Hey there, it's me Ruby Jones. All week we're sharing our favorite episodes from our sister podcast, Read This. It's the show where the editor of the monthly, Michael Williams, talks to some of the best and most respected writers from Australia and beyond. Today we're hearing from award winning Australian author Evie Wilde. Michael Williams is here with me now, Hello, Michael.
Oh, Hi there, Ruby Jones. Hi Michael.
So, Evie Wilde's novels they're known to be quite dark.
Aren't they. Yeah, there is definitely a kind of recurring thread in Evie's novels about intergenerational trauma, about grief, about secrets, and about pain. They are trauma informed novels and that's part of why she's built this loyal following. But Evie is also incredibly smart and very funny.
You know.
The books are still kind of joyous celebrations of human connection one way or the other, even when they do have somewhat dark themes. And her new book, The Echoes straddles that kind of divide really well. In part looks at questions of nostalgia of the things that we remember and romanticize from our past and wear that intersects with trauma and unspoken things. But it's a quirkier book than that too.
It's a ghost story, isn't it.
The echoes it is. It's a kind of love story. But one of the main characters is already dead and I don't mean that. And and Patrick Swayze they sit around a potting wheel. Sense, but you're going to hear in the story Evie thinks says something very interesting about ghost stories, and we end up having what is I think, quite a lively and fun conversation about some pretty dark themes. She even has her own story about a haunted house that she and her husband lived in when they had
a newborn baby. Oh yeah, it's great. I mean, I do put forward the theory that all babies are haunted, and she doesn't disagree with that. So there's a lot in this episode. It's a heaps of fun.
Can't wait to listen, Michael, thank you so much. Coming up in just a moment, Evie Wilde is having more fun.
Than you think.
In a sense. Stories about intergenerational trauma and grief, novels about history, artistic representations of colonialism, and dispossession. Always ghost stories. They are a form of literature that's inevitably haunted by what has come before, a way that we might reckon with loss and silences and all of That's true of what Evie Wilde is doing in The Echoes. But this book is a ghost story in a far more literal
sense too. Max and Hannah's relationship, but the heart of the book is in many ways typical of a couple in their late thirties, debates around marriage and children, niggling doubts and anxieties, tensions they can't talk about. But Max is dead, he says, I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem. What follows is a novel not just about how difficult it is to ever truly know someone, but about what it
means to try to hide from your past. And for Evie Wilde, thinking about her own past begins inevitably with thinking about Australia.
When I was a kid, I was just like I am Australian, and I would affect a bad accent. But obviously you can tell from talking to me. I live in London. I was born in London. A lot of my bios seem to say was born in Australia but lives in London, And I think that's just because it's just easier for people to understand I am technically half Australian. My mum came over when she was twenty one. She lived in a pie shop in Paramatta, and she came
over in quite an unusual way, went traveling. She's very working class, and she met my father, who was very very British and couldn't deal with Australia at all, got absolutely slated whenever he went over there, and very burnt and bitten, and so there was never any possibility really
of us moving over there. And I think what I picked up on as a kid was, you know, apart from the beauty of Australia where my family subsequently moved to, which is a sugarcane farm in northern New South Wales, like the freedom of that place and the smell and the birds and all of that stuff. That was something that I thought about constantly as a child, and I dreamt about it so much so that when I was there, I would be really panicked that I was just having a dream.
I was going to wake up.
And I think that comes from my mum's homesickness, you know, really seeing her in a park in London, find a gum tree and just like scrunch up the leaves and really inhale it for me that you know, that kind of got passed on and you know when she came over it was it was a thirty six hour flight, and you know, the idea of doing that more than once every two years, and the expense and all of that stuff, and also you know, she didn't have a landline.
I think just being cut off from your family in such a way when you're so young, it kind of really built up this quite heavy homesickness that I kind of inherited. As for like, do I feel more or less, I don't know. I lived in Australia in my twenties in Sydney, and I think by that point I was kind of I mean, I was really feckless. I ended up living in a flat share with some people from Portsmouth in the UK because that was the only place I could find and it was on BONDI and it
was all really just embarrassing. And I got a job working for the Red Cross, like going door to door in the suburbs and I got a dollar every time somebody bought something of it was completely hopeless, and I'm sure that added to my feeling of you know, maybe this isn't my home, but yeah, it just I didn't have any direction and I didn't feel the roots that I wanted to feel. And I think that is that's part of being from two places that when I'm here in London, I really I yearn for Australia.
But it's the same the other way around.
What's the relationship between that part of your identity and your imaginative, creative self.
I think, apart from my last book, The Best Rock, I think all of my books have started from a daydreaming, like a sort of nostalgia.
It's easier for me to.
Write about place I'm not in and to kind of in sort of April in London think myself into December in New South Wales. I think that is like it's like a yearning and it's kind of the collection of all of those family stories that I was listening to when I.
Was a kid.
There is a deep nostalgia for me and my favorite thing to do is like go through the photo albums of just snapshots of you know, when we were kids, and they're all grainy and everyone's covered in zinc, and it just you can smell it and you can hear it, Like whenever I hear a butcher bird or a magpie, it's like instant transportation. Or the Pakistani mangoes are in season at the minute, and just like I go down to our local shop and walk back just smelling one like a lunatic.
So yeah, I love the fact identify that one of the kernels of your books is nostalgia as a starting point. How does the line go so swiftly from nostalgia to trauma just out of curiosity?
I think everyone's got both in them. I mean, I'm a big horror fan. That's probably what's going on. I think every beautiful setting is vastly improved by a monster or a ghost. So I think for English people in particular, Australia does hold like some of the last monsters, you know, like that, whether it's snakes or spiders or sharks.
I think there's stuff.
That when you're in England, being English, you feel very very afraid of, and actually when you're in Australia you forget about it and you go swimming in the river and it's all fine, but well, most of the time it's fine, but yeah, I think my family live on a river that has sharks in and it floods every now and then, and so that the house is up on stilts, and I think just the concept of sharks underneath your house is like such a beautiful, horrific thing.
And I find there are so many of those things available in Australia.
While intergenerational trauma and echoes of the past themes that run through all of your work, this is perhaps the one that most explicitly, most overtly ties some of those ideas to the colonial experience in Australia. And I'm curious about whether there was an anxiety about going down the barrel of that big, tricky conversation.
Yes, it's a huge anxiety, and I think, you know, by this point in my career, I feel like when you're anxious about something, you kind of have to head towards it a bit. My main anxiety about it is I'm not articulate on it, but I think that was the point that I started from, and then I realized that one of the big problems is we're not articulate about it because woods cannot express what happened and what
the English have done. So like, there was definitely a stage in the writing of The Echoes where one of my editors was like really anxious about it, and she was like, Oh, should we just take out all of the stuff about the Indigenous school for girls and and
you know, should we just play it safe? And I felt like there was a real moment of like a part of me really wanted to do that, but I think it is really important to fumble your way through to some kind of acknowledgment of what went on and the you know, talking about inherited trauma, like certainly not the biggest trauma of what happened, but the experience of being a white Australian and having whatever your ancestors did in the past is you know, that's really really heavy,
and I feel like it's important to scramble around and try and find words or images or something that express that feeling of just like horror and.
It is you know, I think the best novels, the most powerful novels, grapple with that question about how to
depict something that goes beyond what can be articulated. I mean I remember the I think it was Nick Hornby's review of Saturday by Ian McEwen, where he went to town on that novel because he said, odd's a cop out from McEwen, because all the characters are poets and brain surgeons and expressly kind of engineered to be able to articulate their every thought and their every emotion, and a true novelist doesn't make that easy for their characters.
They depict them without them having the power to articulate it.
Yeah.
I think that's a good point, and I don't find that there's much. I'm not that interested in people who have succeeded in life that well and what their idea is on the world, because it's not it's kind of in the cracks that the interesting people live. And I think it's really important that you don't finish the book with an answer, because obviously I don't have an answer, and I don't think there is an answer. I think it's just I don't know if you're allowed to swear
on your podcast, but I think it's fucked. He can be put out. I think it's about trying to kind of lock into that feeling that you get when that anxiety, like you picked up on that kind of feeling of like in your chest when the subject comes up, and trying to form it into some kind of shape and that's never going to look pretty. And there were drafts where I had Uncle Tone be a lot more articulate about it, and they just didn't work because they weren't him,
and it was you know, I was Ian mcewning. I was trying to get my thought what's across. But I think what is more interesting and more pertinent is that people don't know what to say and they're not It's all about looking away, really.
Isn't it.
So we have a standard set of things we can say and we stick there, and I think any trying to kind of reach out into the darkness of what surrounds those safe words is really frightening, certainly for me anyway, And I'm always afraid of putting a foot in it. But I'm also really afraid of being silent. So ultimately I think the book is looking at who gets to
tell stories. Well, I know that I would never, for example, tell a story from an indigenous person's point of view, but it seems madness to me to not admit the white Australian experience of living on indigenous land and choosing to look away or choosing to look in front of it.
No, it absolutely does. And I'm glad you mentioned uncle tone because seems to me the significant thing about that character isn't whether he has the language to express this disquiet, these ideas, whatever, but he does have the tenacity, the pugnaciousness, the drunkenness as well to not have barriers to what he feels he can comment on. You know, as a character. He must be liberating as a writer because he is someone who is not inhibited in sounding up.
Yeah, it was kind of important to me to give that kind of voice to someone who's also not what we would call a goodie. I mean, I wrote him as somebody who I wanted you to be kind of charmed by him in a way and feel real grief
at what he eventually does. And I was sort of thinking about within the Me Too movement, the in particular comedians that accused of correctly of doing terrible things, and how how their friends like stood up for them and then were shouted down, and that discomfort of there's someone you love and they've done a terrible thing. It doesn't
mean you don't love them anymore, and that awkwardness. So I really wanted to give him the mic for talking about those things, because he's not some pious, right thinking person. He's just scrabbling around in the dirt with the rest of us.
He does memorably say, there's no unfucking it is there? Once you've sucked it up, there's no unfucking it. Yeah, do you believe that?
I think there's trying to unfuck it, which is important.
I mean, I don't.
Think that things that we have done are unfuckable.
There you know, what would we do? Yeah? I just can't figure out what that would be.
Once we've silenced a whole language and a whole I don't know.
We just put a muffler over everything.
I don't feel like British politics is robust enough for the colonial experiment to be rejected in all colonial Australians to return to Britain. I feel like that might we wouldn't be well received.
I think, yeah, we'd have to open up the Isle of Wight. Yeah, okay.
When we return. Evie reveals the story behind her own haunted house and why. Writing from the perspective of a ghost can be a whole lot of fun. We'll be
right back. You mentioned before that you wouldn't write from the perspective of an Indigenous character, but the recognition of that history, the recognition of that schism in the Australian contemporary lived experience, is really important to you, and I'm curious about how how how you approach that, how you approach as you said, so, I mutually the echoes is about who gets to tell a story. Are there points where you found yourself with the limits of a story that you felt you should tell.
Yes, definitely, I think I've walked the line, but I would be absolutely open to hearing where I haven't. I felt awkward talking about death of Indigenous people and I was like, but I can't leave that out because that is what we did, and I feel the landscape of Australia is so steeped in blood that it felt embarrassing to leave it out. But yeah, I think I'm absolutely sure that I have blundered into things unknowingly and I would be delighted to know what they are.
It strikes me one of the things that raises the degree of difficulty for you in being sensitive to those questions about how to handle death and belief and spirituality and other cultures. Is The Echoes is a book that has fun with for lack of a bitter way of putting a questions of mortality in the afterlife, and then you know it's a ghost story at its heart. Do you believe in ghosts?
I believe that people see ghosts. The Echoes, The London parts of The Echoes is set in a house that me and my husband fled because it was haunted. But at the same time, you know, I don't really believe in afterlife, so I believe it is.
You know, we had a new baby. I believe babies are haunted, are.
Deeply haunted, absolutely little fleshy haunted houses.
Yeah, absolutely, But so like you know, we both experienced sort of some weird things happening, and all of them on their own totally explainable.
You know, there was a swarm of bees in our bathroom.
That's because there was a swarm of bees swarming and they found a hole and came into our bathroom. But because it was happening at the same time as I was not quite hallucinating, but I could see with my eyes that there was no woman there. But I could picture a woman in the doorway looking at me, and she looked like no one I've ever seen before. And it had such a feeling to it, and there were smells and there were noises, and you know, I don't
I don't know. It's a funny thing to look at your partner and go, shall we go and live with my mother? Because with the ghost here and for them to go, yes, take the baby, let's go. And now we look back on it and we laugh about it. And I'm sure you know, I was terrified because I had a new baby. I was sleep ap, I was you know, who knows what the sort of drugs SO was on for the cesarean we're doing, and you know, we were both just having daily meltdowns. And the noise
of a crying baby is haunting itself. I come from like a background of like there's loads of ghost stories in my family, and you know they're those really great ones that have no neat ending.
They're just horrifying.
They're just like I opened a box there was an old man in there in which and then you know, and that's it.
There's no closure.
It's just like ugh, I mean, first the close the box, I forget put the lead back on that.
Box throw I matching.
Yeah, So I think I believe that we are very strange creatures and that one of our coping mechanisms is is ghosts.
I feel like it's really it was really.
Interesting in writing the book, like having to kind of set down on paper what what rules my ghost can have and what constitutes it?
Guys.
I when my father died, I would see him everywhere, you know, but it would be a real human being walking down the street and I'd be walking behind them and they would be walking just as my father did in his clothes, and I hadn't seen their face, but I was. I would follow them, and I'd be like, that's just him, And what's the difference between that and you know, somebody sitting on the end of your bed at night, or like, you know, having a dream about
them where they say some stuff to you. Might be complete nonsense, might be something that you've been really worrying about that was unfinished. And that's kind of like that, you know, the unfinished business of ghosts. I feel like it's all so tangled up with who the living are.
How much fun has it been as a writer to introduce an element that is sits beyond what we know or what we're believing. You just say, I'm going to say a new set of rules for the story I'm telling you is that it doesn't have to adhere to the things that I know in the world or the kind of story I've told before. I get to wipe the slight clean and say, Okay, in this world, in this world, Max's did and Max is going to talk to us.
Yeah, it was great fun. I had a lot more fun than you can see in the book. I think the only super weird thing he can do, apart from still being around and being dead, is his size changes depending on what he's feeling like. But I did have versions where you know, he was part of he like when you die, you sink into the brickwork of the house, you know, and then he could see all the other people who'd died there, and it just it became wild and mad and really difficult to find the story within.
So in the end, the most interesting version of him turned out to be someone he just feels a bit impotent, like, you know, they hadn't finished what they were going to say and they can't say it, and seeing the parts of his girlfriend Hannah that he hadn't seen before. You know that she can sing, that she talks to herself who she is when she talks to herself when she's entirely alone, and he can't have any input in it.
I feel like it's such a massive fun thing to write, And actually all of the other I had several weird monsters that were floating around at some point, and I really enjoyed them, but they just weren't the story I was trying to tell.
I love the recurring thread of you having father and they're producing something that's traumatizing fathers that I'm having a great time when I'm playing, and it comes from a place of joy and nostalgia, and it's like, that's just where the fun is.
It is, I do think it is. I think it's just it's exciting, isn't it. I think I'm not Death's biggest fan, but there is a part of me that's like to be on that cusp and to go, I'm going to find out the thing that nobody knows is kind of amazing.
You know. It comes back a bit to that idea of the inarticulate again, is in a relationship, there are things we can or don't say to one another. And by building a relationship, by describing a relationship to us through the lens of death, through the lens of it being over, gives you an opportunity to to sketch out the things that could never be said between them.
Yeah.
I think there's this really interesting thing that happens in long term relationships where you assume you know that person really well and that knowing them is an important part of your relationship.
It's like, I know you and who you are, and you never do.
And also there's that thing you know when you're breaking up with someone and the thing that you say is, oh, you changed, and it's like, well, yeah, every selling my body and I took on two decades worth of information and the world changed, and you know, we change constantly, and the idea of that being a bad thing. And I think within relationships it's very easy to get a sort of pinpoint in a person and go, this is where I want you to stay, and that's my comfort zone.
And when they move out of that, it becomes very uncomfortable and you miss the old version.
It was very like having a kid, you know.
I look back at photographs of my son who's now nearly ten, and I don't recognize the little sort of cherubie person and it's a really strange feeling and you kind of grieve that, you grieve who they were. I think there's something like that that goes on in romantic relationships that you're just like you kind of hook onto them and you're like, oh, please don't change, this is perfect, and then you both go off in different directions. And inability to acknowledge that is I think really sad.
So just before I let you go to clarify, are you willing to try your childhood Australian accent on us now before you leave? Shows how bad it is.
All right, let's think, what would I say? There's a shark in the.
Park Strom strong choice and you went straight back to hallucinating. Oh, that's that's great, That's that's not bad. I've got a whole new interview of questions about why hallucinating is the word that gets you into your Australian self. But that makes sense. That was perfect. I can't I can't fault that. Thank you, Ivie Wild, Thank you so much for your time.
Oh it's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Ivy Wilde's latest novel, The Echoes, is available at all Good bookstores now.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Read This. We'll be back tomorrow with another episode, and you can hear all of Read This by searching for it wherever you listen to podcasts.