Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Our colleagues that Read This routinely hosts the brightest and best writers from Australia and around the world. Today, we're going to hear from Geraldine Brooks. Geraldine is an Australian American writer who began her career as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Her nineteen ninety four book Nine Parts of Desire was in fact one of the reasons that I wanted to become
a journalist. I loved her ability to access the inner worlds of these women in countries that I hope to one day be able to visit. In two thousand and five, her novel March was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Since then, she's published several more books of fiction, including her latest Horse. Michael Williams is the host of Read This, and he's with me now. Hi Michael, Hi Ruby, Great to see you again. I am such a fan of
Geraldine Brooks writing. Have you been also following her career for a while?
Yeah? Look, massive fan as well. And in fact, the Geraldine Brooks episode that people are about to hear today was the one that we kicked off the twenty twenty four season with and it was kind of a very deliberate choice. We had a chance to sit down and chat to Geraldine. Her most recent novel, Horse is terrific. But she's also one of those people who's so thoughtful, not just about what she writes, but about what she reads and the ways in which influence plays a huge role in her work.
Yeah.
I remember her thoughtfulness and the way that she reflected on her role as a journalist as she was doing the journalism that informed her work that I found really inspiring when I read it as a teenager. In this episode, you asked Geraldine about her life sentence, So a piece of writing advice that has stayed with her? Why were you interested in hearing about that from Geraldine.
The life sentence format, which we use occasionally for read these episodes, stems from a column that we do each month in The Monthly where we ask contributors to reflect on a piece of advice. Maybe it's an old lyric from a song or a quote from a work of literature there or that has really stayed with them that kind of permeates their day to day routine and their creative routine as well. Something that underpins the way they see the world and the way they write about it.
So the opportunity to ask a writer like Geraldine Brooks who's made that transition from award winning journalist to novelists and has thought about storytelling through all these different prisms felt like a really great opportunity.
I can't wait to hear what she says. Coming up in just a moment, How Geraldine Brooks became a novelist?
Okay phone off, microphone on headphones twenty twenty four, We are Back? Where were we? Geraldine Brooks is that rarest of things. A literary bestseller, her two thousand and five novel March, a retelling of Little Woman, won a Pulitzer Prise. She's written historical novels about plagues and Puritans, about the writing of the Bible, and in her most recent novel, Horse,
about the greatest race horse in American history. Her readers hang onto her vivid retellings of history and literature, but they also hang on her every sentence because on the line she's gorgeous. This combination of the poetic and the forensic see for me, I love reading Geraldine Brooks's novels because she's one of those writers whose turn of phrase is mesmerizing. I'll stop reading and share passages with whoevers
in the room. I'll take photos of paragraphs and send them to friends, like some kind of instagrammer eating a particularly photogenic meal. Geraldine Brooks writes sentences, so when I asked her to offer a life sentence for Read This, a turn of phrase that had stayed with her or resonated in her life or in her work since she first came across it, it made perfect sense that she might choose a scene for its elegant beauty from Schwartz Media.
I'm Michael Williams, and welcome back to Read This, the show about the books we love and the sentences that make them. French novelist Andre McKean won that country's two most prestigious literary prizes with his nineteen ninety five book Dreams of My Russian Summers. It's a novel about memory and loss, one that grapples with the weight and expectations of history and the ways in which it shapes and
distorts the personal. I'm not surprised that for Geraldine Brooks, pre eminent author of historical fiction, it's a book that resonated at several levels. Here she is with the sentence from that novel that has stayed with her.
By now she knew that this life, despite all its pain, could be lived. That one must travel through it, slowly, passing from the sunset to the penetrating odor of the stalks, from the infinite calm of the plane, to the singing of a bird lost in the sky. Yes, going from the sky to that deep reflection of it that she felt within her own breast as an alert and living presence.
Geraldine Brooks, thank you so much. What a treat to be read to, and what a gorgeous choice. Maybe if you could kick us off by telling us a bit about why that passage stands out for you.
I was reading dreams of my Russian summers for the first time in a pretty difficult year for me. It was two thousand and four and I was being treated for breast cancer and you never know how that's gonna go. And I'm very happy that it's almost what twenty years ago, and it's just a bad memory and a couple of fading scars. But at the time, you're right in the thick of contemplating your mortality. For me, for the first time quite seriously, because I'd always been in denial about that.
Even when I was in crazy situations covering wars and whatnot, I always felt invulnerable. But there was something about getting to that point in the book. And he's writing about his grandmother who was trapped in Siberia by the outbreak of World War One, and her husband has gone off to fight, and as far as she knows, he's dead,
and of course conditions have been terrible. But this idea that the sad and the happy, the beautiful and the terrible, they're all going to work side by side in your life. You're never really going to be in one steady state, and you have to accept that and still be open to the beauty as well as accepting the grief and the pain.
Oh I love that acceptance and openness and steadiness. It's kind of seeking stillness despite being buffeted at all sides. Does that resonate with you were still person?
No? Not really. Every time I go to yoga class and we get to the end and you're lying in savasna, all I can do is think about all the things I should be doing if I wasn't lying in Sevastna. For me, the only time I've ever experienced the full bee here now is on the back of a horse, because if you're not there now, you'll be on the ground very soon after.
Fair enough. But you only came to horse riding at fifty. Do I have that right?
Yeah?
I was in my fifties, because that's relatively late to find the thing that gives you permission to be still.
Yeah, Because for me reading it's a bit like that Andre McKean experience. You're associating it it always with things in your own life. And I should also say that the reason I love that sentence is as a writer, it's just a magnificent sentence. The punctuation is incredibly complicated.
You're breathing on the semi colons and the commas. It's a long, single sentence, and I'm just blown away by it technically, So I'm never one hundred percent there in the book because I'm thinking, wow, this is really beautifully written, or I'm thinking, yes, he's got that right, because it associates with something in my own life that.
Makes perfect sense. But that seems inherently sad to me that as a writer you might not be able to just read for joy. I mean, are you always aware of the mechanics reading as a writer?
Oh?
Look, no, sometimes not. And when that happens, the minute I finished the book, I go back and start it again, to read it for the cross. Yeah no, I do that myself, get carried off by story and emotion and the reality that the writer has created.
Have you changed as a reader throughout your life?
I think we all do, don't we. I mean, the more tread you get worn off your tires just by living, the more you can see. I mean, all those classic books that they marched us through in high school, they were great, It was a great experience, but when you come back to them, having actually lived, you read them as a completely different book.
I couldn't agree more. It's one of the great delights, I think, is to go back to a book that you either read too young, or that your reading of it was kind of consumed by some wider cultural context rather than the book itself, and then you come back to it and you discover the magic on the page, or the ways in which it confounds your expectations. I adore that feeling.
Yeah, you know, I I used to read a lot to my kiddos before they could read for themselves, and it's you know, there was really a day that really amused me. We'd been reading the Philip Pullman his Dark Materials trilogy, and talk about a book that I was getting on entirely other levels to what my eight year old son was getting in terms of the Milton references
and the string theory and all that. When we get to the end, and it's this absolutely heartbreaking bit whether two young protagonists realize that they have to go back to their own universes and they talk about how they're going to sit on this bench at Oxford at the same time every year in their separate universes. And I'm in absolute floods of tears, and my son is like, Mom, could you stop crying and just get on with the story because he hadn't experienced deep romantic love like that.
You know, no, of course, But tell me, were you read too when you were a kid? Did your parents read to you?
Oh? Yes, that was one of the great things of my childhood. We didn't have a lot of material stuff when I was growing up, but books were huge, and we would go to the library every weekend and we'd all come back with our stack. You know, my parents were voracious readers, and my dad read to me every night from six thirty to seven, and wherever we were at at seven o'clock, that was where we left it.
And it was all a big plot, of course, because finally, when my reading skills were sufficient and the book was so good, I just you know, that was when I finally took off as a reader. But yeah, no, being read to was a huge part of my childhood.
You might not, but I'm just curious, do you remember any moments when you were aware of your father enjoying a book? Is reading to at a level you worked at.
But you know, the great thing about my dad was when I was coming up, he was working as a proofreader for the Women's Weekly, and often the books that he would choose for me were ones that had been serialized in the Weekly. And I remember one of them was Paul Gallico Scruppy, which is about the apes on
Gibraltar during World War Two. And it is a book that works on two levels, because you know, the wartime part of the plot didn't intrigue me as much as the character of Scruppy, who is this absolutely impossible ape that they have to convince to mate with a female otherwise, you know, the legend is that if the Apes disappeared from Gibraltar, the British Empire will collapse. Anyway, my dad
was incredibly in love with the English language. He was very astute grammarian, and he had like certain things that drove him crazy. Misuses of were like decimate. He could not bear it. He could not bear the expression centered around anyway. So he would stop in the middle of the book and explain grammatical niceties. And also he was very patient about if there was a word I didn't understand, I would get a definition that was worthy of the oed.
Did you have a similar dynamic with your mum? Like did she read to you?
She was a huge reader. She didn't read to me, But she was the one who taught me to be a writer, I think because she was more into the imagination and she would make up these incredibly involving games that had a strong narrative line through them, had characters in dialogue and all that, and we would play those games together and I think that that you know, I wasn't thinking about being a writer, but it was the
best training possible. And you know, I loved hanging out with her because it was so instructive and I learned more. So I became a bit of a school avoid and she was pretty okay with that. So I would just miss a lot of school and hang out with her and we would make up stories.
Oh, I love that. And it's like they're the essential building blocks for any writer. Your dad offering the technical side of things and the rigor of language, and then your mum's imagination and story and love of play. What an amazing combination.
And you know, throw in the third thing, which is the Irish heritage, the uncles and the great uncles and their aunts. And my grandmother loved poetry, and so when they would get together, you know, and they'd had a few Sherris or whatever, they all had their party piece, these long narrative poems that they would recite, and it was transfixing for a kid. Wait for them to get a bit tipsy and launch into Alaska or the charge of the Light Brigade or whatever it was.
We'll be right back. For the past several decades, Geraldine Brooks has split her time between Sydney and Martha's Vineyard, where she lived for many years with her late husband, writer and historian Tony Horowitz. The two met while they were foreign correspondents, Tony for the New Yorker and Geraldine for the Wall Street Journal. Eventually both made the move from journalism to books, history for Tony and ultimately the novel for Geraldine. I was curious about how that transition was for her.
It wasn't so smooth that it was a little bit more gradual. So the first turtle to get over is the transition from writing reasonably short to sustaining a narrative. And that lesson I learned with my first book, which was a nonfiction and one hundred percent of journalist's book,
which was nine parts of Desire. And I was trying to distill what I had learned over six years living in the Middle East and basically learning to report the region through the advantage that I have had, which was the ability to speak to the women and get their experiences. And you know, it had been a mind expanding, mind blowing six years for me. And when I sat down to write that book, I had no idea how to
sustain a narrative. More than three thousand words was the longest thing I'd ever written at that point, and that was considered a long story for a newspaper, so I had to learn how to do that, and so that was It took me six months, and I've wasted time
before I could even begin to see the way. So that was one step, and then the next step was my second nonfiction book was quirky and a lot more personal, and it was about the It was call Foreign Correspondence, and it's about the penthals that I had when I was growing up in Sydney in the sixties and early seventies and writing to these kids all over the world. And when I was thirty nine or forty, I found that my dad had kept their letters to me, and
so I went and found them. And that book is kind of a strange hybrid between a travel adventure, a memoir, and a reflection on what kind of a dude my dad was. So all of those three things were the strands that I had to learn how to weave together, and I think that doing that loosened me up and made it possible when I made the leap into fiction, because I had learned a couple of lessons earlier on.
So when it comes to writing fiction for you, clearly one of the bigger engines. The kind of recurring prompts is history. Where did you love of history come from? When did that fascination kick in and the novel and history inextricably linked in your mind?
No, it's just because I'm a lazy bugger, and you find these wonderful stories from the past. You've got the superstructure, and you know, I really don't think I know how to make it up from scratch. I love to find these stories that if you did make them up, they wouldn't be great books because they'd be too implausible. That a Muslim risked his life to say the Jewish book, that a Native American born into his own language and culture in sixteen forty ends up graduating from Harvard with
the sons of the colonial puritan Italy. If you made him up, everybody would say, oh, that's bs, But it happened. And so I'm always looking for a story where you know, this fascinating thing happened, but you can't know everything about it. And that's where the fictional part comes in. I wasn't really that interested in history, but then I fell in love with a historian, a guy who was absolutely animated
by history. And I think it's a bit of symbiosis, you know, occurred living with a real historian.
Is it the case that if your childhood and your upbringing was the kind of perfect gift to the person who wants to go on to become a writer, your marriage to Tony somehow became a continuation of that gift.
Yeah, well it's certainly. You know, it was an amazing thirty five years being married to Tony. Oh, it's that's for sial.
Was he a different kind of writer to you? How did that help with your own development as a writer.
We started off being quite similar. You know. I met him in journalism school, and we were passionate news reporters for more than a decade and a half. That was all we thought about doing. And then, you know, for me, it was having a child at the age of forty and realizing I didn't want to be running off to dangerous situations on open ended assignments, and that I needed to try and find something else that would be gainfully employing.
And for Tony, it was just realizing that book writing made him happier than having to answer to a squad of editors at The New Yorker. He was desperately unhappy there because they would handpeck every sentence, and they also wanted him to tell them what the story would be before he'd reported it. And he had by that time written two or three books, and he realized that he was a much happier man when he was working under his own direction.
That makes a lot of sense. But it is funny to me that you describe your use of history as evidence of laziness in some way, kind of delving into artifacts and incidents, that's this whole additional layer of work and responsibility, not to mention pressure. Surely that's the opposite of lazy grappling with the past.
Oh well, look, I don't know, but at least you've got an idea of what the plot is.
And where it's going to go exactly. But isn't there a burden of responsibility when you're doing that? I mean, I imagine if you're going all the way back to the Bronze Age Israel or whatever, you don't feel like very similitudes essential. But at the same time, the way people use history, the meaning they derive from it, is so loaded and so charged. Is that something in your head?
Look, there's a huge burden and responsibility being a journalist. I used to have like a tick in my eye from thinking about have I been have I you know, have I reported it well enough? Have I been fair to that? You know, international conspiracy of bad guy representative who's going to get completely shellacked on the front page of the Wall Street journel tomorrow. And I didn't sleep the night before those big stories were going to come out,
So there's a huge responsibility there. And yes, I like to follow the line of fact as far as it leads. I don't willing nearly change things. And if I do change some small thing, I always come clean about it in the afterward of the book, because I do feel a responsibility to that.
But even though the historical kind of provocations are central to your novels, you'll often make the point of framing them with a contemporary thread, or making a point of the relationship between retroactive storytelling and hindsight and how we kind of extract meaning from them in the present day. I mean, in Horse, it's fundamentally important to the power of that book that the stuff you have to say about race and about slavery is seen through a lens of present day racism in the US as well.
Yeah. Well, I realized that if I was going to be discussing racism in the nineteenth century, and I was going to have a contemporary story, which I always wanted to because I was fascinated with the science around the horses skeleton at the Smithsonian, I couldn't leave racism in the past as if it was something over and done with.
That would have been irresponsible. And I have to say when I realized that that was where I was going, my heart sank a little bit, because you'd have to be living under a rock not to be aware of the discourse around appropriation and about who has the right to tell what story. And I wasn't thrilled about walking into that particular threshing machine, but I didn't see any way to responsibly tell the story without doing that.
When it comes to anxiety about stuff that you feel entitled to write about, you're yet to write a novel that is solely inspired by or set in a context of Australian history or Australian culture, and I'm curious about whether you have the anxiety of the expat who lives in two countries when it comes to writing about Australia, or whether you're just waiting to find the right story.
I know I started writing a novel based on the life of Jane Franklin, but something happened there in that I could not access the story that she was telling herself. And if you can't do that with a character, you really can't write them. But honestly, Australian history is so painful. The dispossession and the abuse of Indigenous Australians has to
be addressed in it. The despoilation of the landscape when you know, we cut down the big scrub and I don't know, you know, it's just I think when it's your own, the idea of immersing myself in these painful histories, I'm a bit of a coward about it.
Honestly, No, I completely get that. You know, it's such a different thing when you feel implicated personally in the history that you're writing about. So, if I can bring it back to the McKeen quote that we kick things off with, I want to know when you're writing, how do you know when a sentence is done. Are you in a state of kind of constant revision, constant returning to the line, or does it flow out of you. You know it's done, and you move right.
On all of the above. I am constantly revising, and I would be still revising horse if they had let me. You know that that terrible day comes when they have to take it from your cold, dead hands, you know. And then you go out and you might be asked to read a passage and you can see like six
ways you could make it better. It's excruciating, and then you know, so I love what A friend of mine who's a sculptor, her name is Sarah z and she makes these incredible, elaborate constructions, and they were profiling her for The New Yorker and they asked her about her process, and she said something that is so wonderful. She said, my process is mess, mess, mess art. And I love that because you can go to your desk and make a mess every day. You don't get to make art
every day. You're lucky, you know. If you get one of those incredible days when the plane just takes off and sores wonderful and the sentences flow out and they're great. But you have to be really suspicious of those days, I think, because most of the time the plane's just clumping along on the runway and it's not getting the list.
There's no question that Geraldine Brooks's latest novel, Horse has Left and its sores. It's available at all good bookstores now. And if you're a fan of Brooks and in particular her love of an elegant sentence, you should read her contribution to the Writers on Writers series about Tim Winton. It's a terrific essay and illuminates hips about both writers.
Thank you for listening to Geraldine Brooks on Read This. For the next couple of months, we're going to bring you some of the best interviews from the show. Every Sunday. Listen out for conversations with Eric Beacher, Mary Beard, Bruce Pasco and more. And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday, today I've in to read this. You can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There's a whole year's worth of fascinating conversations ready for you.