Hello again. It's Daniel James and I'm here to share another episode I 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, Michael is chatting with London based Australian writer Jessica Stanley. As always, Michael joins me to share a little bit more about the episode.
Hi, Michael, Daniel James.
Hello, So, Michael, you make a bit of a mission in this episode that if you go to someone's house, you're definitely going to spend time scaring their bookshelves.
Correct, Yes, doesn't everyone. Isn't that just a basic thing you do when you go into someone else's house. I am one hundred percent having a furtive perv at what's on every bookshelf, and I am passing judgment all the way through. This week's guest, Jessica Stanley says that she does it, but she doesn't pass judgment, and I believe she's lying. We all look at it and we all
have very strong opinions. And then the other thing is like I'm partnered up I know you are too, Daniel, But if you're single, I would encourage people to use people's reading lists, their book recommendations as the ultimate dating determinant. You know, let's forget dating apps. Let's just say, give me your top three books. And if someone doesn't pass muster, they can get stuffed.
It really can reveal a lot a better person, can't it. And the idea of what's on someone else's bookshelves plays a bit of a key role in Jessica Stanley's new novel City Yourself Kissed. Tell me a little bit about it.
No, you're absolutely right. The thing that spurred me onto that particularly unkind diatribe is that this novel that we're talking about today begins with all the kind of beats and expectations of a conventional rom com. You know, there's a meat cut, a grand gesture, someone falls in a lay human connection. But Jessica Stanley is a really smart writer. She's much more interested in the question of kind of human connection and in what comes next. This is a
book about the decade after the World Romance. She follows her two characters, Coralie and Adam, as they go through children and renovations and jobs and extended families and friends and disappointment and corrosion and compromising, just all the grit and grist of everyday life, which could be a trudge in the hands of a lesser writer, but a writer like Jessica Stanley turns it into something graceful and playful
and funny and dare I say it even romantic. It's quite the feat and it's lovely to chat to her about it.
Coming up in just a moment. What's on Jessica Stanley's bookshelves?
Where I want to start is an element of the meat cut in your book, which is the swapping of apartments and the looking at other people's bookshelves. And I want to know, when you visit someone's house for the first time, how nosy are you on the question of what's on their bookshelves?
Well, I'm interested, but as with most things, I'm observing, but I'm not judging. So I'm interested to see what people are reading. But by the time I've made it into someone's home, I'm probably intimate with them anyway, so I'm certainly not judging. And also I find a lot of people in their thirties I'm not in my thirties. I'm forty three, but a lot of people in their thirties have moved around so much anyway that maybe they would think their shelves weren't really reflective of them, so
to be judged on them would be upsetting. Whereas I'm one of those people who I started amassing my books when I went to the Lifeline, book Fair and Camera, and I've taken them from every house to every house my entire life.
Would someone know a lot about you from your bookshelves?
I think so. One thing that I've done since I was really young I probably wouldn't do it now is that my books have always been separated into women authors and then male authors, and I always put the women authors in a special in a special place, and the male authors I put, you know, in a secondary location outside the bathroom or something like that.
Are they books on a shelf that would disqualify a person for you?
I think I would feel frightened and concerned if someone had a top Gear book.
Oh yeah, good, yeah, nan out the door.
But apart from that sort of thing, no, because who knows someone might have a book because they're reviewing it or writing a nusty essay about it. Yeah, I just I couldn't be sure.
Are there books for you that you would insist that someone read if you wanted them to understand you?
Wow? Well, in consider a soft kissed I have Adam say to Coraley that he loves the Don Watson book about Paul Keating, and that makes sense for him because he is a political journalist. And Coraly notices that the spine of that book is corduroy. It's been read, so.
I love that sscription. When I came across it on the page, I was like, I'd never heard it before, and a corduroy spine denoting a much loved book really tickled me.
And that's funny because I made my husband read that book when we first met, as well as Watch the Castle and What's the Murder of Old Chopper?
Oh, there you go, Chopper, The Castle and Memoirs of a Bleeding Heart? Yeah, that's a good cultural three. Was that the Australia that you needed him to understand?
That's exactly it. Yeah?
Did he have equivalent titles he felt that you needed to understand?
Gosh, I feel really bad. Well, if he did, I'm not across them.
You're very literate already though. I imagine your love of Allan Hollinghurst, for example, would mean that a particular strata of London society you had a pretty good understanding of.
Yes, but that wasn't my husband's strata of society. What is Northern Irish? Because he's Northern Irish. So he is very insistent that I regularly watch a meme which is a guy from Northern Ireland saying this is a wonder day, a wonder day because it's sunny.
There you go, that's a good thing to understand about, that kind of Northern Irish energy. So tell me about love and romance on the page. How crucial is it to your reading history? How much is it something that you relish, and how actively did you decide to subvert those beats when writing Consider your Self Kissed.
It's strange because when I began writing this book, I had just published a previous book that hadn't gone very well, This is a Great Hope, which came out in twenty twenty two. It had been reviewed really nicely but hadn't made any sort of splash, and people who knew me really liked it, but no one else seemed to notice it, And I couldn't even come over to launch it because
of the strange timing. But I had got to a stage where I thought, Okay, writing a book isn't going to change my life, And then I thought, well, am I even going to try again? And I really felt as if there was only one reason to try and write another book, and that was for the love of actually writing. And I had also come to a point in my life where care and love feel like everything to me, not just personally but in the political environment.
It feels like the most natural and intuitive response to what's going on more generally, which I would characterize as being quite hateful. And so, even though in the past most of my most favorite books have been about families, I wanted to combine that with a classic love story, someone meeting someone and that feeling of falling in love, but then to also follow that love for the next
ten years when things started to get hard. And one of the books that I modeled it on, apart from the Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, was American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, where she follows fictionalized Laura Bush as incredibly wildly. She falls in love with a fictionalized George W. Bush, and I think you maybe follow them for twenty years, and for some reason, she really gets you to care
about these two people. And so I thought, how can I watch two people fall in love and convey that to the reader, but also help people in a time when it's pretty hard to concentrate on long form content of any kind, and especially fiction. Maybe how can I get them to fall in love with the experience of reading about them.
One of the things I love so much about this book is its approach to time. It's as much a book about the passing of time as it is about love. That actually, when we hit what we think of as kind of rom com beads tends to be a kind of constrained and kind of almost instrumental way of telling a story that the point at which you get together and you fall in love, that's the end of the interesting bit, and what comes afterwards is just the kind
of day to day of life. Was it always going to be that kind of sweeping decade long view.
Yeah, So I go around with a lot of material in my mind, things that I think are funny or interesting, funny things that people have said, and I sort of wait, until I can come up with a structure or sort of line my buckets up in a row to toss the toss the content into, you know, like someone feeding the penguins at the zoo. And this tenure structure came to me right after the joint fortieth birthday party I
had with my husband. I had moved to London when I was twenty nine, and I already knew him then, but we got married pretty quickly afterwards, and so by the time we were at our joint fortieth we had had three children, and we had spent ten years together as a married couple. And if I could have seen when I was twenty nine, if I could have seen this lovely party, my amazing husband, my lovely children, our friends, my friend's children, all hanging out together and celebrating us,
I wouldn't have believed my luck. It was incredible and amazing. But the actual emotional experience of having spent that ten years, having reached the age of forty and been married for so long, I really felt run over by a truck. And the time, especially my experience of time, was incredible, where days when you're on your own with a baby can feel about twenty years long, and then something lovely is happening to you and it just washes by and
is almost a dream afterwards. And so obviously, when I was covering the ten years in the book, I was trying to mimic that sense of time by zooming in on some very special, deep emotional moments and then zooming out and showing how time just runs away from you.
When we returned, Jessica shares how being an outsider helped her shape the main character, Coraly, and why she only ever reads exactly what she wants to do.
We'll be right back.
Your protagonist, Coraly, for her as for yourself. In being an outsider, that thing about starting your life over again in another place and having roots elsewhere, How important to you was it that Coraly was also an outsider in the community that she was building.
Well, a lot of my favorite books feature an outsider to a community, and I think it's the best standpoint to analyze anything from. And of course, my favorite book of all times, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and Nick is the ultimate outsider. He embeds himself with a family that is completely different to his own, and he just notices every single thing about them, and that's sort of what I want to do with Crawley, because I am obsessed with being from Australia. It's a major
part of who I am. And I moved to London for love, not necessarily to be in London, and since then I've come to really love and appreciate it. But I've also been noticing what's strange and funny about it, and I want to write the book so I could put everything that I'd noticed into a book.
One of the things about that which I think you capture so beautifully is the way in which any family or any community is an accretion of different traditions and different value sets, and an Australian amongst a bunch of Londoners. It does seem an important counterweight to certain expectations around class, around who's connected to who, and how that that Australianist does seem to be a key element in the boog. Have you had early readers in the UK? Do they
warm to Coraley's australianis? Do they recognize it?
It's funny because when I went around to bookshops, you know, before books come out, you get taken around to you try and interest booksellers in what you're selling, and I was too shy to do the kind of pitch the intro and when my publicists started off with it's about an Australian in London, I internally cringed. I thought, these
people are not going to care. And that has been my personal experience of living in the UK for such a long time, is that when people hear that you're from Australia, or when people hear an Australian voice, they zone out. So I was anxious about how the book would be received, especially if the australianist was foregrounded. But everyone has responded really beautifully, although it's interesting to me
that no one has responded about her being Australian. I think they have just responded to her as a person, which is the most you can hope.
For, I think. So. I mean, the other thing you have going for you is that telling a story of the UK during that particular decade is one of massive kind of social change, social anxiety, political turmoil. Do you always know that Adam was going to be in the political media sphere? Was that a useful tool for making everything from Brexit to COVID to Boris Johnson a key element of the story.
Yes, that was the only way I could think of to bring it in a way that was natural, because when I moved over, maybe because I come from a colonial mindset, I had this vast reserve of knowledge about British politics that I was keen to show off, and making Adam a political journalist seemed like the best and most natural way to shoehorn it into a book. And
I also just had spent so much time. I think it's hard to explain to people who weren't there the way Brexit gripped the UK, because we really didn't know from one minute to the next if we would have a government, if we'd have a prime minister, or even if we would have the ability to import toilet paper or the chemicals for clean drinking water, and so watching the news at ten o'clock became almost a matter of life and death, and so I thought making Adam a
political journalist could really vivify that for the readers.
It also carries with it that thing love external pressures on a marriage and on a relationship, because that's his professional sphere. It's very clear that at any moment, you know as you're reading it you have this kind of anxiety, you understand the pressure they're under. You understand how close
at times to the edge Coralli is feeling. And you know, if you have a passing acquaintance with UK politics, that just around the corner is going to be something else that means that Adam is not going to be present in their marriage.
Again, yeah, exactly. And I think that the news environment, whether we are really following news in depth or whether it just comes to us through our feeds or in snippets, it does have the ability to change our entire state. And I have had the experience of being at home, having a lovely time with my children, then glancing at my phone and suddenly my life is ruined, or at least my day, because of some horrible political thing that's
happened to me. And I felt that rather than that being something secret or private that happens to everyone in their house every day, why not bring that out through Coraly's experience and make it something that we can talk about and notice in ourselves the way that politics can really have a real world impact on people that it's
being done too. Because I think politics is something that some people do and mostly it's something that we have done to us, and I really wanted to show that from the perspective of someone having politics done to them.
You said before that your starting point wasn't really so much the traditional rom com. But it's interesting how quickly that shift between a meat cured, a grand romantic gesture, a kind of rescue child from upon all those beats that are so familiar to us from pop culture. There is something about the life long aftermath of that that feels relatively unwritten about.
I agree. Maybe I'm just blanking, but I don't feel as though there are many in depth domestic strife novels where two people are good, conscientious, thoughtful people who don't have some kind of dramatic issue in their relationship. They're just two people struggling to do their best. And that's really what I wanted to show if I could.
Yeah, there's no false drama in there. There's no gender Bokay, this person has suddenly done this massive act of betrayal or whatever. It's just it's kind of hard to get on with life and work and a creative life or a kind of independent, imaginative life and parenting and all that other stuff. How important to you is the conception of yourself as a writer. Have you always thought ultimately you would write books.
Actually, when I was young, reading was such a huge part of my life, and I really clearly remember when we lived in Parkville. My parents would take me to the library all the time. But there was a night when the North Carlton library stayed open late, and so I would go in my pajamas and dressing gown and get my books for the week. And it was just an absolutely mandatory part of my life to escape into a book. It was almost like a life support system.
And in my house, books were venerated and authors were as important as God's and so I just didn't consider that I could take my kind of love of reading and my love of writing and actually turn that into a book. So I spent so long kind of trying to earn money on the basis of it by being a copywriter and that sort of stuff. And I didn't start writing until I was about thirty, and my first book didn't come out until I was forty, And so that's a lot of life where I haven't conceptualized my
as a writer. And so now when I'm filling in the card when I come into Australia to say what I do. I write novelist and that makes me very happy. But no, I wasn't one of those people who thought, yes, that will be me someday. And I take a lot of inspiration from people who came to it very late and make it their life.
But I'll be.
Fitzgerald who didn't start writing until she was about sixty. I need a Bruckner people like that. So there are role models that I could look to.
It's funny many of those examples, many of those role models of writers who come to it later are women. That women's lives by and large don't allow for the kind of space needed to give over to creative practice. And so again and again you'll hear in these interviews women who need to make that choice later rather than earlier.
Absolutely, and I have had to grow as a person to be able to communicate to people who love me that four hours a day minimum needs to be put aside for me to be perfectly alone. And a lot of women can't do that for a long time, whether for personal reasons or just how their life is set up. And so everyone who is struggling to do that, I really feel for them. And I was that person for a long time, so I get it.
Much like the rhythms in Consider your Self Kissed, There is something too about time and being able to kind of you know, I quite like the conception of not really starting to write until you're thirty, not having a first book till you're forty. Is if you can write and write for pleasure and hone your craft and work out the stories you want to tell them, the things you want to capture, not having that sense of being in a hurry, I think can only be a good thing.
Maybe, yeah, I agree, I think so.
The thing for me, part of the important part of it was that sense of being an active reader from an early age like that reading was very important to me, but it wasn't just a passive experience that to read something was to add something to the world. Part of that is, yet, how is reader a job? I'm not sure. I hope it is.
Well. For me, reading was pure freedom, and so I would go into the library, get my ten or twenty books, and I would deal with the words as they came into my body and became emotions and images. And even now I tend to read in a way that is extremely agentic, so I never feel as if there's a book I must read. I only read what I want, and when words are coming into me, I can let them wash over me. It is just the area of my life where I feel totally on solid ground, totally
able to experience what the book is giving. It's something I don't have anywhere else in my life, but it makes me feel strong and happy.
Jessica Stanley's new novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, is available at all Good bookstores now.
Thanks so much for listening to another episode. I've read this As always, if you want to dive further into the show, you can search for it where If you listen to podcasts, there are more than eighty episodes in then read this archive for you to enjoy. See you next week.