Picture an Australian novel about a young woman in inner city Melbourne in the early eighties, navigating a burgeoning intellectual and cultural life and expanding sense of the world from her studies, but also an explosion of friends and lovers, of sexual jealousy, and anxious navigation of social and personal boundaries. It's a slender book, and many critics seem to be bogged down in questions of form and content, asking how much of it is fiction and how much is just
based on the author's own life. I suspect if you are setting up a drinking game for read this, one of the more dangerous prompts for drinking would be mentioned of Helen Ghana, our first guest, the patron saint of this show and also part of the inspiration behind our annual pilgrimage to fitzro Paul. So it would be natural for the above description to immediately prompt the eager listener to hit their imaginary game show buzzer and shout monkey Grip.
It's Monkey Grip. But the novel in question isn't that classic debut. It's almost more than fifty years old now. The novel I'm talking about today is a new release, one that came out late last year by one of Australia's most accomplished and admired litterary novelists. Despite making a name for herself with sweeping maximalist novels, Michelle du Kretsa is an author who has never been afraid of formal experimentation.
Her seventh book, Theory and Practice, supports this idea. It's bold and once again there's a heady mix of serious intellectual inquiry with beautifully observed characterization and then formal play. It's a novel, but the front cover carries a photo of a young Dacretsa, presumably at the age of the book's protagonist, a writer who is ostensibly narrating the book. A handful of pages in after the opening of what reads like a naturalistic historical novel, the narrator chips in.
At that point she writes, the novel of us writing stalled. It's really hard not to read this interjection as Decrets's own. The confessional, inquiring voice is belonging, unfiltered to its author. This blurring between fiction and memoir, between narrative and essay is the prevailing mode of the book, and the product is thrilling. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read. This the show about the practice we love and the theory
behind it. I love this novel, and its sense of intellectual curiosity and structural playfulness only enhance the human story at its heart. But that cheekiness about category about how
it should be read, those aren't incidental pleasures. They're front and center of how the book's were been published, and the obvious starting point is its front cover, the striking design by Text Publishings designer Chong Wing Ho, and the books author looking out at us as we begin, I thought I might begin by asking when you knew you were going to be comfortable with or you wanted your own photo on the cover of this novel?
Okay, well, Cheong asked me for photos of the nineteen eighties. I sent him a selection, a small selection, because I don't have many photos full stop. He came back with that one and said, how would you feel if I made this famous? I said frightened. He said why. I said, well, I don't want this novel to be taken for a memoirle and he said no, we'll take care of that,
don't worry. While he was working on the layout. I was, of course, still frightened of that misreading, and I was talking it over with my partner, who but the very salient pointer, as he often does that whenever a woman writes a novel with the first person narrator, it's taken as sort of biographical. So he said, you know, you could have put a photo of anything on the cover and it would still be read as autobiography. And I certainly had this experience with my last novel, one half
of which had a young female narrator. So I thought that that was a good point. And when the cover came back, well, of course under the photo were the words the new novel underlined twice, and as I looked at it, I thought it gestured at the hybrid nature
of the novel. It was saying, this is not straight fiction, but it's not memoir either, And the more I looked at it, it all fell into place for me when I looked at the photo, and it reminded me of Madrid's famous photo realist painting of a pipe captioned this is not a pipe. In other words, reality and its
representation and art are not the same thing. I don't know whether that was what Chong was channeling, but I do know that certainly towards the end of the novel a character specifically warns against mistaking realism for reality, so
perhaps that also played its part in Chong's decision. And I am really pleased we went with that cover because I think it's very striking visually, and I think it has meant that a lot of young women in particular have picked up the novel, and that is of course extremely gratifying.
You mentioned several times about the reading that it invites, and it seems to me that it invites a particular reading, but perhaps more than that, and not just to cover, but moving into some of the choices made within the book itself, it provokes a particular reading more than it invites it that there is a sense of challenge and play here that is designed not just to passively let the reader come to it on their own terms, but actively to unsettle or to just just to force them
to do a little bit more work.
Yes, absolutely, I quite like unsettling readers. Why not. I like novels set on set for me my expectations that play with my expectations, and so yes, absolutely, I think that's fair to say that it does, let's say, strongly encourage a certain reading, which is there not necessarily followed through. We don't want to have any spoilers.
But now I love it, and there is a palpable sense that I have felt this across your entire body of work. Your appetite for play and your desire not to allow the constraints of convention to hold you back seems to be more acute with each book. Is that a reasonable summation, Yeah, thank you.
I'm flattered by that, of course, But I would say that, for instance, my second novel, The Hamilton Case, very much plays with the expectations set up by the conventional who done it. So I guess that grows back a fair way that kind of interest in form and narrative convention,
certainly with this one. And I you know, as you say, I've had this interest in destabilizing the realist novel, and so I wanted to write what I have come to call the hyperrealist novel, the novel that doesn't read like a novel, and hence the start of Theory and Practice,
which presents a completely conventional realist novel. And if I might say so without sounding boastful, or anything, I think quite efficiently, for given the length it is, sets up an intrigue, a plot, a miscarriage of justice, a possible romantic entanglement. In quite a few pages it does that equssion play, and then it changes completely. And the reason for doing that is, you know, it's like placing black and white, and both colors come up shopper when they
are placed next to their antithesis. So I wanted what followed to seem as the narrator say she wishes to be telling the truth, to seem utterly and completely truthful
and not like a novel. And one of the other reasons, for sort of secondary reason I suppose for having that realist extract at the start, is that you know, the narrator is a novelist, and when you get to the end of the novel, you see how little events and little details that have happened to her in her life are reconfigured in the fiction that proceeds that starts theory and practice, so it's kind of like the theory and
practice of the novel as well. I had in mind that instruction you get in Matt's exams to show your workings. So if you like the whole of the hyperrealist novel is kind of the workings showing how those little beds make it into fiction in disguised form, transformed, made fictional, often out of recognition. So that was of interest to me as well, you know, how to demonstrate how little facts from one's life get turned into fiction.
When I finished reading, I went up and got myself a copy of Virginia Wolf's The Years, which I have to confess I had never read. I mean, wolf obviously is very important to this book and to you as a writer, But did you talk for a moment about The Years in particular and what it is that piqued your interest about that particular book.
So in the novel, the narrator is writing a thesis on Virginia Wolfe's late fiction and on the three last novels, namely The Waves, The Year's and Between the Acts. I'd actually read both The Waves and Between the Acts, and I hadn't read The Years. It was Wolfe's bestseller in her day, and it's really underread now. So I read it because I wanted the late fiction, because everyone writes about the you know, the missus Dillaway into the Lighthouse.
I wanted something different, and I've read it, and I read about it in Wolfe's diaries, her composition of it. I was quite surprised when I read it, because it's a very conventional novel, largely realist really, and coming after the extreme modernist example experiment that was The Waves, it was strikingly different, and I understand a writer's wish to do something different, but this seemed almost like a return
to Wolfe's first to pre modernest novels. So what I found out about her original plan for the novel was that she wanted to do something very distinctive and different. She wanted to write a novel made up of alternating chapters of fiction and nonfiction, so a novel about an English family that would cover about fifty years, and in between those fictive chapters, she would have an essay commenting on the social changes that had taken place in Britain
at that time. She wrote an awful lot. She wrote about one hundred thousand words and then discarded it, which is sort of heartbreaking thing for a writer to have done, but she didn't. She discarded the plan. I should say, she used fiction to write the novel that became The Years, and she used some of the essaystic material her book Three Guineas. So I liked that idea. I thought that was a really fabulous idea, actually, the sort of mix
of fiction and non fiction. But I also felt that the reason Wolf abandoned it, And I don't know why actually abandoned it, but I felt the reason must have been that it's terribly schematic, you know, chapter fiction, chapter of nonfiction, chapter of fiction, essay, and Wolf the least schematic of writers. I don't feel could have sustained that very long. And I suddenly felt that if Virginia Wolf
couldn't do it, I couldn't. And it seemed much more satisfactory to me to have kind of tangle of fiction and nonfiction, whether that was essay or a little bit on memoir, and for the reader to not necessarily always be able to tell where one ended and the other began.
I'm really glad you made that point about how schematic that plan was, because it strikes me hearing you talk. You know, that desire to write a novel that doesn't feel like a novel. You know your narrator in theory and practice makes the same point. But she says, I
wanted to form. It allowed for formlessness and mess and I think, you know, I think part of the real achievement here is to do something that is so kind of intellectually robust and rigorous and curious on the one hand, but also messy and complicated like human beings and tells a kind of novelistic story on the other. And I wonder, did you have to consciously go in and mess it
up at intervals? Did you find yourself did you find yourself going one, No, this is too rigid, or these modes are too self evident, and I have to have to just blur the edges a bit more.
No, not really, not as far as form was concerned. But the mess I was interested in was much more human mess. So that you know, for the narrator as well as for many of the of the other characters, there is this messy gap between theory and practice, between our ideals and our actions. I'm always interested in that when it comes to character. And I would say that art really is energized by that mess because it's complex and contradictory, and those are things that art feeds on.
Those are things that the novel feeds on, or maybe I just I feed on them as a writer and reader, and so that was the kind of mess I was interested in. And as for the formlessness, well, just because sometimes you can't tell what is fictive and what isn't.
When we return, Michelle discusses sexual jealousy, feminism, and what it means to be a writer in the public eye, we'll be right back the gulf between theory and practice, between who we want to be and who we are. It might be best served by the novel artistically. Is that best embodied by our twenties in a life? Is that what that period of bigger university in your twenties is four?
Not really, I think, you know. I mean, I'm sure there's I'm still quite out of mess between my theories and my point.
Now you're reconciled as a human being at this point.
But I do think that, you know, in one's early twenties, one is asking the question, you know, how should a person be? So it's an attractive period for a novelist because you're still trying to figure out what life is for and what it will hold for you and how
you can get there and what you should do. So I think there is a lot of energy and a lot of mess when you are in your early twenties as the narrator is I think that you know, Wolf, for instance, there's someone who went on being contradictory and messy right to the end of her life, and we all do that.
I think, do you think culturally we're at a low point for capacity to process those contradictions in the people and in particular in the artists who we admire.
Yeah, that's such a good Christian, isn't it. I mean it is a very topical one what we do with the failings and flaws of writers we admire. The emblematic writer for me when that comes up, isn't Wolf, it's v Snipol. I mean, the man was a monster. You know what can you say? Racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, Brahminist, you name it. He's been there, he's done that, He's got
it on a T shirt. And yet an extraordinary, brilliant writer, really brilliant and really really important for hundreds of thousands of diasporic writers. So you know, there's the man and there's the work. I really understand someone who's young and hasn't read one ipail and says, I don't want to read those people I really understand that, I really get that, or an older person it says, I don't want to read those people totally. But for me, you know, I did read them and they are part of who I am.
So well. Remember McCaulay, you know, he says judgment is simply trying to reject a part of what we are because it hurts. The living cannot call the dead collect they won't accept the charge, and it reverts.
Oh that's fantastic.
I don't expect artists of any kind to be saints, you know, to be without feelings and flaws and shortcomings. But I think it is part of our moment that artists are so much in the public gaze now because of social media, for instance, and so there is increasingly this request, one might almost say, a demand that the artist's private life must conform to an ideal in the work. That if the artist is a prominent person, that then
their private life must be equally flawless. I mean, if the what am I trying to say, I think if they're getting accolades for their work, then their selves should also deserve accolades.
It's also the point that you make so well in theory and practice about truth about the artist who professes to tell law, share a truth, or illuminate a truth that otherwise goes unremarked upon. Is that then that holds them to some kind of moral standard if they're an arbiter of truth.
Absolutely, And I so, I mean for Wolf, obviously she wrote quite brilliantly about women's lives and took the patriarchy to tusk on that score. And therefore, you know, there's the expectation that she has to also be virtuous when it comes to matters of race, for instance, or anything else. And really she wasn't you know. I mean, she was horrible about pretty much everyone in her diaries, which are great, wonderful literary documents. And she was gossipy, she was often hatty, and she was human.
I do like the way in which, in theory and practice you do put forward a case that it's perhaps in sexual jealousy that we best see the illustration of our idea of ourself and how we live our lives being diverging. You know, it's a particularly a cute example, particularly for a young feminist, to identify sexual jealousy in oneself.
Yeah, sure, I mean, I think in the world there are many ways in which the gap becomes evident politically, for instance. But you know, I was writing about a young woman. In any young person's life, you know, sex, desire, romantic entanglesments loom particularly large at this point in one's life, and so that was the narrative I chose to tell.
There is the wish on the narrator's behalf to be a good feminist and her inability to follow through when it comes to the woman she constructs as her rival, who is her lover's official. And I thought it was good to write about jealousy because it is such a source of shame, and shame is an interesting emotion because it has tremendous silencing power, and what is being silenced, what cannot be expressed, is always of interest to a novelist, isn't it. Yeah, you know, you want to express it.
Just at a technical level, at a level of form and process. The sense of play and the sense of fun in this book runs all the way through it. And I'm curious about whether that was the experience of writing it as well.
That's a good question. I look it undertok me a year to write, which is probably on average half the time it takes me to write a book, but it's half as long. There were many times of just work, and you know the kind of dart that visits any writer, thinking, I don't know where this is going, who will want to read this rubbish? Et cetera, et cetera. I mean, all the things that you know wake you up at
three in the morning. But I would say that when I had finished the first draft, actually even when I finished the book, I mean, there's always just a sense of a little adrenaline rush because you've just actually made something. So there was that, but beyond that, I think I really felt a sense of exhilaration. I felt I had made something different and that was very pleasing to me. And I would say that again without in any way trying to diminish the amount of work and revision that
any novel requires. I felt, with this bookcast with no other that it was somehow all ready inside me and I just needed to be able to get it out there, to give it a form for system world.
Michelle Decretz's latest novel, Theory and Practice, is out now. Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week and almost a year ago to the day we had on as a guest, Geraldine Brooks. She gave her life sentence and she spoke movingly about her writing career about Horse, her most recent novel, but she also talked about her late husband, and she's just brought out a beautiful memoir called Memorial Day that deals with the grief and shock that came upon his unexpected
death a few years ago. It's an absolutely beautiful memoir as you would expect, and I can't recommend it highly enough. You can also go back to the archive and listen to that conversation with the peerless Geraldine Brooks. That book, again, is called Memorial Day. You can find that in all of Geraldine Brooks's books, and Michelle de Cretz's books, and Virginia Wolf's books. In fact, lots of books can be found at your local independent bookstore or library. That's it
for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot. On next week's show, I'll be in conversation with the brilliant Rachel Kong discussing her latest novel, Real Americans, and what luck means to her as a writer.
Luck is I think really at the core of this book this question of what creates our lives essentially, is it luck? Is it chance? Is it the actions that we take? Is it free will? Right? And that's just a question that I've thought about for all my life.
I think read this as a Schwartz Media production, made possible by the generous support of our A group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zolten Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.