If you find yourself with a spare fifteen minutes, maybe eating a sandwich at your desk in the middle of the day, idly surfing the web, google Andrea Goldsmith. Go to her website and read her author by her. It's not your standard functional, CV or bloodless selling paragraph about her nine novels and are acclaimed rightly track record. What you find there instead is a mini essay brimming with
warmth and invitation, gently confessional, generously cerebral. You'll find references to old love affairs and thwarted passions, career and travel, and all the stuff of life. The voice is charming and self deprecating, at times sharp, but always kind. It tells of Andrea's great love with her long term partner, the poet Dorothy Porter, and gracefully delicately pays tribute to that love and to the loss of Porter, who died
in two thousand and eight. It's an excellent snapshot of what makes Andrea Goldsmith such a gem of a writer. I love her books, and her new one is called The Buried Life. It follows three characters, artists Kesey, Town planner Laura and Adrian, an expert on death as ever Andrea is unpicking the relationships between people, the undercurrents of doubt and faith that define our lives. But more than anything else, this is a book, like its protagonist, that
is first and foremost concerned with death. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read this a show about the books we love and the stories behind me. I will come to death inevitably. I mean we will all come to death. But in this conversation today I will come to death at some point because it's it exerts some centrifugal force on this book in many ways. But I don't want to start with death. I want to with a lightning moment that one of your protagonists, Adrian, has while driving
back from Adelaide to Melbourne. Could you describe that moment in the book for our listeners.
So Adrian is a temperate sort of man in his early forties. He doesn't have grand passions. He's a scholar of death. Actually he's a sociologist of death. And he's driving back from a conference and it's winter, and he stops at one of those coastal towns that are dead in winter, and he's sitting in a cafe and it's on the top of a cliff and there's the crashing oceans, the Southern Ocean, crashing ocean is below. And he's tired, He's really tired, but he needs carbs to keep going,
to drive back to Melbourne. And suddenly he becomes aware of a piece of music. And it's even more singular than that. It's a voice, it's a woman's voice, and it seems to be coming to him from a long, long tunnel, and it captures him and it takes him to a place that he's actually never been before. And yet this place that he's never been before, it sheds light on his current life. When the music stops, he dashes over to the woman who's serving behind the counter
and asks, what is this music. He's not a musical person, he really isn't. And it's the final movement of Marla's Song of the Earth. Their upsheed the farewell. And this is a man who, for the past twelve months has been suffering the leave taking of his long term lover and finally, finally he's able to say farewell to her. And it was a piece of music for a man who's not musical.
I love the delicacy of referring to Adrian as a temperate man, and I want to return to his emotional state and his ability or inability to articulate his own narrative about his life in a moment. But before we get to that, I want to know that lightning moment of work of art changing a person and opening them up to possibility in a way that they never knew before. Have you experienced that yourself, Andrew Goldsmith?
Yes, I have a few times, in fact, quite a few times, through two particular art forms, poetry and music. Poetry which is the metaphorical arm of language, and music, which I kind of think of, is the metaphorical arm
to life and what they do both of them. Because of this metaphorical aspect, it seems to me they take the mind, the mind that's not being bothered by social media and various other things, takes it to a place that hasn't been before, and it seems to make connections so that you come back to the present, you come back to your life. And yes, there's illumination something that
is different. It's happened many times, and it's happened once in the visual arts, and it was when I stood in a room full of Rothkodes.
Oh yeah, I could say that that's a moment right to the solar plexus.
Absolutely. I stood in this room and tears started rolling down my face, and instead of doing what I'd normally do, which has turned my mind to it and try and work out what's going on, I said, no, just go go with this. Go with this.
Do you think you're particularly open as a human being to that kind of engagement with art? Do you think that's a muscle that you develop and then once you have it, you're more open to it.
It's an interesting question. I mean, I think it's very very much LinkedIn with the imagination, and from early childhood I found a home in the imagination, and it's having a ready imagination, which is to say, an open mind.
You are one of those novelists who write about other art forms beautifully. Well. I think sometimes it's a hurdle that writers can't find the right words to evoke the kind of emotional response you might have to visual arts or to music. And music has always played such an important part in what you write. But I'm curious that you've identified those lightning moments for you coming from poetry rather than prose. Is that exclusively the.
Case no, No, poetry is all about concision. So it's not by chance that when people are suffering, when they're in pain or this suffering grief, that they reach for a poem and it sues, I mean, or it illuminates. And that's certainly been the case for me. And there's a lot of there's quite a lot of poetry in this new book. Not reams of it, but epigrams, because poetry manages to say in two lines what a novelist would take a chapter to do. I've always looked to
poetry to help me understand the complexities of life. I'll put it that way. Fiction has taught me about people who are not me, taught me about places and feelings and responses that are not me. I escape into fiction, but maybe poetry escapes into me.
I love that distinction, all right. So people who are not you who you can hide in in fiction. Agriin seems to me, as a protagonist, to be a prime example of that, particularly as we discover him at the start of the book. You know you use the temperate. At one point, he reflects that his relatively recently ex
partner would call him emotionally constipated. He is a man not terribly in command of his own emotional state and what drives in There's a scene very early on where one of his friends discovers for the first time that he was orphaned at a young age, that had lost both of his parents, and the friend is offended, and Adrian is a little put out by this. This is
just normal to him. This is the world as he sees it, and it doesn't cross his mind that that act of sharing stuff about himself is an act of generosity or an act of love. And I want to know, have you that strikes me? You were not a person who would hold back in sharing personal stories.
Oh, totally hold back?
Oh yes, Oh you like Adrian in that respect.
No, I think I do it with more panash or what I'll do is I'll filter. I'm a great filterer, which is another reason why it's great to right. I mean, my novels are all character driven. So no, I don't see myself like Adrian at all. Adrian's mother died when he was four. His father committed suicide when Adrian was seven, and he says, this has no bearing on his life.
And you can say it was buried, or you can say, well, this was the sort of person he was at the beginning of the novel, and he's not at the end. I mean, a buried life seems to surface for him. But it was enough for him to say, well, of course I haven't told you Mahindra his friend about my parents. This is my normal. And he actually cites a colleague whose mother had a long, long, long affair and Adrian was horrified, but the colleague said, but that was my normal.
And I'm very interested, particularly in a novel that also delves into fundamentalism, both of religion and thought, how one's normal can become entrenched and kind of blind you.
It seems to me that the great, kind of beating heart of this book, the counterpoint to those unexamined normals that we endure in our lives, is friendship. This is one of the kind of great novels that I remember reading about the strange business that is adult friendship. When we think that we're reconciled with who we are in the world, we think we know what our interactions with other people are. So open ourselves up to someone new and to have to give an account for our lives
to someone new. Is this exhilarating? Thing, and I think you capture that so beautifully.
I've delved into friendship in most of the novels, particularly Reunion, which is about a group of friends. Here as it evolves the Lynchpin. There are three main characters. Adrian, a woman Laura, who's a town planner in her late fifties who's been long married to her husband, whom she met at university. She fell deeply and blindly in love and that has not changed. And the third person is Kezy Kaziah.
She's in her late twenties. She was raised in a fundamentalist Pentecostal community on the outskirts of Melbourne, and because of the choices she's made, one of them is to do with her sexuality, she has been banished from that community and also exiled by her family. And the interesting thing about friendship is that I actually see Kezy the youngest, the youngest being the full crumb, the lynch pin. They all become friends, there's and more, but I see Kezy
as that full crumb. And it was nice to give it to the young one.
I'm interested in that phrase. Nice to give it to the young one. When you write a book like this, and as you say, very much a character driven book. Do you create the characters and then follow it where it takes you, or do you have a more schematic approach.
It's very organic with this book. The first character was Adrian, and I've long wanted to write a relationship between an older woman and a younger man. So Laura came next, and in fact Kezy was the third. Because I've got deeper into the novel, I understood that I wanted to explore this notion of fundamentalism in relationships. I mean that black and white, it's the opposite to uncertainty, that the human project is all about uncertainty, and yet we chase
against it instead of embracing it. And one way of getting rid of the uncomfortable chaf is by seizing on an ideology or religion or anything where all of the answers are there. And I think it also happens in relationships too.
I think it absolutely does so when building the character of Laura, because the key thing about how she defines herself when we're first introduced to her is her marriage. She has more or less subsumed everything else about her identity, about her imaginative life, about her sense of possibility, to this marriage with a man who she believes is a
perfect husband. I don't want to give away the pleasures of narrative in this book and the ways in which stuff unfils, So I'm going to be a bit circumspect about how to say this. But Laura and Tony's marriage was that written as the product of marriages. You've observed people, you know.
I just want to say one thing. When we meet Laura, we actually meet her in her work role, and she is strong, and she's in control. She is everything that she's not when she's with Tony. And we also learn when she first met Tony and why why she just fell for him. As for the relationship that does develop, one very dominant partner and the other one that subsumes themselves despite being so capable and intelligent and having friends and all of those sorts of things, but subsumes themselves
in the marriage under the husband. I've seen it in marriages. I've seen it in relationships where there is no marriage. I've seen it between sisters and brothers. I think it's very very common. I mean, in any relationship striving for that equality, it's very very hard. It's very hard, and particularly if I mean Tony has tickets on himself. He's shared those tickets with Laura throughout their marriage, really, and he knew which buttons to press with her. That's the other thing.
Yeah, No, it's a kind of chilling portrait, partly because it's you know, I think we've all had that thing of having someone we love with the partner who we can see diminishes them or holds them back from what they're capable of. It's quite a distressing thing to be proximant.
To, it is, and you can't when someone's caught in a situation like that, they are caught, they've got all of the answers. You cannot say anything. You can't because they'll do what Laura says, I mean, Laura turns around and says, you don't understand.
I think one of the things that's so delighted me in this book was you don't fall into any of the ubiquitous traps about generational misunderstanding or disagreement. Even though case he is younger than the other two characters and significantly younger than Laura, their friendship is firstly has real integrity to it, but the ways in which they relate, the ways in which they understand each other, the ways in which they view the world, has nothing to do
with generational divide, and I think that's really lovely. Did you have to work at that or is that reflective of the kind of friendships you have?
It's something that I don't know how common it is. I actually didn't even think in those terms. It was more that Kezy she's only twenty eight, but she's been through a lot, and she has understandings that a lot of much older people don't have. And Laura actually needed those understandings. And maybe it's the very difference of Kez that allowed Laura then to take what she was seeing and hearing and relate it to her own her own situation.
But certainly, I mean in the real world, I mean I have friendships with younger people and I really really value them.
When we return, Andrea reveals why she's always been fascinated by death and shares some of the poems that make it all make sense to her. We'll be right back. I don't want to give anything away, but suffice it to say death isn't only an abstraction in this book.
It's not only the subject of Adrian's field of study, He and the other characters in the book have to contend with a very real death that occurs late in its pages, and that contrast between the theory and the reality is almost like an assault, as this brutality to it after ages of thinking about it philosophically, thinking about it poetically, the prose of death is a very different creature.
There's an amazing passage in this late part of the book where Adrian is reflecting on that gulf between imagined and real death. And I asked Andrea to read it to us.
But I know nothing about death, nothing about death in the hand, death in the heart. I don't know how to watch someone die. Death has been and he paused and took a deep breath. A curiosity for me, a fascination. I've been half in love with easeful death, but there's nothing easeful about death. I knew nothing about how death attacks you, colonizes you, how it brings on horror and sadness and futility and anger. I know nothing about death.
That bit really jumped out at me because that gulf between the imagined. I mean, you talked about how the ability to be moved by art is about imaginative, subtleness and capacity. But the gulf between what we imagine and what we experience is a vast one always. And I think that's why that passage so jumped out at me. Is it suggested that there's the poems, there's the beautiful kind of words that are said about it, and then there's the reality.
Yep, absolutely absolutely got it. I think also what feeds that is that sense of the sense of rupture, and there's nothing, there is nothing that compares with that.
As we've touched on already, Adrian is a scholar of death. He is a great pains to say that that's got nothing to do with being often at a young age. That's just a coincidence. But he is fascinated by death. And I do know that that is something that you draw from a personal fascination. Tell me why. And death is such an important, interesting, flexible subject to play with.
Like uncertainty, which is common to us all, so is death. And I've always, for most of my life I've been captivated by the mysteries of death, but also that so many people are frightened of death. And to me it's been I've said this to my father decades ago who he had a friend who had cancer and the prognosis was not good, and my father was quite distressed about it because his friend was very, very depressed. And I said, you need to let Charlie know that you do it
in your terms. You're alive until you die. And I have a great, great belief, and it's here in this book too, that you live until you die, and the idea of a process of dying is an oxymoron. You live and then you die. That's not to say there might be suffering and pain and a whole lot of other things, but the people who suffer death are the people who are left behind. And this all seemed fairly
clear to me quite young. At the same time, of course, there are mysteries about death, so I wanted to plunge into it. I mean, I do believe that religion would be on its knees if we didn't have such a great fear of death. I think the poets, in particular, they've found death a great subject to explore because it's totally open ended, which of course is one of the things that scares people. You know, there are over two
thousand requiems that have been written. So music is there too, so to me, it's just it's this vast universe that's there to be explored.
I understand you've sat with now four different people as they died, and it's right.
But there've been other I've been uncommonly unlucky. Two of my closest friends from school died before their time, and of course my partner, Dorothy did. I was there when my father and mother died. So I mean there's been Yes, I've had my fair share.
There is and I again don't want to give anything away, but in this novel there is death, and not just in the abstract or as a field of study, but as a reality that the characters have to endure and navigate. Did you always know that that was going to be part of the story you were telling or did that take you by surprise?
No, it's not. I mean, I just love the way novels develop, and the reason why you do twenty drafts is because you know they have to find their center and the death that happens towards well, actually we know, we know those problems fairly about the middle of the novel, but the death happens at the end. It wasn't there first up. I mean it's quite interesting that it was in Adrian's exploration of death that I realized the possibility
of bringing in a death. You know. He says at one stage that he's written hundreds of thousands of words about death, but not about suicide, and yet his father committed suicide, and when it comes to a death that's close to him, he actually says that he knows nothing about death. Very different when it's up close.
Of course. I mean, on that note, are there certain poets or poems that you particularly return to, things that resonate?
There are some poets, I mean, look, Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle is a fairly good example, but there are some other ones that I've just loved. Douglas Done, English poet wrote a collection called Elegies after the death of his wife. They provide consolation. But as soon as you talk about consolation, as soon as you're talking about that, that quiet tutors you're reading, you're going places, and yes, so it's illuminating to Edward Hirsch has written a collection
called Gabrielle. It's about the early death of his son Gabrielle. So these are sweets of poems. Ted Hughes's Crow poems, and I have to say Ted Hughes's birthday letters. They are full of regret and anguish and all of those sorts of things. And yes, while a lot of the poems are not specifically about Sylvia Plath's death, they kind of are. I mean they've written a long time after she died. I have a seven page a four seven page list of death books and death poems just so
there are a lot in there. You know, I have looked to my fellow and sister writers in exploring this topic. Has been I mean, I must say, when I first realized the novel was going to be about death, I thought, oh, you know, you've got so much good stuff to read and music to listen to, this fabulous death music.
I like that you've added your own, your own book to the library of great literature about death. It's a wonderful novel and it's such a thrill to read it.
Thank you, Michael, Thank you.
Andrew Goldsmith's latest novel is called The Buried Life, and it's available at all Good bookstores this weekend. Before we go. Instead of a reading list from me, we've got a treat from this week's guest. The seven Page list of books and poems on death that Andrew mentioned is available
as a link in our show notes. Go and have a read, and then while you're there, rate and review us and share the episode with friends and loved ones before they go as ever, shop for the books we mentioned at your local independent bookstore, or go to a public library one or the other. Next week I read this, I'm sitting down with writer Sonya Orchard to discuss her
new memoir, Groomed. It's her first book of non fiction, and amongst other things, it revealed to her far more about the novels she's written than she ever could have imagined.
All three of my earlier works have a theme of someone not understanding what's really going on. All of them have got sort of unreliable narrators that tell a story, and it becomes quite clear to the reader that the narrator is not seeing what's really going on.
Read this as a Schwartz Media production, made possible by the generous support of the Ara Group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. There may have been a spot of Marla in there, this week as well. Thanks for listening, See you next week.