I've realized recently that I want to read water before I learned how to read a book.
That's Dylan Hardcastle, writer and self described water baby. Growing up, Dylan spend every free moment at the beach with surfboard in tow. In fact, up until the age of sixteen, they thought they would become a professional surfer, and while that career may not have come to pass, Dylan's ability to read water has guided all of their work, from their debut ya book Breathing Underwater to their twenty twenty follow up Below Deck. Now Dylan is back with a
new book and I loved it. There's water a sure, and characters who most achieve a sense of peace when swimming in Sydney's ocean pools. But it's a richly elemental book in surprising ways too. It's called a Language of limbs, and it's about selfhood, about the choices we make as we work at who we are and how to be in the world. In alternating chapters spanning several decades, the book follows two women trying to make sense of their
sexualities and their lives. As the book opens their teenagers growing up in suburban Newcastle, they're referred to simply as Limb one and Limb TWI, and each of them is faced with an awareness of desire for their best friend. Two first kisses, two adolescent heartaches, two paths. There's this tradition of LGBTIQA plus coming of age stories that came
to mind when reading this extremely accomplished novel. It had echoes of Timothy Conograve's classic memoir Holding the Man in the ways it laid out the vulnerabilities and pleasures of first love. In its account of the rise of aids and its horrifying toll, there are shades of Rebecca Mackay's Wonderful Book for Great Believers, and the descriptions of Urani in the House Qui sharehouse that is at once sanctuary and gathering point for community, reminded me of Armistead Morphin's
indelible twenty eight Barbary Lane. But a language of limbs, while suffused in a cultural, political literary tradition, is still very much its own story. Through tragedy and heartache as well as moments of deep joy. The two characters' lives run parallel, they almost intersect and overlap, but they always offer this sense of possibility of hope and of love, all of which is to say it made me cry. So I thought I should talk with its author, non
professional surfer Dylan Hardcastle. I'm Michael Williams, and this is Read This the show about the books we love and the stories behind them. The first thing I'd love it if you talk about a bit is Douglas and explain who he was and what he meant to you and what kind of human being he was, because from everything I've read and no, he seems like a pretty important guiding light to this book and the energy behind it. So I'd love to hear you talk about him.
Yeah, I mean, what an honor. It was such an honor to love and be loved by him. He was my grandfather's older brother, who was twelve years older than my grandfather, and Doug passed away to over two months ago now, and he was ninety seven, And for as long as I can remember, I always knew that he was gay, and then he was a gay man, but we'd never spoken about that, the two of us together.
It was just something that I was sort of always aware of, and I think it was he was often not invited to family events and I wasn't really until I was an adult myself that I actually started to
have this relationship with him. But I remember, like the few times that he was family gatherings when I was a child, he'd just sort of make eyes with me across the room and give me this like really knowing smile, and I just thought he was the most like sort of magical being because he would just tell these stories and he's so theatrical and so camp and flamboyant, and
I was so drawn to him. And then I think when I was like nine or ten, I wanted to be I told him I wanted to be an artist, and he told me that the role of an artist is to make things glow. And around that time, he
also started saying that we were simpatico. And I had no idea what that word meant, and it wasn't until I was much older, I think that I like, it was always this word that he was saying, and then I just looked up the meaning one day and it's, you know, it's like you're in sync and you're like
two things as combatible. But you know, that was well before he knew I was queer, and it was probably two years ago that I was talking about him, and a friend was like, you should actually just talk to him about your queerness, and so he never worries hearing aids. So I wrote down on this piece of paper I am gay, and then I put it across the table to him.
And he was drinking his.
Glass of red wine in the garden and he would always be in his garden. He credited his plants to him living so long because he would take care of them. And he picked up his wineglass and he said, my darling, it is an honor and a privilege to love and to witness you. And then he broke into song and he sang the entirety of you are so beautiful to me. I'm not sure what the actual is that the name of the actual song.
Honestly, it's immediately recognizable from that refrain.
Yeah ninety five at the time sings to start to finish, and then he says at the end and anyway, I've always known, and so I think, yeah, it was like he saw that in me well before I did. And yeah, I think that was part of that beauty of saying that were simpatico when I was just this little child running around and yeah, he really recognized this in me well before I did.
It's such a beautiful story and that idea of sympatico. I really wanted to draw that out because in the
context of this book it's really important. One of your protagonists grapples with at a number of different points with the inadequacy of words to describe quite deep feelings, quite deep connections, and one of them is, you know, this concept of found family, and she settles on the idea of skin as being the word to capture both kin and solidarity and found family and sympatico the thing that when people are your people, I guess totally.
And because Doug and I, he was adopted by my great grandmother, which is its own whole, just incredible story. I think it speaks to these because Doug and I aren't technically related, and yet I found a home in him, and I think us being sympaticorn sort of having this like long soul love dance with each other. Across my whole lifetime, I've known him, I've learned how a person can become a home.
I think it's so important, not just in the context of this book, but also in the genre of queer love stories. And queer coming of age stories in particular, is that relationship between previous generations and their experience and the generations that follow that idea of the legacy and the debt to the legacy of people who have loved and struggled and felt great joy before to make it
possible for future generations to do that. And I'm interested the books set in a time where that journey predates your own. You know, you are telling a story that's come before your own, and I'm curious about whether you felt anxiety, your reticence about that, and how you found your way into feeling like you could own those stories and retell them.
Hmm, I mean I did.
I felt a sense of responsibility and an anxiety around this. I felt more anxious about this book coming out than any book I've ever written. And I think that was, yeah, largely because it was written in a time I haven't lived through and was speaking to a community that i've you know, have inherited in some way, but wasn't technically
a part of. And you know, I have friends that lived through that time who have shared stories with me, and that also, I felt so much responsibility to do that time justice and to do those stories and those
very real lives justice. I think the other thing that I've been thinking a lot about was so I had a conversation with a friend who we were talking about the power of naming ourselves like Dylan's my chosen name and it means born of the sea or toward the tide, And we were talking about this idea of inheritance and you know, because it's not like you're born into this family where these stories are passed down to you. You know, in many ways, you have to seek it out and
find this and find these stories. And yeah, I think that was the biggest thing with this book was the research just led me into my own understanding of myself in such a beautiful and profound way because I slowly, over time came to understand that people's bodies were literally broken open and that that history. That's amounted to me being able to write this book as an openly career and transperson and you know the fact that I even have pride in that just understanding, Yeah, how much has
been sacrificed. And I had someone asked me a question recently whether I sort of became no style jic when writing this book. For this time that my friends who are seventy eight ers or who you know lived through that time describe just how turbo the parties were and how they have openly been like, yeah, we had way more fun. But I think there was this real the
joy in this book. I think you know that were it just comes at a cost, and parties were so high stakes because and the dances were this sacred thing and I missed in many ways still at but were sacred because it was very much life or death. And yeah, those oppositions sitting alongside each other.
I've really felt that.
And I don't think I actually felt jealous when I was writing this book of that time. I just felt such deep, deep admiration for the people who may have made my life possible.
That sense of debt to that time comes through really clearly. And it's interesting, whether it's depicting the kind of rise of AIDS or the first might, you know, these moments that are so kind of historically resonant and so kind of embedded with trauma. One of the things I admire in this book is the way in which you get that dance between trauma and joy quite deliberately. I think
the question of whether it's worth it. Whether something is worth the pain is one that's infused all the way through this book.
One of the pieces of sort of material that I watched first was a TV series Got It's a Sin, and that I was just so blown away by that dance that you were talking about. I'd never come across anything where I felt so like the blows of that heartache because I loved the characters so much, and I think also, you know, being a part of the LGBTQ A plus community, those two things come rub up against each other. Joan loss rub up against each other all
the time. I think with this book in particular, I really wanted to anchor myself in the body and yeah, to sort of speak from that place. I guess that was also what I felt in terms of this sense of responsibility anchoring the story and the body, and was a way for me to sort of like really get into that time and speak to that time that I hadn't lived through, but also to sort of play with that dance of joy and heartache.
When I saw It's a Same mentioned in the acknowledgments, it made perfect sense to me. It was an earlier work that I thought of when I was reading this book, and I think you achieve many similar things to that show.
But tell me about the relationship between historical trauma, collective trauma, societal trauma, and some of the stuff that you visit upon your characters as individuals and characters in a book, because one of the hard things that seems to me must be working out how much your characters can bear individually in the context of narrative, in the context of who they are, and what that right balance is to have them prevail, to have them not be broken by it.
Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is, I guess as I've over the last five to ten years lean into my own transness, the world has become increasingly more hostile, the more aligned I have felt on the inside, and that the ways that my friends and my chosen family have been this sort of refuge or this soothing balm where no matter what kind of hostility I have experienced as a more visibly trans person, not only is it like actual hostility that I've sort of, I guess experienced,
but seeing the ways trans people, for exams are either pathologized or you know, considered perverted in a threat to women and children, those headlines I think slowly seep in to the point where if something sort of goes wrong in my personal life, I've often found that my skin is thinner and that those headlines suddenly rip straight through, and I very much believe them in moments of.
Yet, like in sort.
Of lower low moments, and my friends and my chosen family have been the kind of thing to boss to me from the inside out. And I think that was, yeah, what I kind of wanted to show with this book that in Uranian House, Limb One's life is outwardly much harder. And you know, I think people talk about how what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and I think what
doesn't kill you sometimes just makes you really tired. And her life is outwardly much harder than Limb Too's, where doors for Limb Too are constantly opening, you know, she gets to finish school, gets the scholarship to university, she's able to buy a house, can be public with her partner, etc.
Etc.
And yet inwardly she's sort of eaten up by that repression. Whereas in the one story, the main character outwardly her life is so much harder, but she bolstered from the inside and that house functions in a very similar way to my chosen family and my own life, where the end is this like shedding of not just your clothes. I think there's a line where it's like not just the fabric, but the skin too, And it's just that total like ability to be naked and vulnerable in front
of these people and to have them hold that. And I think that that was how I felt comfortable. I think writing some of those blows of like deep tragedy existing in these people's lives because the love that they have for each other, like is how they survive that?
Yeah, that's a really love life, very thoughtful answer. I did have a moment where I wondered whether with lim one and limb to the person who gets to define themselves and identify themselves and honestly live themselves becomes the artist, and the person who represses those things becomes the publisher editor. And I might have been reading too much into that, but I say that fits with most publisher editors I know about being able to manage in the world a
particular way, but not to tell their own story. Am I reading too much into that?
Oh my god, that's so funny. I actually never thought about.
That, it got like I could one hundred percent be projecting on that, but I was just like, oh, yeah, the artist needs to be able to be honest about their own voice.
I actually think there is some truth in that, because they is this part very early on that's actually, yeah, I loved that you have picked up on that, because I think I've actually forgotten. There's this part very early on in Limbtoo's story where she's in the library all the time at school, and yeah, there's a line where she says like, I don't really write my own poetry. I'm paraphrasing, but it's like something about her not writing her own poetry because.
She's scared of what she'll say. Yeah, oh my god, totally.
When we returned, Dylan shares some of the books that influence the Language of Limbs. We'll be right back. There's this sequence early in Dylan Hardcastle's new novel, A Language of Limbs, where both characters independently pick up Virginia Wolf's Orlando. As with so much of their respective journeys, they have these strong but opposing responses to the book The limb One. It's this treasured piece of literature. It helps give words
to the feelings she's been experiencing. But in stark contrast, Lim too, after learning the book was written for Wolfe's female lover, quickly returns it to the library bookshelf, not even taking the time to remove the bookmark. For Dylan, the acceptance and rejection of art is a fundamental part
of how we define ourselves. I wanted to ask you about books, early books, even as a young person, first discovering reading that were important or revelatory to you, that you either embraced or rejected in the way that your two characters do.
Oh yeah, I was hoping that we would got to talk about this because I am a painfully slow reader. But my first ever book with chapters was Blue Back by Tim Winton, and that book remains my favorite book
of all time. And it's because I was such a water baby, like I was saving before and after school by the time I was nine, and my parents bought me a rack for my bike so that I could ride myself to the beach when I was ten, because they were so sick of me coming in at five o'clock in the morning saying can you drive me to the beach.
That's my kind of parentig absolutely.
Yeah, So I was such a water baby and honestly barely read, Like I had Blue Back that my dad had read to me two or three times, and I
loved that. And I think that story was really sort of set the scene and was foundational to my own riding practice because it showed me that the ocean could be almost a character, you know, not this passive backdrop, but this body that is alive and that has the potential to both liberate and drowning, which I think is something that I already very much knew from spending so
much time in the water. But I've realized recently that I learned to read water before I learned how to read a book properly, Like I spent so many hours sitting in the lineup reading lines of swell that I think that genuinely is why almost every metaphor I ever lean on has water in it, because yeah, I learned
to read water before I learned how to read. And it actually wasn't until I got this scholarship to study English literature at the University of Oxford in the UK when I was twenty three that I properly began a reading practice, and that I actually started to find books and so that was the most amazing sort of deep dive, but very much getting thrown in the deep end at Oxford because I suddenly was reading and you know, they were like the canon, and I was like, I don't
even know what that word means, what books are part of the canon, But I think there is something about you know, I wrote my first two books before I was probably a reader, and there was something about that that really.
Meant that I found.
A voice that I think honestly was guided by water and that was very much my own. And then you know, then started learning about craft and through reading other people's work and began to learn the rules. Yeah, but I think my way in was actually I mean, I don't think I would change it, because I yeah, I did.
I found a voice that was very my own.
It's really lovely and it is marked. I mean, this book does feel like a departure from your first couple in a range of ways. You mentioned it's a sin. Are there queer narratives that you read before this that you wanted to fit into the tradition of or were you keen to carve out your own space.
Most of the reading that I did for this book was nonfiction. I read all of Pride History Groups publications that they've put out, spent a lot of time listening to a lot of their material on their sort of their online repository. But then I ended up writing a Language of films as part of a PhD in creative writing. My PhD is on queer embodiment and looking specifically at how writers have used the uncanny as a site right with potential to sort of bring about some sort of
queer corporeality. And the two books that I have done deep dives on in the dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and Lars Horne's Voice of the Fish, a lyric essay. They're actually both memoirs, but they play with genre in such interesting ways.
And they really yeah, they really taught me, I.
Think doing this really close textual analysis of both books whilst writing this cracked open my mind and heart of what I could achieve. And it was really important to me that Limb Too story where the character is sort of repressing her desires and carving out this cis heat life and sort of you know, following all of the key milestones of that that her side of the story is written in traditional scene formulations. When somebody talks, you go to the next line. You know, follows a lot
of literary conventions. Whereas limb One, my motto when writing that side of the story was think less.
And feel more.
And I tried to be guided by bodily instinct and do away with all of these devices. And so I think most of the research I did in the early days was to do with the actual historical context. But then yeah, as I found these two books, it really just allowed me to lean into my body in sort of a band and whatever I thought to know about writing.
You mentioned before the question of kind of chosen names and as part of your transness, getting to choose the name Dylan for yourself. And I am curious because you do have a character who's a Thomas, who's been named for Dylan Thomas, and then you've got to choose Dylan for yourself. And apart from the sea, is the Thomas connection a specific one for you? You do you have a Welsh background or is that.
Just yeah, my dad's Welsh and he's actually the only person in his family that's here. The rest of his family is in Wales, and so I've spent a lot of time there. Yeah, it's funny because before I chose Dylan for myself, Thomas in the book was called Dylan, and my agent when I decided to change my name, was like, Dylan is going to have to be Thomas. You can't have one of the main characters called Dylan and then Dylan on the cover. So yeah, that was
why Thomas became Thomas. But yeah, I really wanted my name to sort of speak to that lineage. I loved learning what Dylan meant as Born of the Sea feels very apt, but also toward the tide, and this sort of like turning always back to water felt really resonant.
On the question of names and naming, Ben and chosen names, how early did you know that you weren't going to give names to your two protagonists until the very end? How clear was that to you as a device that you wanted them to remain kind of nameless.
That was very intentional from the very beginning, And that was because I want my readers to read almost the entire book not quite knowing if they are two versions of one story. You know that kind of sliding doors in this story, this person comes out in this story they or if they are in fact different people and which you obviously don't find out until the end, and so.
Not naming them was part of lending itself to that.
Dylan, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for having me. That was such a pleasure.
Dylan Hardcastle's A Language of Limbs is available at all good bookstores. Now, before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week. Yomi Ada Gerke's novel The List came out more than a year ago and I somehow missed it at the time. But it's a media satire that is a lot of fun. It follows couple Olla and Michael, two stars of black British media whose relationship is rocked when Michael is named on
a list calling out me too style perpetrators. It's funny, page turning and full of moral complexity, and well worth a read before the inevitable TV adaptation that's already in the works. You can find it and all the other books we mentioned in the episode at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. As ever, follow, like, subscribe and share. Next week, I'm read this, I catch up with a veteran of crime writing and the first author I ever interviewed, Michael Robot.
I hate three word slogans for all sorts of reasons, but I have three words that I sort of write by.
Not to make them care. I thought it was stop the boats, Okay, make them care? Right? That makes more make them care?
Yes, definitely not the other one.
Read. This is produced and edited by Clara Ames, mixing and original compositions by Zolton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.