“It’s not an autobiography,but it certainly draws heavily in places on my own life. I started as she was born and finished it when she was about six.”
In Moonland is about different family arrangements and kinds of community and how people work out a way to live together. So while it begins with Joe in Melbourne in 2016 and goes back in time to his father hanging out at an ashram in India for “the orange people”,the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh,it also moves a couple of decades into the future.
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“I didn’t write it as a simple critique of utopianism or of religious communities,or of that particular religious community. I wanted to be true to people’s experiences of it,but I also wanted to allow for there to be some reckoning with the consequences of that attempt to live differently.”
He said he was interested in different forms of community. “Family would be one form,but there is a whole set of other kinds of arrangements of how you figure out a way to live together. And none of them are perfect.”
One element that both his novels have in common is a quest. In Fever of Animals it was a search for a mysterious Romanian surrealist painter. “That kind of slightly unresolved quest narrative feels very natural. So I wonder if one day I can do something else.”
Can he? Unfortunately,he said,the book he is working on now is not that dissimilar:“It’s about a ghostwriter who’s writing the autobiography of an Australian Rules footballer. I think what he finds is more than he was searching for.”
There’s an element of synchronicity in Brennan’s biography winning — her subject wonTheAge fiction prize 10 years ago for her final novel,Foal’s Bread.
When Brennan finished her biography of Helen Garner,she wanted to work on the life of another Australian female writer. There was enough in Mears’ writing – three novels,four collections of short stories,essays,and masses of letters – to intrigue her.
“And I was really interested in her life. I had met her once and I just knew the vague outline of her bravery with multiple sclerosis.” Mears struggled with MS for more than 15 years and eventually took her own life in 2016. What clinched it for Brennan was the discovery of Mears’ enormous archive at the State Library of NSW.
“It was mind-blowing. I just had no idea that it was so big. It took a while to get access because Gillian had sold off everything – all the letters that she’d ever got from people,photo albums,everything,” she said. “The State Library said to me that I had to get permission from every writer whose work was in each section to say that I could look at them.”
As a literary biographer,Brennan believes her subject’s writing should always be central to the book:“I think if you are a writer and particularly someone like Gillian who has determinedly lived her life as a writer and has caused all sorts of issues with herself and her family or whatever to write,then that writing needs to be respected.”
But,she said,you could never capture someone’s whole life. There was always lots of gossip and other sorts of things that could be included,but they didn’t interest her.
“I don’t see the point of doing that. I think you need to give a shape to a life and allow people to understand why this person wrote the way they did and why they acted the way they did,” Brennan said. “My intention is to encourage readers to discover this writer or to go back to her work. So because her life was so phenomenally close to her work,it needed to have a really significant focus on exactly what was happening in her life.”
Meet the winners ofTheAge awards at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Friday,6.30pm.mwf.com.au