There are many types of unreliable narrator as a narrative device. The idea that we shouldn't blindly follow our protagonist or the person who's telling us the story is I'd argue a singular, delicious treat for a reader, the un self aware narrator or the duplicitous narrator, the narrator blinded by their own perspective who's incapable of seeing the truth of things. Literature is dotted with flawed lead characters and authorial trickery.
Some personal favorites are Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, or Michel decretz Is The Hamilton Case, even Christos Chulkis's The Slap.
These are all.
Examples of the kind of book where a shifting perspective completely changes the way you feel about what you've read in the pages before. But there are other ways that an author can play with your expectations as a reader. One of them is when they share the worldview and thoughts of a character whose own experience of life is fractured or a skew in some way. Think of all those books you've read with a precocious child narrata who doesn't understand what they're seeing or describing for us, the
unaware witness. So let's add to these ridly tricks one more complex task of empathy and depiction. How do you tell the story of someone whose connection to their own memories, their very sense of self is breaking, even broken beyond repair. How a might a work of art do justice to the experience of dementia? A couple of years ago, the film The Father with Olivia Coleman and Anthony Hopkins did a powerful job of it. Closer to home read this alumni Nonie Hazlehurst was in a film called June Again
and was also terrific. Both of those films used a trick that so effectively got you into the experience of the dementia sufferer. At random points, they'd be having conversations with loved ones, and the films would change the actor who was playing the secondary characters. The new person, without missing a beat, would say the words that hold the conversation, and our protagonist would face them with utter confusion and
a sense of dislocation. The new novel You Must Remember This by Melbourne based author Sean Wilson, employs the literary equivalent of this device. It follows Grace, a woman suffering from dementia, and moves between slippery memory and present day confusion, sharing her story, but also sharing the sense that that story is slipping away. Because the book begins with chapter ten, then follows it with chapter seven, then eleven, the whole book shifts and twists as Grace tries to find purchase
in her own reality. It's deeply effective, a deeply moving approach, a tragedy of forgetting, and a story of hanging on to one's humanity as the illness strips it away. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read this to show about the books we love and the stories behind them. 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 the 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 it was a film, and quickly realized that my play was a little bit too close to that play, and it was very 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, there's Graces 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 Pass 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 have 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 deft hand with metaphor, with how to 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, or as you know, the constraints on the stage is just dialogue in some scene description and bit of action. You haven't got anything else, and so you can only tell that stuf sorry, 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 let go of and came back to in a different form. Was it your grandmother that 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 present 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 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 mum? And 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 is tragic that at the end of her life she gets to a point where she loses all of those memories, all of the part 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.
Are 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 distress 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 has 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 of levity as well,
just as there are in 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. Our experiences have echoes of that, a 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. 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. 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 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, you know, 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 third 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. But then you still get across that kind of dislocation that the character has. It's 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 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 it 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 chronology, 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 long. But you don't necessarily get that path to satisfaction or joy or redemption.
I think that there is a through line in the story, and maybe it takes a little while to get to it, but the through 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 her 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 present and 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 against the current of change through the dementia, to change a 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 changed, 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. We'll be 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 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 set 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 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 you must remember this before Gemini Falls out right, And so in a sense, this is my first book, although it'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 then 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, as not enough just to have a story about financial crisis and how displacement and all
of those issues that I wanted to explore. You've got to have the relationships that they're 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 success.
Why, 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 sense.
There's a choice crescendo with Octopus's Garden. I was with you all the way through Dear Prudence, so then you just had to be silly.
And maybe I'll gave 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 deliberate 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. 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 to hard it is to write a book now after we're 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 and 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 in to 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 us.
Thank you, it's been a pleasure. I appreciate it.
Sean Wilson's new novel. You must remember this is available at all good bookstores. Now before we go, I wanted to let you know what I've been reading this week, And I remember as a teenager someone gave me a copy of the Penguin Classics edition of Thomas Mallory's Lamote the Arthur. I read it, and then I immediately read H White's Once in Future King, and then I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. I went on quite the King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table kick. I was a very cool teenager, as you can imagine. I loved it, and then I kind of forgot about it entirely. But when it was announced that Lev Grossman, who wrote this terrific book a few years ago called The Magicians, was doing his own take on the Arthurian legend, I thought I'd give it a shot. The product is a lot of fun and definitely cast
my mind back to that teenage reading. He's got a modern sensibility and an eye for queer and divergent versions of those classic stories, and Grossman's created quite the romp. You can find it and all the others we've mentioned in this episode and your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends about it and rate and review us. It
helps a lot. Next week I'm read this I'm speaking with the novelist Andrea Goldsmith about her gorgeous latest, The Buried Life.
Like uncertainty, which is common to us all, so is death, and for most of my life I've been captivated by the mysteries of death, but also that so many people are frightened of death read.
This is a SHORTZ media production made possible by the generous support of UR Group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.