Hello there, it's Ruby Jones and I'm back to introduce another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast, hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, we're going to hear from Melbourne based writer Sean Wilson, who's discussing his second novel You Must Remember This. As always, I'm joined by Michael to tell me a bit more about the episode. Hi, Michael,
Ruby Jones. Hello, So Michael, I thought we could maybe begin our conversation with a discussion about unreliable narrators, because that is really key to Sean Wilson's new book, isn't it.
Yeah, that's absolutely right, Ruby. It is on balance a bit harsh to refer to the main character of Sean Wilson's new book as an unreliable narrator. She doesn't know she's unreliable. She's someone whose connection with her own life, with her own memories, is fractured, and so her story is one of someone who's disconnected. But when we read a book, it's a relationship of trust with the voice that we're hearing from with the story we're being told.
You know, we're conditioned as kids to believe what we're being told in the stories. Here's the good, he, here's the bad. He, Here's what's going on. And I think there's something thrilling as a reader that first moment you come up against the thing where there's a world, where there's a set of meanings, where there's a reality that might be beyond your narrator. They might be lying to you,
they might not know what's going on. But the great literature presents heroes that are complicated, presents characters whose worldview isn't the totality of the story that they're telling. And I love that. And Sean Wilson's book is a worthy inclusion in that pantheon.
Right, And it's dementia that the narrator of you must remember this is dealing with. So how does that play out in the structure of the book and what is the ultimate impact.
Yeah, it's such a fascinating kind of creative, artistic storytelling challenge. And if you think about like great depictions of dementia that you've either read or seen, I mean to me, I think about there was that film a couple of years ago with Olivia Coleman and Anthony Hopkins called The Father and that was great. There was another one with Nonie Hazlehurst called June Again that I encourage people to
dig out. Both of those did this trick where central characters were suddenly recast in the middle of the film, They'll be having a conversation and suddenly a different actor would be the one setting across from our dementia suffering protagonist. As a viewer, it immediately took you out of it. It immediately gave your sense of what that character was going through. Who is this person who says that they're my son but has a face I've never seen before.
It's kind of heartbreaking. And Sean Wilson's book does a kind of literary version of that, because at the heart of it is this really really clever Conceit begins with chapter ten and then follows it with chapter seven, then chapter eleven, and it jumps around like that. It's a
completely fractured, fragmented narrative. The experience of the dementia sufferer so often is one about a nonlineargs where memory and reality bang up against each other and they're trying to make sense of this kind of fragmented world, and Sean Wilson captures that beautifully with his central character, Grace. It's a heartbreaking book and one that I thought was really pretty fabulous.
Coming up. In just a moment, Sean Wilson pulls back the curtain on dementia.
Did I read somewhere that you must remember this had one iteration where it was written for performance rather than for the page.
Yeah, so we're going back over a decade now. I originally wrote it for this stage, and it got a bit of attention from some theater companies, didn't ultimately make it on stage. And not long after I'd written it and was talking to theater companies, I saw The Father, the play on stage because it was a play before the film, and quickly realized that my play was a little bit too close to that play and it was unlikely I was ever going to get it on main stage,
so put it away. And then at a certain point I just thought, you know, let's have a go out rewriting it as a novel. And so a lot of the elements in the stage version aren't relatable to the novel. In the stage version, Grace is on stage the whole time. There's no blackout. People are coming in and out from President Pass and so there's probably a little bit more bleed in the President and Past in the stage version in order to get across that message in a different way.
But some of the elements, some of the scenes remain and I've just sort of rewritten them for the page instead.
It really surprised me, partly because the book is so accomplished on what I think of as particularly literary terms rather than theatrical terms. You know that the fragmentary nature of Grace's relationship with her reality and her past means that you have to have a very defthand with metaphor, with how to we express something that she might not be able to express, and that relationship between kind of knowing and not knowing that seems particularly well suited to the novel.
Yeah, and the fact that you can get into Grace's head and to a certain extent, show the confusion that you wouldn't be able to get across on the stage. As you know, the constraints on the stage is just dialogue and some scene description and bit of action. You haven't got anything else, And so you can only tell that story through the interactions that are happening on stage, so it opens up a lot more possibility to do
it as a novel. I think it was in some senses an easier process writing as a novel compared to as a play. But as you said, it gives you a bit more opportunity to explore the condition itself through metaphor.
So a story that you first tried to tell ten years ago, men couldn't they go of and came back to in a different form? Was it your grandmother drove you to know that you wanted to tell this story.
Yeah, and I felt like I had a responsibility as a writer but also as a grandson to try to understand her experience. So at a certain point in her life with dementia, I could tell that she was starting to live between president and past. So she would be interacting with us in the present, sometimes knowing who he was, sometimes not. But she would talk about her parents, who are long dead on the other side of the world
as if they were about to visit. And she'd talk about her age care worker in the same moment as if that person was her best friend. And so it's very difficult once a person reaches that point of cognitive decline, they can't tell you what it's like, and so I suppose it lends itself to a story to exploring through fiction what that experience might be like.
Was she your mom's mum or your dad's dad's mom A Were you close?
Yeah? Yeah, really close. She's quite a remarkable person in a quiet way. She grew up poor in Manchester, lived through the Blitz, the family, got on a ship three months across to the other side of the world in the fifties and sort of raised her family over here
without any assistance. You know, someone requires a lot of fortitude to do something like that, and it's it is tragic that at the end of her life she gets to a point where she loses all of those memories, all of the parts that made her her And it's
very difficult to watch a person go through that. But then it's very difficult to see yourself disappearing in their eyes at the same time, which I suppose is one reason why there are so few accounts of dementia in fiction, because it's a difficult thing, if you have experience with it, to see yourself, to watch yourself disappear and to see your love on going through that.
How like for your family, the management of the dementia and the kind of slow motion loss of this important figure. How did that play out for you guys? Was it something you talked about freely? Was it something you know? My family definitely, Gallows humor is almost the only way of coping with any of that stuff. But I'm curious. One of the things I love so much in this book is Grace's daughter, Liz, and how that plays out. And I'm curious for you and your family.
Yeah, I think I just dialed up in Liz some of the reactions that we all had. And so Liz has some moments of frustration with Grace, and she has some moments of compassion and acceptance, and I think the intensity of those is just dialed up. It's probably a little bit less in our experience, but there was very much I witnessed in myself and other people. There's moments where you want to try and tether them to the present,
and you almost want to fight against the condition. And in those moments, sometimes when you do that, it can create some distract for the person because you're trying to correct them constantly and they are aware in a vague kind of sense in some cases of shame and embarrassment about what they're saying and the fact that they're not remembering.
And so I think another path that you can take, a more compassionate path where you just sort of go along with things a lot of the time, where you just even though they might be saying something completely wrong, you just go along with the thread and you continue, and you can kind of calmly and slowly try to bring some of their memories out, but if it doesn't happen,
then you just sort of let it go gently. And I think that that in the relationship between Liz and Grace in the book, when the point that it gets to, I think is a point where Liz's started to come to terms with that. And what you mentioned about Gallow's humor, I think I tried to get across in the book that there is a tragedy going on, but I didn't want to make it a tragedy pile on. There are moments ofvity as well, just as there are own life.
Sometimes you reach for dark humor and you can bring some parts of your own life into the situation and try and make it a little bit fun I think that's important.
Yeah, absolutely. But the other part of that I think, which I think you do so well, is and I should say here, you're very clear in the acknowledgments in the book that Grace isn't your grandma. Her experiences have her echoes of that and are drawn from that. But she's a different human being. But you don't let yourself lose track of Grace the human being. She's not completely
subsumed by her confusion or by her situation. That part of why the book works is that it is the story of a woman who has lived a life and dealt with disappointments and delights and all manner of things.
Yeah. I wanted her to have a strength, and that was important to me in the book because my grandmother was strong. Although as you said, she's not the same person as Grace in terms of who she was, the way she behaved and her experiences and the rest is fictional. But she had a strength to her character as well. And I didn't want Grace to sort of be a
very passive and meek individual in this book. I wanted her to be fighting against the condition in the early parts of the book and trying to hold onto her identity as much as possible, because I think that that's the natural way that she would react in that situation.
What struck me when I was reading this was that it's one thing to write about a difficult experience, but it's a complete other thing to find a way to embody it, to demonstrate genuine empathy for what your character is going through. And I think you do that really powerfully, and you must remember this.
I think that's the most one of the most difficult things about trying to portray a protagonist with dementia is that they are going through cognitive declient. So you have to if you're going to have close third person or even first person. I'm not quite sure how you would do first person. I think that would be a little bit too difficult towards the end of the chronology, but even close to the person, you've got to show that progression.
And as they progress, there's a lot of opportunities for you as a reader to become confused, and so I think trying to get that balance between readers are a little bit confused but a little unsettled and able to sit in that in that mode, but then you still get across that kind of dislocation that the character has, so it's a bit of a balancing act.
That decision to make form agree with subject matter is one of the great payoffs of this book and one of the one of the really moving things. I'm curious about the kind of reader you are. Are you a fan of structural play or do you like a good, straight, clear narrative.
I think I like both, and I think you could call it a party trick essentially to create a fragmented narrative in this way and to, like you said, make the form match the nature of the character. I think in this instance you kind of have to do it that way unless you're going to tell it from the point of view of another character looking in, like Alice Monroez the bear came over the mountain, where it's the
spouse looking in at the person with dementia. So I don't think I had much of a choice in this case. But I think in terms of my reading, I like it both ways. I think what I'm looking for primarily when i'm reading something is a good story and good writing, and if you can tick those boxes for me, I
don't really mind about the rest of it. And I mean in terms of a good story, that you can take me on a journey from A to B of character growth and relationship change, but then also that there's some art involved in the expression, that there's some beauty on the page. And if I can get both of those things, I really don't mind what else you do.
That question about telling a story and the structure of a story and our expectations around the convention. So much of that is tied up with analogy, with cause and effect, with actions and consequences, and your decision, or as you put it, the kind of inevitable fact that this story had to be told in a fractured way kind of
robs you of that at first glance. Yeah, Instead, it's almost akin to a collection of interconnected short stories about a life where the threads and the echoes and resonance has become clear as you go along, but you don't necessarily get that path to satisfaction or joy or redemption.
I think that there is a three line in the story, and maybe it takes a little while to get to it, but the three line really is the relationship change throughout the story, and you get the flashbacks which contribute to the relationship change in the present, and that's really what
I was trying to go for. I was thinking a lot about Philip Larkin's anti natalist poem This Be the Verse when I was writing this, and not that I'm an anti natalist because my wife and I have a three month old son, but the last stanza, there's a couple of lines in their man hands on misery to
man it deepens like a coastal shelf. And I was thinking about how if we're not careful, and if our parents aren't careful, we can pick up some of the traits from them, and they picked up from their parents, and we can embody those and we can bring those into our relationships with our children. And some of those traits may not be ideal, and some of the behaviors they lead to may not be ideal. And what would it take to go against the current in changing your behavior?
And if at the same time, as my main character, Grace is in this story, she's reliving some of the past. She's living simultaneously between this past key moments with her relationship with her mother and then living in the present and sort of slipping in and out of those timelines.
She's sort of experiencing those traits that she's picked up with her mother as she's in a sense with the ticking clock of dementia in the present, trying to change before it's too late, and trying to change your relationship with her daughter. So I think that's what I was trying to get at. That's the through line through the story.
Even though the chronology, as you said, is really fragmented because she's slipping in and out of president past, there is a through line, and that's that change that happens in her relationship with her daughter.
Yeah. I take your point about that through line, But I think part of what's so fascinating and effective about the way you approach it in this book is the impossibility of either forgiveness or repair when it comes to a broken relationship like the one between Grace and her mother.
The ways in which the kind of residual, lifelong traumas of that unreconcilable after a certain point, and those questions about how we do right by the people we love and how we make things right when they're broken seem to me to be almost as important to this book as questions of memory.
Yeah, I think that I'm dealing with two things, both Grace is changing because of the condition, and so really all we are instincts and memories, and if our memories are starting to break down, some of those stories that we have about ourselves that lead to kind of a cohesive self, who we were, who we are, and who we hope to be, she's starting to lose those. So
she's changing through the condition as she's going along. But I think she's trying to change at the same time, sort of against the current of her change through the dementia, to change your relationship with her daughter, And she does that through the recollections she's having about her past, about her relationship with her mother. And although the relationship with her mother is fixed, that's change that's done. It does by reliving them, does inform her relationship in the present.
When we're returned, Seawan discusses how his relationship with reading and writing has changed since becoming a published author. Right back, even though you must remember, this is the first book I've read by Sean Wilson. I first heard his name back in twenty twenty two. His debut novel came out. It was called Gemini Falls, and several people thrust it upon me and told me I should read it, and
I just never got around to it. But looking at it now, in light of having read his second book, it strikes me how much of a departure he's made. His Debut's a genre novel, for one thing, it's said in the Great Depression, and it's probably best understood as Australian rural noir, a kind of plot driven murder mystery that's revealing a darker story about Australian society's evolution or lack thereof. I'm always fascinated by writers that can transition
between genres, so I wanted to know more. I'm curious about the your second book, and your first book is a genre novel, like it is a novel that actually does very much kind of follow the beats of convention in order to tell the story it wants to tell. Did this feel like a completely different set of muscles you're flexing?
No, the Gemini Falls felt like more of a departure, and I was trying to achieve something very specific with that. This feels more like it's in my wheelhouse. And I actually wrote the manuscript for you must remember this before Gemini Falls, all right, And so in a sense, this is my first book, although that's gone through some editing
and rewriting. Gemini Falls. I wanted to tell a particular story about financial crisis and housing displacement in an unregulated market economy and what that does to people in the community and who sort of helps and who raises a fist, And because I think there are some parallels between now and the Great Depression in that sense, I said, it is a historical novel in the Great Depression. And after that I decided, how how am I going to tell
this story keep people engaged in this topic. I decided to have a crime in order to turn the heat up on the community and explore those themes, And so just naturally it sort of went into a genre that I'd had no experience with.
So when you say it didn't come naturally or you didn't know that genre, did you find yourself reading a lot of historical crime fiction in order to feel like you could fit the conventions, or did you kind of avoid it and happily go in naive.
I probably should have read more. I read a little bit, but I think my guiding light for that story was to kill a mockingbird, in the sense that to kill a Mockingbird could be a crime novel or a courtroom drama if you were reductive in that sense, But really it's about racism in the South and the depression States
rights gender roles. So I felt like I had enough with that story to guide me, and then from then on it was really just about I think what's important in stories, and what we always go back to is the relationship change that happens in the novel. So although I wanted to explore those themes and that was important to me, it is not enough just to have a story about financial crisis and housing displacement and all of
those issues that I wanted to explore. You've got to have the relationships are changing, and so the main character and the way he relates with his father and his sister, those are really the important parts of the story, and that's what keeps us coming back to stories.
So what did writing in a mode that was if you'll forgive this way of putting it a little bit reverse engineered, what did that teach you about the writing that you want to do next? Having done something that from the sounds of things flows out organically because of the personal elements of the story and because the structure presented itself once he worked out what the project was. What do you know now two books under your belt, what does number three book like?
I think I would like to try something new for their third book, and maybe not the third book, or maybe the fourth book if I get that far better. I think it's a shame when people write the same book over and over again. From an artistic sense, I can understand from a financial point of view if a book is a successfuy.
I think Philip Roth said every writer just writes the same book again and again, hoping as they hone in that eventually they get it right.
I've seen that happen, sure, But I've also seen you know, Margaret at would write a speculative fiction and then go to historical fiction. And although it's the same kind of themes that she might be exploring, she's using very different muscles, as you mentioned in terms of structuring. I mean, it would be a shame if the Beatles just made Love Me Do over and over again. You never get to Dear Prudence or Octopus's Garden, so in.
That there's a choice to crescendo with Octopus's Garden. I was with you all the way through dear prudence and then you just had to be silly.
And maybe I'll g have my own octopus's garden moment.
You never know. I don't doubt your capacity to do it. I'm curious because there is a deliberateness to the way you talk about your writing, like there was a sense of purpose and a sense of kind of internally imposed discipline on how you want to approach it. Did you do you always know you wanted to write? Was this something that you worked your way towards.
Yeah, I've wanted to write for a long time. I think when I was younger, in terms of where I grew up, there weren't any examples of writers around me growing up in the suburbs. So it took me a long time to get to the point where I thought I had enough to say in order and sort of fit in that mold. But I think it took me a little while to work up to it. But I guess I've had a long time to think about it and be deliberate in that sense.
What kind of reader are you and how has that changed since you've been writing your own books.
I'm definitely more forgiving reader, I think, and this is why I don't slag off other people's books because I understand how hard it is to write a book now after writing too, and I understand how hard it is to hold onto the vision through the editing and publishing process as well, so I have more understanding, I think, for writers, if I feel that something's not working, then I can sort of think back to some challenges that I've had, So it's definitely made me more forgiving in
that sense, but I still am looking for those moments where I feel that they're in so much control that I can switch off join in the fun. I think one of the problems when you take on a craft, and I think it's probably the same way for musicians as well. If you're a drama, you're probably just listening to the drumming in any particular song and understanding how it works in the mechanics of it, and you find
it hard to lose yourself in the song. In the same sense, I do find it hard to lose myself in fiction, and the only times that I really do where I really start to fall into the spell and have that kind of hallucinatory experience that we all do in the best times when we're reading is when I feel like the writer is really in control. And I've had a few of those moments lately, and it's been a pleasure when I'm able to sort of switch off my analytical part of the writer reading and just be
a reader. That's a real joy.
Thank you so much for joining Asta.
Thank you, it's been a pleasure. Appreciate it.
Sean Wilson's new novel, You Must Remember This is available at all Good bookstores now.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. As always, if you want to dive further into Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There are more than seventy episodes in the archive for you to enjoy. See you next week.