for myself.

Literary Traversings

After meeting H and having lunch with C on Chapel Street, I walked back to the hotel to meet my publicist. I was still grumpy, but feeling less violent than in the morning, and as I walked I rehearsed my speech and decided that the sun was uncomfortably warm on my shoulders. A* turned out to be wonderful – young, vibrant and friendly – and she carried my backpack around for me, which made me a little uncomfortable. H had been the designated packhorse but due to a change in plans he couldn’t go back to the hotel to collect the bag for me.

A* and I went first to a gay and lesbian bookshop down the road and signed their two copies, then went on to a beautiful bookshop in Albert Park. ‘The book’s been selling quite well,’ said the manager, rather solemnly and quietly, and I wondered if this reserved estimation was characteristic of all bookshop managers. A* then got us a cab to Dymocks and the manager there was lovely, and gave us cups of tea and hot chocolate from the cafe. She told us about her camping trip for the upcoming weekend, on a plot of land which several families had grouped together to buy, and now she and their descendents kept up with the tradition and still went there to stay. It sounded a bit like life on the farm so I told her about that. Then A* and I went across the road to an independent bookstore and signed some more copies, and then we caught a cab to Brunswick Road for dinner – Malaysian this time, at Blue Chillies. H texted me in alarm to say that there were people queuing on the footpath outside and he wasn’t sure if he could get a ticket. Then he wrote again to say they were the overflow from the previous event, which had a comedian in it, and my heartbeat subsided fractionally.

It surged again as we entered the bookstore, where there were quite a few people. I flapped around trying to get the FM set up so I could hear, and introduced myself to the two women writers beside me, Jesse Blackadder and Susan Hawthorne. There were three blokes, Dallas Angguish, Todd Alexander (Sydney) and Henry von Doussa, sitting in front of us but I couldn’t hear them and was too stressed trying to remember my spiel to try to hear them. Four writers spoke and then there was an interval, in which I caught up with my publisher, who’d come back from maternity leave, and met the head of marketing at Penguin who’d also come along. H chatted to them too then excused himself to attend to his blind date outside – a meeting engineered by L. After the interval a woman got up and sang a song, murmuring into my FM microphone, ‘This song is for you, Jessica,’ then she sang into the microphone for the audience. I giggled, embarrassed by the attention; it was the first time I’d been serenaded by a lesbian, and she was a good singer. Finally I got up and said my bit and gave two readings from my novel and, despite feeling very nervous and ill-prepared, it was fine.

I was utterly relieved when I got back to my seat and forgot that we had to do Q&A. So we all went up and sat on the plush red velvet couch, and everything was fine and dandy until I got asked the question by the MC, ‘Now Jessica, you’re a heterosexual, so how did you go about writing about lesbians?’ Fortunately I’d rehearsed an answer to this question with H, though he assured me that I wouldn’t get asked it because a thing like because it was passé. I explained that the relationship between Ingrid and Ellyn was based on a relationship with a man that hadn’t been working and wasn’t ever going to work, but that the reason why I’d written about two women instead of a man and a woman was because I was a very strong feminist and my ideas about female autonomy and independence were better expressed through a relationship between two women. They seemed happy with that, though I was affronted and, later, quite angry, for the same reason that I was irritated by the review written by Peter Pierce.

Pierce had maintained that I’d chosen quite a conventional structure and genre (ie a romance) to write about an unconventional topic – namely, lesbians. The must frustrating thing about reviews is that you can’t defend yourself or give the reviewer one of your famous expressions of withering scorn. The whole point I’d been making had been that lesbian love is no different to heterosexual love – therefore as a heterosexual writer I’m entirely qualified to write about love. As for the sex scenes, as I pointed out to the MC, I used my imagination – which is what writers tend to do.

After thinking about it some more, I understood that the MC might feel defensive if a heterosexual writer was writing about gays, namely because I was infringing on the very thing that defined them – their sexuality. But to use that line of reasoning would be to say that deaf people can only write about deaf people and black people can only write about black people, which is patently ridiculous. Then I thought about it some more and figured that it might have been a generational thing – maybe that’s how people like the MC thought (and he was at least in his late 50s), and how people like Pierce think - ie that lesbianism is something radical, when in fact it’s not that different – sure, you’re still marginalised, but marginalised in the way that deaf people might be. I can recall one of my writing lecturers (also around the same age as the MC and Pierce) saying in a faintly disparaging tone to a lesbian in my class that the lesbian novel she was writing was the sort of thing that might get picked up by a left wing women’s press but it would never make it to the mainstream. Well, look at where we are now, folks.

Anyway that’s enough of my ranting. Someone then asked a very sensible question about the role that landscape of Australia, both in the city and country, played in our work. I'd already spoken about this before I gave my reading, so I talked about how homesick I was, and that the only good thing about being out of Australia was that I didn't have to listen to John Howard, and I got a round of applause for that one.

There’s one last thing I need to mention: the red velvet flock wallpaper of the bookstore. I spoke to the owner of the store afterwards as he got me to sign a stack of books and told him how much I admired it. He said that it had been a toss up between the wallpaper and the airconditioning and he wasn’t sure if he’d made the right decision. ‘Oh, I’m sure it was,’ I replied. ‘It’s like when I buy shoes – I always favour beauty over pain.’ He looked at me dubiously and said, ‘I don’t think you’d have been saying that if you were here last week when it was 40 degrees in the store.’ I had to concede he had a point, but now I am determined to have the same wallpaper in my house when I get back to Oz.

We went out for dinner afterwards, and as we stood at an intersection figuring out where to go, a girl, who was reasonably well-dressed, came up asking for money. H forked some out and handed it over, then the girl turned to me. I didn't really have any idea of what was going on as I hadn't heard her, so J+ patted her on the shoulder and said patronisingly, 'I think you've done well for tonight, you should go now.' I didn't hear this until afterwards when H repeated it to me, but when he told me I started laughing, and matched up J+'s phrase with the girl's expression of resigned agreement.

The next day we had a picnic with our cousins in the Botanical Gardens, which were beautiful, and the day after that indulged in the panacea of shopping. I found some lovely sparkly shoes to go with my Collette Dinnigan dress - $215 down to $75 – wohoo! And made the mistake of walking into Alannah Hill and walking out again with a red handbag. Ok it was kind of essential and I will use it everyday but I still felt guilty as it was a tad on the expensive side.

That night we went out with G and her boyfriend to the pub. H was supposed to meet up with his blind date again but after the previous night he was a bit reluctant to go. I drank twice my limit (which is a glass and a half – yes, am sad – but cheap) and eventually I got sick of his flaffing around and said, ‘For God’s sake, what do you WANT to do?’ and he said, ‘I want to stay here,’ and I replied, ‘Well, tell him that then!’ Many creative suggestions for texts were proffered and eventually, guilt-ridden, H managed to stay put. After freezing once again (honestly, I didn’t travel 2000 miles to end up shivering in a Melbourne beer garden in the middle of summer) we got up and I tottered after the others, flashing a brilliant smile at the bouncer for the heck of it. There was some kind of scuffle going on across the road. ‘What is it?’ I asked H. ‘A bitch fight,’ he replied gleefully. We walked on some more. ‘What are they saying?’ I asked again, but he replied, ‘Shhhh, just get a move on.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Shut up and keep walking, I’ll tell you in the car.’ When we got to the car he said, ‘Lock your doors, Jess!’ and I asked again, ‘What’s happening?’ and he said that he’d started giggling as we walked down the street and the man fighting with his girlfriend had shouted, ‘What are youse fuckin’ laughing at, you fuckers?’ Hence the reason for not talking and hurrying on. Next time, H said, he would laugh throatily like a man instead of giggling like a girl, and no one would dare to swear at him. At this I, too, burst out laughing.

I caught the plane back the following afternoon after having coffee with C and J* at a hole-in-the-wall cafe. I'd had a bad hangover and so settled on Vietnamese coffee, which was thick black coffee with condensed milk. It was a bit nasty and my tummy was upset so I opted for a freshly baked chocolate cupcake as well. When I got back to Sydney I texted L to tell me where to go but she didn’t answer her phone until 2 hours later (despite me having told her I would arrive at 5) by which time I was sitting at Eddy Avenue at Central in the sun waiting for a bus, angry as all fuck. Later I complained to Mum on the phone, ‘My life is organised, why can’t other people organise theirs?’ and she remonstrated, for the umpteenth time, that everyone was different therefore it wasn’t fair to apply my standards to them. I knew she was going to say this – she’s been saying it since I was small – despite the fact that both of us know it won’t make any difference because I will always be frustrated by disorganisation.

At last ....

…. the novel is done. Seven years of thinking, writing, rewriting, drafting and editing, the blasted thing is finished. 'A Curious Intimacy' will hit the bookshops in Oz on 8th January. I’ll also be talking at the Midsumma festival in Melbourne on the 25th Jan, and then the launch will be on the 31st January at which, of course, I’ll be wearing my Collette Dinnigan dress. I was looking at the scar on my knee this morning (acquired whilst trying to escape from stingrays when snorkling in January), wondering if it would disappear in the next two months, but given that it has only slightly faded in 11 months, I don’t think that’s a goer. I half-heartedly apply Palmer’s cocoa butter scar serum to it every now and then, but the stuff has shark liver oil in it and reeks to high heaven, so I’m not fond of using it.

Scars aside, I keep expecting Penguin to send me more proofs to tweak, but at the moment they only want more info for publicity. It won’t feel really finished until all the publicity is done and I’m back in the UK, staring glumly at my thesis again. Why did it take so long? I had various degrees to finish and start in between, and money to be made to get to London, and I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing and had to rewrite it twice before I found the right voice. Then there were agents and publisher to be found, and so many drafts to complete before it could become a reality. A few months ago I was so fed up I wished I could burn everything, but now all the work is out of the way I’m getting excited about it again.

So I have two months to get back to my previous Sydney skinniness, so as to look brilliant for the publicity. But given the shitty weather in this country, it’s hard to get motivated. In Oz the light would wake me up, I’d bounce out of bed and run around Centennial Park, then sit down and write for the rest of the day. Here it takes forever to get out of bed then it’s so fucking cold outside. However, complaints aside, I still love running. This morning along the canal there was a woman sitting on a bench reading, all the hairs on her legs standing up because it was so cold. A little further along in the alcove that stinks of urine was another woman reading music and playing on a guitar. And in the park were the usual dogs bounding around and chasing the squirrels, and a pack of men fishing, all kitted out in their green camouflage/army gear. I always laugh at them to myself as I go by, and wonder why they don’t go out into the country instead of staying by some pissy little pond in the middle of the city, trying to feel like a hunter.

I’m so homesick. I miss the sound of the palm trees clacking their leaves in my mother’s garden on windy days.