Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:08 Welcome to the Fremantle press podcast. My name is Maria purpose. And today I have Josephine Taylor here with me to talk about her debut novel. I have a Rook I overlook is both a historical and medical narrative exploring pain. The way it is experienced and the way it is seen or conceptualized by others, I overlook would take you as far back as the mid 18 hundreds, England, and will bring you forward to contemporary Western Australia, as it explores to women's experience of the same poorly understood gynecological condition. Vulvodynia. Let me introduce you to Josephine Josephine. Taylor is a writer and editor who lives on Perth's coastal north after developing chronic gynecological pain. She was forced to surrender her career as a psychotherapist years later, research into the condition made its way into her prize, winning PhD thesis and investigative memoir. Josephine is an associate editor at westerly magazine and is an adjunct senior lecturer in writing at Edith Cowan university. Welcome Josephine. Lovely to have you here today.
Speaker 1 00:01:22 Oh, it's fantastic to be with you, Maria. And congratulations on winning the Hungerford. Lovely news. Thank
Speaker 0 00:01:27 You. And congratulations you too for publishing this wonderful book Josephine. I read, I have a Rook over the summer over that Christmas break, and I have to say it is such a beautifully written, intelligent, and highly effecting novel one, which still stays with me today. All of the characters have remained long after I've turned that last page. Will you share a little bit about what I overlook is about?
Speaker 1 00:01:52 Sure. And I'm really glad it has stayed with you. Cause novels can come along really fast. So I'm glad that the characters have stayed with you. So my level of a rock follows two women who develop mystifying, gynecological pain. You contemporary Perth, you have academic and writer Alice tenant, who starts to explore the history of hysteria to make sense of her disorder. And as she does that, she draws away from her husband Duncan. She starts to become a different kind of person. Then you also have in Victorian London, Arthur Rochdale, and his wife, Emily and Arthur is seeking help for Emily who has also developed the same kind of disorder. He consults with the real life surgeon, baker brown and contemplates his radical surgery for women with hysteria. So there's a lot that connects these two women. And you would think that over 150 years a lot would have changed in the way what is happening to them is perceived and the knowledge around it and the treatment of it.
Speaker 1 00:02:54 But what you find out through this narrative is actually that not a lot has, um, because the characters in both timelines in cancer, ignorance and dismissiveness, their lives are altered in otherwise too, because they learn about the kind of love that you need when you're suffering. And also about the rich possibilities of creativity. The condition at the heart of either rock is a condition called vulvodynia. It's a chronic pain disorder that affects the vulva, the, the genitals, and it affects up to, or around 16% of all women at some point in their lives. So we're looking at over 2 million women. And I think that, um, when I began to research, this was sort of really incensed me about this was that so many women were experiencing this pain, but nobody really knew anything about it. And the other thing about it, I guess, too, is that the two women in Overbrook have quite severe cases of all the Genia, but vulvodynia can range in its symptoms to, through, to quite sort of mild discomfort. Um, perhaps with pressure
Speaker 0 00:04:02 Strong links to pain constantly throughout the novel. And what is particularly noticeable to me is the frustration. And sometimes voicelessness of the person in pain. And as you were speaking, when you said 2 million women are affected, it made me think it's not just the voicelessness of the person in pain, that's the voicelessness of women in pain. And throughout the novel, you explore both the women's experience. And I noticed that for both women, the way other characters and especially male characters, the way these characters are quick to speak for the women and quick to explain away their pain. Can you talk a little about how you did this and how important was it to you to give characters like Emily and Ellis, the chance to speak for themselves?
Speaker 1 00:04:53 This is the over years that I've been researching and working with this. So I think that I really felt that it was just critical that women were given a voice at the same time, because I've met so many women with this condition. And most of them aren't able to speak about this. In some cases, it might just be that, um, a partner knows, um, and, or adopter might know, but I do find that whenever I present on this, people seem to be very relieved and I get women coming up to me afterwards and saying, you know, how grateful they were and they talk about their daughter or a colleague or whatever. So in, in making, um, Alison Emily really central, I think I wanted to explore the whole sort of befuddlement of that process of, you know, well, I've got this thing. It's, it's completely derailing my life, but no one knows what it is.
Speaker 1 00:05:51 Giving voice to this sort of inarticulate, helplessness. We now have a word, we have the denia, but for Emily, there weren't really any words at all. And I mean, women were really silenced even more than, you know, Arthur really speaks for her. We hear Emily's voice in letters. And that was really important for me that we did hear her voice, but I was also really interested in how a man in a, in a situation where he has some kind of power because the men did have the power men would deal with her pain and whether he would empathize, whether he would speak for her. It's not only that it can be invisible, so there can be nothing there to see for a lot of women. There's also the silence around it. And I, I really felt strongly that I kind of wanted to break through that taboo. And the highest incident of symptom onset is between the ages of 18 to 25. So we're actually looking at quite young women at a time when they're coming into their sexuality, as Emily really is in this book. So even if women can't speak for themselves, I guess I'm hoping I can speak for them through Emily and Alice. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:07:05 Emily and Alice are not alone in this. They have partners and Arthur is Emily's partner. And you mentioned Arthur in the 1860s. How would he respond? And would he talk for Emily or, or what would he do? It turns out that, uh, he's my favorite character of the whole entire narrative. He is the classic good guy and he's kind, he's supportive. He trusts her. He is empathic to her experience and he treats her with such respect. And actually he challenges my stereotype. How did you come to create Arthur?
Speaker 1 00:07:45 So what happened? Well, he actually came to life really for me. I wasn't actually trying to create him. I was in a writing workshop. I was given a writing prompt, we all, where the character was meant to be looking at a painting on a wall. And so I just started writing and spontaneously because I had not written any fiction around this subject at all this character. Um, Arthur was in a room with Isaac baker brown and I was like a little gobsmacked and he just stayed with me. I think what happened too, is that I drew on my father's experiences for him. So my father also went to boarding school and he had a, a trauma in his life, a loss, um, at the same age as alpha. And he was told in the same way. So he experienced that loss in very much the same way.
Speaker 1 00:08:41 And it's something I think that's always affected the family. And certainly my, my dad, but what was happening is during the time of writing, um, dad was, um, getting older and, um, I interviewed substantially and I invested after with his experiences and then dad actually died and not the last couple of months, um, of the writing. So I finished the, the final draft of the book a couple of two months after he died. So I think what happened is just my love for dad and my boys as well. I think my, my two sons, the whole thing about motherhood to do with my relationship with my boys as well, Pierce with his mother, it just went into that. I wanted him to be sympathetic. I felt like we really needed somebody in this book, particularly to support one of the women in a powerful kind of way,
Speaker 0 00:09:37 Since some of your characters are based on real life people. So you mentioned Arthur being in a room with Isaac brown and since your writing is so well-researched, and since you have that personal connection as well, why did you ultimately decide fiction as the way to present your research ideas, your thoughts,
Speaker 1 00:09:56 Just responding to that bit on Isaac baker brown I've probably first came across him in 2006, and I just spent years just intrigued by this man. And I got a copy of his, um, book, but there was a tucked away in the front cover. There was actually a handwritten dedication from him, cause it said from the author. So then I took a few years in working out who the dedication was to and, um, really eventually determined it was to his son who was in new south Wales. It's a kind of tragic story. I've written, I've written a personal essay on it, but I think that he had to come into the novel, but I also didn't want him to be too central because he had such a devastating effect on so many women. My PhD thesis was, it was great that I was learning how to write about this condition.
Speaker 1 00:10:51 And I, well, I couldn't have written a novel without writing that thesis. First. I used that period that I did my PhD in 2007 to 2011 iced Alice's narrative in that timeframe. And that meant that I didn't need to do more research around vulvodynia because I was kind of done by then. I finished it and I approached a couple of publishers and I wasn't getting anywhere. I tend to lose confidence really quickly, really easily. I had one publisher who was said that they all look, they all read it. They all loved it. It was a very, a small, but a very good publisher, but they didn't usually publish debut memoir. And I think I just sort of ran out of puff for the moment. And then I asked Susan Medalia, who was my mentor during the writing of the novel to assess a personal essay. And she said, um, you know, you, you write beautifully, et cetera. It was lovely. But she also said, you, you could write fiction, you know, if you wanted, I met roadblocks that then eventually sent me in that direction. And clearly the pressure of the characters, the pressure of the material still needing to be going out into what I really wanted it to get out into the world. And I think that just gave the necessary sort of creative kind of push for it to happen all
Speaker 0 00:12:16 Together between the PhD and the novel. Was it also difficult to write?
Speaker 1 00:12:21 Yeah, so I actually started writing about 2004. So we're looking at a kind of 17 years and I started the PhD because I got bumped down. So I don't know. I kind of thought, well, what if, what if I could do a PhD, the novel I loved writing. I mean, it was hard in the way that good things can be hard. You know, that things that are pleasurable can be challenging and hard, but I loved writing it probably the hardest parts of the book is when, uh, Alice, where she's really at her wit said really at her lowest point, I found that hard to write because it took me back into that place. But at the same time, I really felt that I, I had to do that in order to communicate it properly. Yeah. So what are you working on now? I'm really interested.
Speaker 1 00:13:14 I have written a personal essay on this called the lady in the carriage. I'm really interested in trauma and the way we try to creatively resolve trauma, but I'm also really interested in the way in which trauma sort of repeats in ways, which try to push us towards, I think, resolving it. So I've read and written quite a lot on this. So I was very interested in the idea of intergenerational trauma. I'm thinking about a family over a couple of centuries. I'm very interested in genetics and epigenetics, whether we're born in a particular way, whether we're fated, whether we are influenced by environment to pat speed, uh, does self-destructive or whatever, but I'm also interested in the future. So several of the family generations would be in the future, um, perhaps involving some kind of robotics or something like that. And I'm very interested in that kind of sense of how creativity and love. Again, I think can work through time, um, backwards through time, as well as forwards through time. That sounds
Speaker 0 00:14:23 So fascinating. And I am going to look forward to that as much as I've enjoyed reading your current book. So we're going to finish today with a passage from Iraq.
Speaker 1 00:14:33 So this is at a point where Alice is really starting to question her marriage with Duncan and she is starting to know, watch a little bit of what she has and she's starting to take her own voice, her own mind. Uh, and she's also started taking a medication for her pain, which is a, an all-star try cyclic antidepressant called amitriptyline, which is often used with conditions like vulvodynia it's to do with, um, altering pain perception. What happens with this tablet is that it knocks you out at night. So when it kicks in, um, you just go, boom. So that's just to give you a bit of context. They watched the program together, hands intertwined, a softness admitted a piece of sorts brokered in the light thrown by the TV. Dunkin's face was unlined years younger than the man who had challenged her that morning. When she saw her husband like this, it was easier for Alice to believe the best of him to think again about how her illness must affect him.
Speaker 1 00:15:34 This man with his sharp directed thoughts, his ability to shape creative solutions from complex problems, but worrying about his place in this, about how he would love to be the cause of improvement or how she might see his hurt feelings only made her feel guilty, reduced, and there was so little of her left. She couldn't grow smaller. Could she the screen Buffalo forged a river somewhere in Africa then arrived to describe the action in a hush voice and predators, white hungrily opportunity, mystic snouts, and eyes poach from the surface of the water young and the sick, especially vulnerable. Alice did not enjoy these nature. Docos has done Condeed, especially now the battles and blood, the fight for survival funded. I could have sex, proper sex, not these fraught encounters in which more and more parts of her body felt off limits, right? Safe. How could she tell him that she could hardly be his touch?
Speaker 1 00:16:36 How could he believe in their love while she rejected him? How could she you reassure him over? And you saw, I went, if she moves to move to touch in the rural of stead, as if she were caught on barbed wire, her mind too was on equal to the task. What she needed was in a Bryce with that demand, this new Alice could no longer meet Duncan's demand. And she realized that a start with sensitive dislocation, that he was powerless to help him. Duncan was absorbed. Alice, very focused on the TV, had the Buffalo survived. It was wrapped as now, monkey screeched and flung themselves from tree to tree. And the two birds circled above now, watching and waiting said the voiceover was the rift between them solely because of her illness, the new pained, Alice questioned, all that had gone before suggested there was a floor in the foundation of their relationship.
Speaker 1 00:17:30 Wondered if the baby she had imagined, it seemed like years ago, it would have been a mistake anyway, but could she trust the thoughts and feelings of the new Alice? Was she a superior version of herself, more insightful, more, more mature, or a hag who no longer saw the good in her husband who now saw the world itself through a glass darkly. What did she make of herself of their marriage obscure downs that had hidden within the folds of her pain only to emerge. Now she tried to translate the language of herself, but the Raptors have a strategy. The neuritis voice, again, all the monkeys from their swaying seat in the tree canopy watch the male disappear. His mate flies in behind unnoticed to, I was close to her eyes from the moment of meeting Dunkin had provided an answer to her world and she had always believed that he looked to her as some kind of compass.
Speaker 1 00:18:25 That life made more sense for both of them in each other, this company, for what other reason had they married Sharon, but that early melding and nights when he'd recounted his childhood troubles, his mother's many hospital absences as her body was remade. The loss of his father just as anal was returned to them fixed after a fashion, Alice had held him as he cried, felt his need for her in those boyish tears. When she looked back through the eyes of her new self, she read a different story, a young woman in the grip of an older seemingly smarter man, a woman who had bent herself into the form defined by his interests, his beliefs, the thoughts and hopes fenced, the compromises made to bring him pleasure. A slow whittling away at herself. Her face was wet. She blotted the tears with her sweater and hope and her eyes to a burst of motion.
Speaker 1 00:19:17 Look the rat to grasp a small monkey from the tree tops. There is no escape. Now the bird flew with her prey to an outcrop of rocks. Then thrust large talents into the belly. Her wings, rat stretched. She raised her proud head and scan the sky. Isn't she beautiful? Dunkin's voice was resonant with, or she loved that about him. His eager curiosity about it, of the world. She loved him. This disorder would disappear tomorrow with the crippling dat in that love or self-esteem com era an effect of pain of despair. Yeah. Surely she could know, should work harder to save their marriage, to hold onto the remnants of what had been between them. She called back the memories the week away last year that has shown us something different, their love and the thought of living proof of that bond. When she recovered, they would return to that point, even plan their future.
Speaker 1 00:20:14 They would see this softness in each other and laugh together. Again. It had been good. She must remember the rep type like wings shielded the dead monkey from the view of other people, predators mantling than the writer pronounced. Alice could see the monkeys, Milky underside, the scattered splotches of brilliant red, her skin prickles, top to toe. She could feel the PEX to her belly. The tearing at her inner listening membranes ripping. She moved closer to Duncan and he, his arm around her, she leaned into his long body, became heavy and slack, uh, here at Kane that tiny sedating pill that nightly bulldozer, her eyelids dropped glowing after image the monkey's white belly and the Raptors pale eye. The round absence at its core. Then the heavy surge rolled over her body and she fell into that black hole going, going. I was the shoulder grip to shake an Alice. Come on time for bed. She lifted her eyelids. So a shadow hovering over her. It swings darker than the night filled room mantling was it shielding her preparing to eater? She couldn't move her arms or legs. Couldn't fight the shadow or the heaviness. The blackness came again and carried her away.
Speaker 0 00:21:46 Josephine. That was beautiful. Thank you so much. And thank you for taking the time to join us listeners. You can find, I have a Rook in awkward bookstores and online at Fremantle, press.com.edu. If you enjoyed our chat today, subscribe to our podcast on apple podcasts, Google play, SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Maria Pappas, and I have been your host today in 2020. I won the city of Fremantle Hungerford award and my own novel will be out in November. Join me next time as we continue our journey into everything
