Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:14 Welcome to the Fremantle press podcast. My name is Maria peppers and today Susan Medallia is joining us to chat about her novel everyday madness, which is a wonderful story about family and forgiveness. Before we begin, let me introduce Susan. Susan Medallia is the author of three short story collections or shortlisted for major literary awards, a history of the beanbag, an unknown sky and feet to the stars. Her debut novel. The art of persuasion was published in 2018. She also works as a freelance editor, mentor and workshop facilitator, and has had articles published on contemporary Australian women's fiction in national and international journals. Thank you for joining us today. I have admired your stories and your contribution to the w a literary community for a long time. When did you start writing and how did you begin your writing journey?
Speaker 2 00:01:15 I didn't start writing fiction until I was in my fifties. And I first became interested in writing when I was doing of all things, an academic PhD on contemporary Australian women's fiction. And I discovered that I was much more interested in style and craft than I was in the ideas I was meant to be advancing. I just enjoyed actually creating something with words. And then a couple of years after that my father died. And because I'd had a very fraught relationship with him, I just sat down and started to write about my relationship with him. So that was written for therapeutic reasons, but it ended up being published in a journal. And then I won a short story competition. And then my first collection of short stories was published in 2007 and I was 55. So I'm a late start.
Speaker 1 00:02:13 Your first novel came out in 2018 and everyday madness is now your second novel. What phone do you prefer to write in? And how do you know whether a piece of writing is meant to be a short story or a novel?
Speaker 2 00:02:26 I think sometimes people think of writing short stories as an apprenticeship, the you hone your craft and then you go on to do the real thing, which is a novel. And I don't see it that way at all. I think they're very different kinds of forms of writing and they require different ways of thinking different kinds of skills. And fundamentally, I think the difference is based on how we experience and understand our life in time. So short stories work on the assumption that we, we experience lives. We try to make sense of them through moments in time and, you know, moments can be crises, climaxes, or intensely disillusioning. They can haunt us for years, but another works on the assumption that we experience. And we try to understand our lives as a sequence of events that unfolds over time. So you have to think about short stories and novels in, in different ways.
Speaker 2 00:03:26 I wrote my first novel, not because, uh, I wanted to test myself or I wanted to do something different. It was simply because I had an experience, which I knew would require a much longer narrative to do justice to. And the experience was seeing a Memorial to over 300 asylum seekers who were drowned at sea in 2001. And I saw this Memorial in Canberra. It's kind of hidden away from public view and it's very modest that I found it really moving. It moved me to tears, and I knew that I wanted to write about it, but I couldn't do it in a story. I wanted to develop it over time and I wanted to develop a character over time.
Speaker 1 00:04:12 Oh, that's wonderful. Um, will you tell us what everyday madness is
Speaker 2 00:04:16 About? What about the ways in which ordinarily rational people can become irrational? G-tube certain personal or social circumstances. It's about dysfunctional families and dysfunctional marriages. It's also about the ways in which people can develop and change. It's also a novel about language. I'm really interested in what people say. And don't say one of my characters, Meg is training to be a speech pathologist and she comes to understand that that work entails not just the mechanics, the science, the neurology, but it's about enabling people to connect. So yeah, language is important in the book
Speaker 1 00:05:05 It's called everyday madness. And you've already spoken a little bit about it. What went into choosing that title? What does madness mean for this particular book?
Speaker 2 00:05:14 Right. Well, I must say when I submitted the manuscript to Fremantle press, I had another title, which was really kind of nondescript. And, but now, like I kind of didn't quite remember what it was. I think it was something like four voices because my novels told him four voices, which doesn't really give you a way into the book. And so my editor, Georgia Richter said, you know, we need to come up with a new title. So eventually I found everyday of madness. I thought about what links, the four characters, the most obvious example in the novel of everyday madness is Gloria. She falls into clinical depression and I didn't use the word madness to apply her in a derogatory or pejorative way. But I wanted people to think about the fact that depression is widespread it's every day in that sense, I think something like twenty-five percent of the Australian population currently takes prescribed antidepressants.
Speaker 2 00:06:16 So it is becoming more readily diagnosed. But the danger there I think is that sometimes people can assume because so many people have depression. That it's really just a case of the blues. If you like something you can easily recover from. And I wanted to show in my novel that the effects of clinical depression, the symptoms can in fact be really debilitating and quite frightening. So in my novel Gloria experiences, protracted insomnia, she stops eating. She stopped speaking and she has hallucinations, visual and auditory hallucinations. So I wanted readers to feel the severity of it. And, and her sense of bodily, a settlement, her sense of bewilderment, other forms of madness, Bernard, her husband loses his job through no fault of his own. And so he becomes a little unhinged in the process because he's one of these men for whom work has been a measure of his worth, uh, Meg who's, their former daughter-in-law is a single mother and a highly well an over protective mother.
Speaker 2 00:07:30 And because of that, she comes unduly suspicious of a man she is interested in and who seems to be interested in her. And then there is Ella 11 year old Ella, who is partly mad in the colloquial sense of angry because her mother won't let her have a mobile phone, but also because she desperately desires the approval of a new friend, a rather sophisticated friend, she ends up doing something which, you know, in her heart of hearts, she knows isn't right. So really I'm interested in the ways in which ordinary people, people who are usually rational, logical can go a little crazy. I also refer to a couple of other examples of everyday madness. One of which is leaf blowers. And if there is one instrument in the world guaranteed to make me mad, it's the ubiquitous leaf blower. I can't see the point of them. I just make a lot of noise and the leaves keep on falling.
Speaker 1 00:08:33 When I, when I read a novel, I always look for that one insight that always seems to hold the whole narrative together. And for me, that insight actually occurred during Ellis narrative. Ella reflects on a time when she was disappointed by her father's attitude to women and having acknowledged that she had never spoken about this disappointment, others. She says maybe it was like, Lola's secret, hidden inside you, and you didn't know how to unlock it. It feels to me that all the characters struggle to share in words, the difficulties they experienced, though, they do inevitably express themselves. In other ways, did you set out to write a novel about what happens when people struggled to talk and what understanding do you hope readers come to about communication?
Speaker 2 00:09:27 Mm that's a really interesting question, I guess, because I know that life is always a contest between the spoken and the silent between the known and the not known. I'm interested in language as a form of psychological action. What characters do to one another with words, but your question focused on the struggle to speak. And yes, Ella doesn't want to tell anyone about her. Father's staring at the girls in bikinis and she finds this really unsettling. And she does eventually tell her mother when her mother trusts her with knowledge that she hasn't trusted her with before. So a lot of hesitation or reluctance to speak is based on not knowing whether you can trust the other person, not being sure of what their response might be. And that's why, you know, conversations between friends that's Sally Rooney is normal conversations between friends is always based on that sense of trust that you can make yourself vulnerable when you speak confess things confide in each other. But all the characters in my novel are they're either isolated or ashamed or as reluctant to speak. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 00:10:46 May comes across as a contradictory character. She worries about how she looks. She is an over-protective mother to Ella, somewhat paranoid about her new love interest. And she seems to blame herself for her ex-husband's infidelity or while being a feminist and a strong, successful single mum. I feel however that she is very true to life. Why is, makes such an important part of your novel?
Speaker 2 00:11:14 She sent an important because she is a feminist and she wants to instill feminist values and beliefs in her daughter. She's also a bit of a renter. So that actually gave me the opportunity in a couple of places in the novel to rant about men or to rant about injustices. They've kind of handy characters to have because then people don't think it's you. Although I am a renter political renter in real life, but the contradictions that you've you've pointed out, I think are really important because I'm a novelist and I'm not a polemicist or a sociologist. One of the things I'm interested in is contradictions and in characters. So I guess Meg's a feminist. She knows rationally that a woman's appearance has nothing to do with her value, but she still has that two centimeters of crap inside her head that says, you know, I'm not pretty enough, or I'm getting too many wrinkles or whatever.
Speaker 2 00:12:11 And most women, I think at some level, feel some sense of dissatisfaction with the way they look it's deeply entrenched in our culture. Women don't always act or think in their own best interests. So Meg knows rationally that a woman's looks has nothing to do with her value, but that doesn't stop her from feeling inadequate. And it's an interesting point about ideology because we can accept those ideas rationally. But on the other hand, so, you know, everyday women are bombarded with images of beautiful women and they feed into a sense of inadequacy with, um, the infidelity, her husband's infidelity. And you said she, she does blame herself. That's what she tells her daughter, because she doesn't want her daughter thinking badly about her father. And so she, she says, you know, I, I neglected them. I have to take some of the responsibility much and all as her ex-husband Carl is a highly unpleasant character.
Speaker 2 00:13:17 I didn't want to make him the stereotype of the male adulterer. Who's just, you know, lecture us and sleazy and thinks nothing of having sex with a woman other than his wife. I wanted it to be more complicated than that because, you know, Adelphi takes place in very complex, psychological, emotional circumstances. So I wanted Meg to think about how she contributed and she never quite resolves that. And in the end, she decides, she agrees with Sigmund Freud. She says, Sigmund Freud felt we could never get to the truth of the matter that all we had was stories. And the stories might keep changing. She is over-protective, won't let her daughter have a mobile phone. Won't even let us stay in the house by herself. She's nearly 12. She's about to start high school. There is one point at which Meg reflects on her desire to have a baby.
Speaker 2 00:14:18 And she knows it's because her own mother was such an unloving, unkind, distant mother. And so she wants to have her own child to kind of make up for those deficiencies to be the good mother that her own never was. But at the same time, she's not entirely irrational to worry about her daughter because we live in this kind of hyper sexualized culture now where even girls, as young as five and six and seven are worried about their sex appeal. So I have in the novel example, Meg recalling seeing, uh, a girl who looked about 10 strutting in the mall with really tight clothes and lots of makeup. And, and I have her thinking, you know, she's, she's trying to look sexy with no idea that sexy can turn up to be a trap. And so I think Meg's, overprotectiveness towards her daughter is in some ways unreasonable, but at another level, it's also perfectly understandable. If that makes sense.
Speaker 1 00:15:24 It does you write about domestic situations and family relationships in this novel, but I think you've said in the past that some readers look down at so-called domestic novels, why do you think it's important for us to keep writing about these themes? Regardless of criticism?
Speaker 2 00:15:43 I haven't said that in the past indeed. And I think it's a gendered thing. I think it's, you know, women's writing women write about domestic things. They write about romance and families as though these things are worthless than writing about, say war or world poverty. And I think it's crucial to keep writing about these things. Family is such a formative experience and families can be nurturing. They can be really damaging. Most of us have them and family in particular is really important for whether the child sees that there are possibilities in life or whether a child grows up feeling that, you know, there's no hope back in the seventies when then prime minister Gough Whitlam, his government abolished university fees. And the hope was that lots more working class kids would go to university. Now that didn't transpire. And what they realized was that it's not the finances that stop people from going to university it's that a lot of kids have grown up in households where that was never an expectation where they might never have been a book in the house, no one ever read to them. So families, I think, are really crucial in forming who we are and how our futures might turn out. Uh, you know, families are an institution that have dynamics power within them. So I'm interested in husband, wife, relationships and the power imbalances. I'm interested in parent child relationships as well. The word kindness comes from the word kindred, meaning family that's its origin. And so I think about family as having that capacity to, to nurture, to, to show kindness to one another. And that that's the kind of model for how we should behave to everyone.
Speaker 1 00:17:42 The novel made me reflect on how much of our lives are lived out on social media, pretending everything is all fine. When in reality, many people are experiencing a hidden anguish as the Australian book review, put it, but there's also hope and humor in this story as well. How did you find the balance between anguish and hope?
Speaker 2 00:18:06 Hope is the basis for change? Not just at an individual level, but all the great social movements. The movements for social progress have been about the hope that something could be better. And Bernard is the character who is cynical. Arrogant has a fairly bleak outlook on life. And I didn't want him to stay that way. I wanted to give him a second chance. And I think that to be cynical, to be, um, arrogant, to be bleak, pessimistic, they are the kind of easy responses. It's much more difficult to sustain hope so that's, they're the kinds of things I was playing around with. Yep.
Speaker 1 00:18:50 In addition to writing your work as an editor and mentor, you teach writing workshops and I have no near 12 students sing your praises as an English tutor. What is your top most crucial piece of writing advice that you can give to aspiring writers?
Speaker 2 00:19:08 This is probably what a lot of writers would say, but I think it's crucial. None, the risks, single most important thing a person can do if they want to write. And if they're serious about their writing is to read, read good books because you learn every time you read a good book, you can learn something new about the many possibilities of story, the different ways to structure a story, different ways to use language, different ways to create character. So yes, read, read, read widely and often
Speaker 1 00:19:39 What can readers next expect from you?
Speaker 2 00:19:43 I am taking a break from the long, hard slog of writing a novel, and I'm having a great time writing flash fiction, which is stories of less than 500 words. In some cases I've got, you know, an 80 word story. So I've had a few published that I can work away at a really, really short story for a few days. And then yes, I've got it. Whereas a novel takes two, three years, and sometimes it feels like the end is never insight. So yes, that's what I'm doing. Now.
Speaker 1 00:20:17 We're going to finish today with the passage from everyday madness, Susan, what were you read?
Speaker 2 00:20:22 This is Ella. So 11 year old Ella with her two best friends. They've been friends since kindergarten Lola and Fern. It was a really fun day. Hanging out with Laura and Fern. Lola's blonde hair was tied up in a knot, which showed her long, graceful neck. Fern was wearing a t-shirt that said I'm famous, but no one knows it. They tried teaching ELA to roller skate, picked her up when fell over, then tried again. She spent most of her time with the bum on the ground, but her friends didn't laugh and they didn't bring their I-phones either. Ella's mom, let them make their own lunch. And she didn't pull a face when they made massive peanut paste, banana and jam sandwiches. Then Ella took her friends to her room and they thought her flamingos were cool. Lola said that flamingos had nothing to do with books.
Speaker 2 00:21:09 So that made them even cooler. Then they all talked about this girl from another school who was only 11. She had a big party and some kids ended up drunk and spewed all over the lawn. Gross. Then they talked about Nathan because just about every girl in the class was in love with him. But Fern said he was full of himself. Ella didn't have a crush on him, but she liked the way his hair flicked around his face. She had a bit of a crush on Billy though with his shy kind of smile, the longest eyelashes in the world. And he wasn't loud and rough, like a lot of the other boys, but she'd never tell anyone that not even Lawler or Fern, because Billy was way too good looking for her. Anyway, Fern thought he might be gay. Then they painted each other's toenails in a cool purple nail Polish that Lola had nicked from the chemist, but she'd never do it again.
Speaker 2 00:21:53 She said her hands went all sweaty and her heart was banging so loud. She was terrified. The chemist would hear it. Fern look kind of wise. Her eyes always went darker when she did that. There's some preacher guy in England. She said, who reckons it's okay for starving people to steal food from shops. He said, Jesus would approve. That's not the same as stealing now. Polish loader said, they looked at their toenails and no one said a word and Ella could tell they felt guilty. The color looked cool. Just the same. Then they played a game of Scrabble and Lola won easily because she kept picking up the high scoring letters. Only Ella didn't say that it would make her look like a bad loser. She was a bit when it came to scribble still, she managed to make the word AI three times. It meant a three toed sloth.
Speaker 2 00:22:41 She checked it on the net. She was glad to have friends who liked playing Scrabble. When other kids at school thought it was lame. And she was glad that her mum didn't pop her head into the room to ask how they were doing no. Once in the afternoon, soon, they all sat down to watch the bold and the beautiful. It was full of women with big hair and big boobs who slapped each other a lot because they were cheating. But other women's husbands, the acting was so bad. Like this woman turning her face just before she got slept and then screaming like she'd actually been hit. The whole thing made them laugh like crazy. There was a guy called thorn with teeth, like piano keys who grew up thinking that his sister was dead. You just knew he was going to find her one day and she'd have gleaming white teeth like him, even though she'd been kept a prisoner in a basement for years and had never once used a toothbrush in one scene, the characters had no clothes on, but you only saw boobs for some weird reason. They didn't show a Willie. Not that Ella wanted to see one, but it was still pretty weird that you couldn't. Her mum said the show made women look stupid. And Lola said, that's why it's funny. Ella's mom said she didn't think that was funny, but she laughed along with them. Anyway, when some woman squealed in a hysterical voice, you've never really loved me. Rich
Speaker 1 00:23:58 Susan, thank you for reading and thank you for taking the time to join.
Speaker 2 00:24:02 Thank you very much, Maria. It's been lovely
Speaker 1 00:24:05 Listeners. You can find everyday madness in awkward bookstores and online at Fremantle, press.com.edu. My name is Maria Pappas and my novel skimming stones will be out in November. Thank you for having me as your host.
