Podcast Transcript
Jacqueline Maley “The Truth About Her”
SPEAKERS
Nicole Abadee, Jacqueline Maley
Nicole Abadee
Hello, I'm Nicole Abadee and I write about books for Good Weekend. Welcome to the Books, Books, Books podcast in which I interview the best writers from Australia and overseas about their latest book. Thank you for joining me. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the country where I live and work and from where I'm joining this conversation, the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. I pay my respects to their elders past and present to the elders of all communities and cultures across Australia, and to leaders of the future. You can listen to this podcast all of the episodes at nicolabadee.com.au or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Today, I'm delighted to welcome to Books, Books, Books, highly respected journalists Jacqueline Maley, to talk about her first novel "The Truth About Her" published earlier this year by Fourth Estate. Before she became a journalist, Jacqueline did a degree in Arts Law at the University of New South Wales, and worked for a short time as a lawyer. She started at the Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet in 2003. And she's now a columnist and senior writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age writing about politics, people and social affairs. In 2016, Jacqueline won the Kennedy Award for outstanding columnist. In 2020 She won, with her colleague, Kate McClymont, the Walkley Award for excellence in journalism for the investigation in the Sydney Morning Herald into allegations against former High Court Justice Dyson Hayden. Jacqueline, welcome to Books, Books, Books.
Jacqueline Maley
Thank you so much, Nicole. It's such a pleasure to be here.
Nicole Abadee
Let's start by you telling us what the truth about her is about.
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, it's a novel that is centred around the protagonist, Suzy Hamilton, who is a journalist and single mother who writes an expose of a wellness blogger named Tracey Doran and after the expose is published (and this is not a major spoiler because it happens sort of on the first page) and Tracey Doran, the wellness blogger kills herself. And this sort of spins Suzy into a reckoning with her own life with the stories that she's written with the consequences of the stories that she's written and the stories that she's told about herself. And she comes into contact with someone who knows, knew, Tracey very well, and begins sort of relationship with that person.
Nicole Abadee
Would you like to do a short reading for us?
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, absolutely. I would love to. So this is this is sort of from quite early on in the book. And it is, Suzy talking about her, the time that she spends with her daughter who's about four in the book, and just talking about the business of single single mothering. It was Maddie's firm belief that mice, a class of animal with which she was obsessed, lived in trees. This belief didn't come from nowhere. It was the result of a misleading picture book I often read to her in which the mouse family lived in a tree house. An elaborate, beautifully furnished house with parrots and winding staircases and it little mouse sized runners along the corridors. These tree mice were one of the main sources of conversation between Maddie and me. Although we also discussed Maddie's dolls, Maddie's friends at preschool, what we were going to have for breakfast, lunch and dinner, what we were doing on the weekend, and lately what color people's eyes were. The discussions were completely distinct from our arguments, which were chiefly about what Maddie would wear and the thing she didn't want to do at any given time, eat dinner, leave the place where we were, brush her teeth or her hair. There are many things that no one tells you before you become a parent. At the top of the list is how hard it is to brush the teeth of another person. I found these arguments frustrating and there were times when I had to walk out of the room and go to my own bedroom and shut the door to breathe myself back into calm. I would sit on the blue counterpane and look through the French doors which gave out to the balcony and think "I have become enraged by the refusal of another person to wear socks." And it really was rage, an uplifted pulse, a temptation to say something irrevocable, a loosening of the tongue and redness for shouting. But the rages came and went. Our discussions were lasting and satisfying, often meandering in unexpected directions like inquiries into where bones are from and where the sun is gone and why do we only have one coat of skin and once terrifyingly "Where are people made?" 'Babies grow in their mommy's tummy" I said briskly and Maddie accepted that although she seemed to sense it was only part of the truth. We discussed mice as I walked Maddie down the street after picking her up. I took her to Tom's cafe for a shake milk, which is what Maddie called milkshakes. She also said cock porn instead of popcorn which was embarrassing at kids parties. The cafe was one of those ones that had chalkboard black walls and signs advertising the origin of the coffee they were serving that day. Today's was from the Gallapagos Islands and had notes of brown sugar and green apples. I ordered a cup of it and a banana milkshake for Maddie. She wriggled out of her chair to go play with the miniature kitchen they had set up for children in the corner. It was sufficiently Scandinavian. It's designed to blend into the cafes aesthetic. She liked to make me tea and bring me slices of cake made from blonde wood. I looked around for Tom but remembered he had mentioned it was his day off. I wondered briefly what he did in his free time. It wasn't something we talked about. Sometimes we talked about the books Tom had strewn around his room, and many, many of which I'd read before I dropped out of university. A young pretty waitress delivered my coffee she had a tattoo which advanced like a vine from her neck to her breasts. The breasts were lovely. I thought about how many times a day Tom must glance at them just a quick shot of the eyes downwards briefly and back up to the face. Most men seem to be able to accomplish this glancing quickly, although others seemed incapable. I wondered why Tom was sleeping with me when he could be sleeping with this young woman or any number of others who had interesting tattoos and self assurance I had long grown out of if I ever had it. My own breasts were defeated, as though they were the only part of me that had truly absorbed the sorrows of the past few years. The rest of me had held up quite well I thought at least physically, but my breasts' dislike, uninterested, had sponged up the tragedy and become tragicomic themselves. The tattooed waitress swung over to us bearing the milkshake. I called Maddie over and she sat on her stool and drank the milkshake earnestly, occasionally pausing to push her hair out of her eyes in a gesture that seemed adult. Her head tipped down and her cheeks plumed outwards, perfectly spherical like balls of ice cream. I looked at my daughter and felt the same commingling of responsibility in love that had awed me when her father left or when I left him. The first time it happened, it was frightening. This overwhelming sensation arriving suddenly that I would be wholly responsible for keeping this baby alive, that it was on me to feed her and to read to her, to make sure I had the right clothes for her, to make sure those clothes were clean, to earn enough money to buy a house where we could one day live, to cut her fingernails, to teach her manners, to teach her how to talk, read, drive, love, be, to explain to her where people are made. I had to support her belief that mice lived in turrishered tree manners until it became undeniably obvious that they didn't. This responsibility oppressed me. There was no point pretending it didn't. Except I did pretend all the time. I left it out of conversations and I sat with it alone. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I worried absurdly about some goalpost that was far off, who would teach me how to change the oil in a car. Among all the responsibilities, I tried hard to hack out some space for myself. The main space I had was work. And so work was how I stayed visible, work was how I kept my head above the waves.
Nicole Abadee
You wrote "The Truth About Her" in 2018. When you were on long service leave, and you've said that "writing this was one of the best things I've done. It was hard, the most technical task I've ever undertaken." You've been a journalist for almost 20 years. Have you always wanted to write a novel?
Jacqueline Maley
Yes, definitely. I think, I think journalism in a way was a weird sidetrack that just lasted for a long time because it's so interesting. But um I've always been obsessed with literature and fiction was my first love. I've always read a lot of fiction and pretty much exclusively fiction. And I have always wanted to be a writer. So I always wrote creatively, just in my spare time, and around the edges of things. And that was sort of probably since I was a child, really, and university. And then when I graduated university, I wanted a job that I could, you know that I could earn a living writing and the best and most interesting way to do that I thought was journalism. And it was sort of a good combination with my, like, law background, I guess. So I started in journalism, but I had always always wanted to write a book and various things meant that I hadn't gotten around to it. Although I did write another book, I wrote another manuscript before this one. So I've been working away for quite a while.
Nicole Abadee
What happened to that manuscript?
Jacqueline Maley
Well, it's just languishing in my in my bottom drawer, like, like so many manuscripts, and then that's where I think it will probably stay because it was, it was a really good apprenticeship and I think it was, I'm really glad that I wrote it. And I now look back on it and see all the things that I was trying to work out for myself when I was writing it. And it mostly is that technical stuff that you were talking about, like I, I think, you know, you can loosen up the muscle, muscles fairly easily to get yourself writing prose and to get yourself writing even fiction, fictional kind of creative prose as opposed to journalistic prose. But the stuff that is really hard to teach yourself or I found hard was the overall technical structure of a novel and I had to really think about that a lot and you know, really, sort of my brain would just sort of break trying to think about plotting and the the narrative arc and all of that stuff. I would just get really, really obsessed with it. And I think I just had to do that once less successfully in order to do it semi successfully a second time.
Nicole Abadee
Having wanted to write a novel for so long, how did the reality match up to your expectation of what it would be like?
Jacqueline Maley
Well, I think at first, it was hard. I mean, like the first manuscript again, that was sort of an apprenticeship in that because you go in all these different directions, you don't really know what you're doing. And even just basic stuff like how do I move my character through space and time? like, you have to do that. It can feel quite mechanical at first, when you're first starting to write fiction. How much speech do I include? How do I make sure the dialogue in my novel is, is believable? and credible? How do I paint a character? How many minor or less major characters do I want to include? What is my character going to be doing with their day? How long? Will the novel be over what time period? Will the novel be set? And if I have flashbacks, will that be a different timestamp? Or you know, there's so many technical things right there. I wrote in the first person, third person, so I had had that apprenticeship with the first book. So when I sat down for the second, I felt it flowed a little bit more easily.
Nicole Abadee
How did you write the first one? Was it a long time before 2018?
Jacqueline Maley
I started it in 2013, so and I was probably, and then I had my I had a baby in the middle of it. But yeah, so and I was probably writing it till about 2016? 17? something like that. And then I had a bit of a break and then I went back. And as you say, in 2018, I had long service leave ao I started this one. And I got a good chunk of i done during the long service leave and then I, you know, worked on it in fits and starts over the next year or year and a bit.
Nicole Abadee
What did you enjoy the most about writing fiction after so many years of being a journalist writing facts?
Jacqueline Maley
Well, it sounds really obvious and almost a bit stupid but I just really loved being able to depart from facts and to be completely the master of my own realm. And once I got a taste of that, I just found it really addictive. I, I the best way I can describe it is it just made me feel really free. And I didn't have a lot of personal freedom at the time, because I was a single parent myself, my daughter was very young. And I was like - here is a place where I can roam here is a place where I can wander, where I can run, where I can do whatever I want, where I can run the show, where I can make things up with the gayest of abandon, and I don't have any consequences to worry about. I don't know I just felt total freedom in it and I really loved it. And once you sort of allow yourself that freedom, and you untangle yourself from your expectations, or the expectations of this imaginary person you think is reading it, then it's just really liberating. And I really, really enjoyed that. And now that I'm sort of writing my second one, I like I'm enjoying it again. I like being at my desk. I like, you know, the sun streaming in through the window and having some books around me. And just myself and my laptop. I just really like it.
Nicole Abadee
Jacqueline, as we've mentioned, you did an arts law degree at the University of New South Wales. You've said that that radicalised you? And that that has influenced your feminism and your writing. So I'm wondering, did having a law degree influence the way you wrote this book?
Jacqueline Maley
I never actually got my practicing certificate I, I trained at a law firm and i did a clarkship as it's called. And I was offered a position as a solicitor, but I just sort of never went back. Basically, I went traveling and then just never returned for the, for that part of things. So no, I never practiced as a solicitor, but I had a short, well, I've had a few years of a law firm.
Nicole Abadee
Do you think having the law degree influenced your writing or your thinking in relation to this novel?
Jacqueline Maley
Um, well, I suppose there's, you know, the main character has a similar background to me as in she worked in a law firm for a while, and she does have some rather sort of acerbic comments to make about the lawyers and that law firm in particular. So I definitely draw on my own experience. I mean, a lot of my good friends are lawyers, as they say, and I find myself in my journalism really drawn to, I don't do a lot of court reporting, but I love it. And I find myself drawn to it. I love the human theory of it. I love the drama of it. And I also am still interested in this sort of intellectual stuff of the law, I suppose. So if I get a chance to sit in on a court case, I'd be really happy. But um, yeah, so in that sense, I think it probably did infiltrate the novel somewhat. And it you know, Suzy, the protagonist's mother who's a bit of a petty snob she's kind of a, you know, an aspirational snob. She really wanted her daughter to be a lawyer, so she's, you know, she sort of frates Suzy with this disappointment, this maternal disappointment that she never fulfilled her mother's dream for her, and I suppose that was, I mean, my mum, like, didn't like she is not at all based on the mother in the book, I might add. But I just sort of, I suppose stuck that in there as a sort of maybe it was more of a self referential thing myself being disappointed in myself and not cutting it as a lawyer.
Nicole Abadee
And part of the mother's disappointment is that she wanted her to make more money, isn't it? That she thought she'd make more money as a lawyer than she ever would as a journalist?
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah. And I would be absolutely lying if I hadn't thought, you know, many times over the years, how much richer I would've been if I'd become a lawyer instead of a journalist. But here we are.
Nicole Abadee
So let's talk a little bit, I'm just going to pick some of the main characters, there are some really interesting, lesser characters as well. We won't talk about all of them. The three I want to talk about really are Suzy herself, Maddie and Suzy's relationship with Maddie, and Jan. So let's start with Suzy. Tell us about Suzy, what she liked what we know about her.
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, well, Suzy, is sort of recovering very much from a setback, from a heartbreak and a bit of a body blow that she received when her daughter was very young, which happened with the father of her child who's now left to places unknown. And so Suzy is really solo mothering. So she's struggling under the weight of that. She is very much devoted to her job, as you know, with in the reading, I just just read out work is very much where her sense of self and her identity comes from. And it's a place where she can separate herself from the demands of her child. She's devoted to Maddie. She feels the occasional sort of suffocation and lack of liberty of solo parenting, but she's completely sort of in love with her child. And they're sort of in that, that place of mutual enchantment that mothers and small children are and that's sort of heightened by the fact that there's, it's just the two of them. But on top of that, she also has a very messy personal life. So she's written off the idea of having a relationship for herself, but she still ends up having a bunch of relationships that she doesn't want to, you know, it doesn't really matter what she calls them res IPSA loquitur, I think is the legal term for that - "The thing speaks for itself."
Nicole Abadee
And she says, doesn't she "I didn't want love and companionship, that's not what I wanted." Although, I wondered if she was a slightly unreliable narrator in that respect. If, if that's what she really means?
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, yeah, she well, she's just sort of, she's very pragmatic about it. And as you say, I think she may be is a bit of a bit of an unreliable narrator in that sense, because everybody wants love, but she has written that off as a possibility for herself. But she's very pragmatic. She's like, you know, I still have various needs that I'm I want to be met. And she still has a desire for intimacy. So she just makes sure that that desire is fulfilled. And I wanted to write a character who was quite unapologetic about that, and about her sex life. So and I didn't want it to be, you know, that she was having sort of relationships with men because she was trying to fill some hole in herself, or, you know, for it to be a tortured kind of thing. I was just like, not, you know, single parent, you know, but she's ummm
Nicole Abadee
She has needs that she wants...
Jacqueline Maley
She has needs . Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nicole Abadee
You and Suzy do have certain things in common. And I'm obviously not the first commentator to make that point. You both studied law before having careers as journalists. You both raised a daughter as a single mother, you both live in Sydney's inner West. You have said that your own situation was a springboard. But the story is very much a feat of imagination. So I was wondering, where does Jacqueline stop and Suzy start?
Jacqueline Maley
So it's a very personal question that one? No, I look, I, Suzy is very, very different to me. I took my own set of circumstances, in that I'm a journalist, and I was a single parent when I was writing this book. So the single parenting stuff and the relationship that Suzy has with her daughter, Maddie, is very much taken from life. I was sort of, I wanted to, I think I wanted to memorialise that. But I also wanted to put it down because I thought it was an interesting and worthy experience of literature that I hadn't seen really described and captured. Well, in many books that I'd read, and I, you know, read a lot, I read a lot of books. I haven't ever, you know, there's not that many that do motherhood really well, and in particularly the sort of nitty gritty of motherhood, you know, not necessarily the grand overarching, you know, emotions or whatever, but mothering a small child and particularly mothering a small child alone, and just what it's like day to day, and I thought that would be I thought it was just a really interesting and overlooked subject. And obviously, I wouldn't have probably had that realisation if I hadn't been experiencing it so intensely myself. So that stuff is very much taken from my own life. You know, I had an insight into what it was like in a newsroom so that is a little bit taken from my own life. Although, like various of my Herald colleagues have claimed themselves as the inspiration for the various characters in the book, and you know, I've told them Well, yeah, and they're not. But apart from that, nothing in the book that happens to Suzy has happened to me. No one's ever killed themselves as a result of my journalism. And Suzy is a very hard person I think, she's very cynical, she's very judgmental of other people. She doesn't have many people, she doesn't have any female friends. And she holds the world, at arm's length, I think and other people at arm's length. And the withering sort of judgments that she puts onto other people are really a result of the withering judgment she has for herself. And that's really quite dissimilar, I think, to my personality. So yeah, she's, she's a different, very different personality to me. But when I was writing her, I had to be very, because she was the one that I was sort of most closely associated with. It was weird, like, there were times when you know, when she'd be doing something terrible, or something that I would consider quite immoral. And I'd be like, finding it really difficult to write. And I'd be like, why is this difficult to write, she's not real. And then it was, you know, I had to sort of really separate myself from her on the page. And that way, in a way that I didn't have to with the other characters, who were probably a bit more fun to write actually,
Nicole Abadee
Let's talk a little bit about Maddie, how would you describe Suzy's relationship with Maddie? And then I'm going to ask you, how would you describe Suzy's relationship with her own mother, Beverly? So let's start with the relationship between Suzy and Maddie.
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, it's very close. And the way that I would describe it is that yeah, it's that's that state of mutual enthrallment and enchantments that mothers and small children have, when they're, it's almost like being in love, like you're really it's limerence, you know, they're completely sort of enamored with each other. They each think the things that the other person does, sort of adorable and special. And they get very intensely sort of, you know, annoyed with each other sometimes. But then they have these little fits or storms of emotion. You know, like the segment that I just read out where Susie describes getting so overwhelmed with frustration that she just has to walk into the next room. But that's very much a reflection of the intensity of their bond and the intensity of the love that they have for each other. Which again, I think is very true to life with with mothers and children and little kids particularly. Yeah, so it's just very close. It's very uncomplicated. I think this from Suzy's point of view, Maddie, there are two people in the in the book who reflect back to Suzy, a really good vision of herself and one of them is Maddie, because Maddie just looks at her and thinks she's perfect and the other person has her great uncle who thinks she's a really good person and he's really proud of her. So when she's with those two people, she's sort of, something's restored to her in terms of their self esteem that she doesn't get with any of the other relationships in her life. And I think we've probably all had that, you know, particularly with small kids, like, they don't care what you look like that, okay, what you do for a job. They don't care that you did something bad last week, or that, you know, you've stuffed up a particular relationship or whatever. They actually just want your time and your lab. So yeah, I was sort of was trying to reflect that in the relationship depicting the relationship between Maddie and Suzy.
Nicole Abadee
Tell us a little bit about Suzy's relationship with her own mother, Beverly, who you referred to briefly a little while back?
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, it's much more. It's a, it's a tense and somewhat difficult relationship. I think, um, you know, Beverly, I really loved writing Beverly, because she's like a petty snob. She's quite aspirational. She's disappointed that she doesn't have a sort of higher status in in the world, then then she really does. She's disappointed with her husband. She's disappointed with her child, Suzy. You know, she's sort of completely enthralled by her grandchild that pushes Suzy aside, she is the sort of inconvenient, inconvenient and disappointing Mother of her grandchild. So it's much more complex because Suzy feels the weight of that disappointment and judgment from her mother. But she also turns a lot of judgment back to her mother. And she's aware, I think, particularly by the end of the novel, that Beverly is really the the present parent, whether it's her other, her other parents. Her father is a sort of amiable presence around the edges, but he's not present in the way that Beverly is and she rolls up her sleeves and gets into the you know, to the nitty gritty of family life in a way that her husband doesn't. So they have Yeah, they're really. She, I think, has a has a bit of an arc and evolved over the course of the book. But I really enjoyed writing Beverly because I just thought, you know, she's she's a petty snob. She's very interested in fashion, she's a bit vain. She's probably like, if you gave her a few drinks and said student extra at the cocktail party, she'd be really good fun because she just sort of let acid. Yeah, yeah. And she'd have really good commentary, you know, of the other people at the cocktail party. She's that kind of person.
Nicole Abadee
It is a complex relationship, though, isn't it between Suzy and Beverly and one thing I was wondering, do you think people who don't necessarily have great relationships with their own mothers work even harder on their relationships with their own children?
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, that's such a good question. Um, I, I mean, I, Beverly is not at all based on my mom, I hasten to add. And so I don't know, because I feel like the way I mother my child is just really modeled on how I was modelled because I was mothered nicely. But I mean, I remember a psychologist, I spoke to a psychologist once, and she said, you can, you can go either way, when you have a bad parent, you can either you can either unconsciously, sort of adopt or recreate the same relationship for yourself in your life. Or you can go the opposite direction. And I guess it's similar with parenting, because I think a lot of people, like swing back the other way, don't they and try to do things differently. We all have things that we want to do differently to our own parents. But if you had a particularly mean parent, or heaven forbid, an abusive parent, you probably do try to correct it. Yeah.
Nicole Abadee
Let's talk then on the other mother in the book, Jan, who's the mother of Tracey, the wellness blogger who killed herself as a result, arguably of the story that Suzy wrote, what's Jan like? And how much fun did you have creating her as a character?
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, I loved creating Jan, she was my favourite character in the book, and the one that I missed the most actually, I almost thought like, should I resurrect her for something else? Jan, how do you how to describe Jan? Jan is, there's a mean, there's a big class difference between between Suzy and Jan. Jan's from Queensland. She's sort of grown up in regional Australia. She's not University educated. She's one of the, you know, hundreds of thousands of women across Australia, who probably was never able to fulfill her potential because of the time she was born, and the level of, of education that she got or didn't get. And so there's a sort of certain level of untapped potential or frustration just built into her life and that makes her really as common as dirt. Because as I said, there's so many women like that across Australia, probably a lot of people's mums are like that, or are like that. But she has an enormous vitality. She has an enormous zest for life and she has an enormous presence. And I really wanted her to be the sort of person who was kind of overlooked by society, if you like, and was probably poor. You know, she's one of one of those statistics that you read about, like the women who retire with almost no superannuation because they've spent their lives caring for other people and in low paid jobs. Yeah, overlooked by society. She's definitely on the other side of the invisibility cliff that Suzy talks about early in the novel that women have,
Nicole Abadee
Once they reach a certain age.
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah. And then, you know, so this person who's completely sort of undervalued by society, I just wanted her to march into the center of this novel, and to disrupt Suzy's complacency. And to become like this sort of angel of vengeance, who is seeking justice on the part of her daughter, and at the beginning of the novel, the reader has, you know, doesn't really know what to make of Jan. And then you get to know her a little bit better as the novel goes on. And, you know, I wanted her to be a little bit funny. I wanted her to be quite idiosyncratic. And in contrast to Suzy and her mother and the relationship between them. Jan is a very non judgmental person, she doesn't judge anyone she comes across. She's angry at Suzy, but she's not judging her. She's not saying that she's morally, you know, she's not, she's not judging her and that's a really rare quality in a person. And it's a really pure, sort of it's, it's a pure quality in a person and I just, it's, there's something so innately good about people who don't judge other people. And so I wanted to write a character like that, and that ended up yeah, that ended up being part of Jan, Jan's kind of anatomy, literary anatomy, because she's been through so much in her life. She stuffed up herself. She doesn't feel like she's done a particularly good job as a parent. The last thing she would ever do is, is judge anyone else's choices or the way they live their life.
Nicole Abadee
She asks Suzy to do something for her Jacqueline, something quite unique. What does she asked her to do?
Jacqueline Maley
Well, she blames Suzy for having written this story, which basically, you know, cause the death of her daughter. But she also is very angry at Suzy for having written the story, which is, you know, a completely factual story about her daughter being a fake, essentially in a fraud. But she says to Suzy, you didn't tell the whole story of my daughter, you know, you might have written down some facts about her, you know, at a particular point in time, but this does not reflect the whole person that my daughter was, it doesn't reflect her true character and the essence of her life. And so she basically asked Suzy, you know, this audacious thing, which is I, you know, she says, I want you to write the true history of my daughter, I want you to write the true story of my daughter. And Suzy ends up saying yes, and they sort of embark on that project together, which forms a lot of their interaction over the book.
Nicole Abadee
So it's the true story as told by Jan, of course.
Jacqueline Maley
Yes. Yes. and as they sort of, as Jan, you know, Suzy interviews Jan, essentially, over a series of sessions and as Jan gets talking about her daughter, she ends up talking a lot about herself. And that to me, I wanted to sort of put, convey this idea of, I think I had it somewhere in the book about, you know, the life of the mother being inside the life of the daughter and the life of the daughter being inside the life of the mother, like a sort of series of Russian dolls, they're all bound up in each other. So you can't tell the story, you know, Jan can't tell the story of her daughter without telling the story of herself. So we get to know Jan quite well through through that process.
Nicole Abadee
I want to talk to you now a little bit about something we have discussed a bit already, the the idea of motherhood and in particular being a single mother. So this book is dedicated to your daughter, you've called it a love letter to mothering. I think that's a very good description. There is so much in this book, as you've said earlier, for listeners, there's so much beautiful writing about the joys of motherhood, beautiful descriptions of the relationship between Maddie and Suzy, one of my favorite lines, it has Suzy looking at Maddie's face and saying, I just could have written a sonnet to my daughter's cheeks. You write this when your daughter was three? I was was wondering couple of things. First of all, was it having your daughter that made you want to write this novel that gave you idea, the idea for this novel with this concept of motherhood? The goods and the bads of it at its core?
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, definitely, I think I, you know, it's got me thinking about a lot of things having a baby. And when I was, when I was in the throes of early motherhood with her, you know, baby hood and then toddlerhood I just, you know, I would always read books, when, even if I was just like, dog tired, I would or I was always reading, and I would just go to my favorite novels, have burned my way through various novels, probably mostly contemporary fiction at that time. And I just, it just really struck me how this subject had never been, it had never been really well portrayed, that I could see in any of the books that I that I had read or was reading around that time. I am thinking I mean, and I'm thinking particularly of yeah, the business, the business of motherhood with an early you know, in the early years, with a young child, and particularly the business of solo parenthood. There's some great books about parenthood, I mean, fiction, I mean, you know, "Actress" by Anne Enright, which is just a brilliant book, I guess that came out, I don't know, two or three years ago. That's a beautiful, amazing book about a mother daughter bond, but it's not, it's really written from the child's point of view, not the mother's point of view. And then, you know, there's "Monkey Grip" obviously, Helen Garner...
Nicole Abadee
Which is an incredible book about single parenting. And if you haven't already seen it, one critic compared your book very favourably to "Monkey Grip." I don't know if you knew that.
Jacqueline Maley
Yes, that was the most thrilling thing I think i've ever ever read. That was great to be compared to Helen Garner and to that book, was incredibly gratifying. Yes. So I'm actually struggling to think of any other books, which talk about it at any great length or in any great detail. So yeah, in that sense, I was very much inspired by my own motherhood, to write those parts of the book. The other the other things that I wanted to explore was sort of, I wanted to, I wanted to talk about shame and guilt and reparation and how that intersected a little bit with like the sort of, you know, social media cycle of shame that we see so often in the modern world. And I also wanted to write about the stories and the power of stories and why we need to tell them because that is such a fundamental human need, we see it again and again and again. And that's very much something that I was always coming up against in my day job as a journalist, you know, what it's like people have just had this compulsion to tell stories and to tell their own stories. And in fact, many people can't move on with their lives until they've told the stories that they need to tell. And we see that a lot in terms of, you know, the victims of trauma and abuse.
Nicole Abadee
You say something interesting, at one stage you have Suzy thinking, at one stage Suzy is writing a profile on someone, I think it's a 3000 word profile, and Suzy's thinking to herself about whether it's ever possible to know another person and you, you wonder or Suzy wonders if any person is knowable, or if in fact, we're all unknowable. Would you like to comment on that?
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, well, I think people are unknowable, aren't they? Because otherwise we wouldn't surprise each other and hurt each other and betrayed each other as often as we do. And that's the project of fiction, isn't it? We're trying to fix down something which is unfixed, unfixdownable. We're trying to nail down the portrait of a person, or to describe the feeling that really only one person can ever experience. So in that sense, it's sort of inexpressible. Like, we're always trying to bridge this enormous gulf between people. And we're trying to do it with description and words and story. And we manage it, I think, a lot of the time, like good writing managers. And that's sort of the project of literature. And I just can't think of anything that is more important to sort of, I don't know, humanism, then then that effort, I suppose.
Nicole Abadee
Jacqueline, as you say, there haven't been a lot of books written about mothers full stop or not from the mother's perspective. But especially, there haven't been many books written about single motherhood. You've described that as being like motherhood on crack and you have given very good descriptions through this book of various things that if you haven't been a single mother, you wouldn't be aware of. Suzy feels a huge sense of responsibility, having the sole responsibility for Maddie that was in the passage you referred to earlier. She says when you're the sole carer to a small child, your choices contract, your personal liberty just about disappears. And she says you have no choice but to bear it. Because nobody likes an angry woman. And I wondered if there are any books, fiction books, novels that you have read about what it is really like to be a single mother? And if there are not, is that? Was that another reason why you wanted to write this one?
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, I'm actually really struggling to think I was I mean, yeah, I, because I read a lot of contemporary fiction and contemporary, I mostly read contemporary fiction that's written by women. And there's definitely more and more a crop of writers now, female writers who write about motherhood and the difficulties of it, or the sort of honesty in an honest way. But I can't I actually can't think of anyone who's written about single motherhood, fiction is littered with mother, children who've lost their mothers. And that's a very common theme. So mothers are sort of, you know, loom large by their absence, I think in a lot of books, you know, everything from like "Jane Eyre", to, you know, most fairy tales. "Shuggie Bain" you know, The Booker Prize winner from last year, that was an incredible book about a relationship between a mother and a son. But again, it's from the child's perspective, looking at his mother, who's ruining herself.
Nicole Abadee
And is a love story of sorts too
Jacqueline Maley
It really, really is. And it's almost a bit like "Actress" like the Anne Enright book in that it's written from the point of view of a child who sees his mother very clearly, but is still really enthralled by her and is still always able to remember or is still really in that early state where he just adores his mother and thinks she's the most beautiful woman in the world and is enthralled and kind of enraptured by her. Yeah, sort of similar books in that sense. And I've Yeah, I love I love that theme. Actually, I really love that theme. Because I think there's probably a part of all of us like our inner child who just thinks mummy is the most beautiful, you know, the, the part of our inner child who's watching your mum get ready and put on her jewelry and, and, and her lipstick in front of the mirror and just thinking she's the most beautiful woman in the world.
Nicole Abadee
Let's talk now about journalism and in particular, the ethics of journalism, which you deal with quite comprehensively here. So let's talk first about Suzy, who feels very guilty about the fact of Tracey's death and we should explain and again, it's not a spoiler because it's revealed very early that the way Tracey actually dies is because after Suzy writes the expose the trolls get onto Twitter and say that and the experts say is that Tracey has pretended that she has cancer and that she's cured herself and Suzy writes expose that shows she didn't have cancer. And then the trolls get onto Twitter and say, his is terrible, why don't you go kill yourself? We're going to talk a little bit later about social media. But in this context, we've got Suzy feeling very guilty that she set off the chain of events that led to Tracey's suicide and she rebukes herself she says, I did my job. And I didn't think about the consequences of it. At a later stage in the book in one of Jan and Suzy's, many conversations, Jan, confront Suzy about it and accuses her of exploiting Tracey and she basically says, you've used Tracey story, to win awards and to win the approbation of your colleagues. Why is that any different to what Tracey did and exploiting her cancer? You've been just as exploitive? And I wondered, this is my question to you. Is that a fair accusation that Jan levels at Suzy? And the next part is, what are the obligations of journalists to those that they write about?
Jacqueline Maley
Wow. Um, yeah, the big questions. To answer the first question. Yeah, I think Jan's got a point. I think that the thing about public interest journalism, that, and I don't say this from a judgmental point of view, because I've done some of it myself. I think it's the most important kind of journalism, every single journalist and most admire is engaged in this kind of work. I think it's really important, more important than ever, because, you know, there's such a lack of governmental scrutiny and, you know, scrutiny on institutions in other realms. But yeah, I mean, I don't think it has escaped anyone's notice that the biggest stories are the ones that have the most dire consequences for the people that you're writing about. So the best consequence for a story, a big story is, you know, a royal commission, or someone loses their job or someone gets kicked out of cabinet, or, you know, in some cases, someone is completely disgraced. It's not that you go after that particular consequence, but it's, it's a consequence that, you know, will be the measure, I suppose, of a successful story. So it's like journalists show up on the worst day of people's lives and write about like, the worst thing that they've done. And maybe that's not a good, an accurate portrayal of the whole person. So there was there's, there's always that kind of ethical murkiness that I thought was really would be really interesting to explore in a fictional realm, which I'd always thought about in my journalistic career. But I wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that I think that that kind of journalism is morally wrong. In fact, the opposite I think it's necessary. And, unfortunately, the consequences for individuals, most of you know if the, if there's individual wrongdoing, it's a form of justice that I think is important for the functioning of society, actually, even if it hurts individual people.
Nicole Abadee
You've said about journalists. "We seek the truth and write it. But we can never hope to capture a person just by reporting things they've done. It's almost an existential thing. Does someone's true essence exist? Or is it constructed through the process of describing it?" I thought that was a fascinating question. And I'm wondering what your answer is to it.
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, no, this will sound really pretentious, because I was sort of reading a little bit about existentialism, at that time. So I was thinking about that question, you know, the existentialist kind of basically believed that, you know, the essence of something doesn't exist, that we construct ourselves day by day, in the actions that we take, and the way that we behave in the world. And I think that that is probably true. And journalists don't and can't report on someone's, you know, innate character, or their essence. I mean, that's probably the business of fiction writers, if it's the business of anyone, but they report on what people do, they report on what people how people behave, how people interact with each other, the actions that they've taken or not taken. And that's all we can do. And that's all we should do. But it does sort of pick someone in time if they've done something that is bad, and is maybe not reflective of their whole character. And the tension or the, what I was trying to do in the book a little bit was to mirror that ethical or moral sort of tension with Suzy's own life because she is up there in a way, casting judgment on other people by writing these stories and fixing them in time on their worst the worst day or the thing that the worst thing that they've done is a thing that gets immortalized. That's not the whole of them. It's not the whole of any of us. But she's done a lot of things that she, she doesn't she's not particularly proud of either. And she's done. She's made mistakes, and she's had some shame and disgrace in her own life. And so I wanted her to be sort of brought down in a similar way or in a way that mirrored her bringing down of, of Tracey Doran in particular,
Nicole Abadee
Let's come to that. Now, this whole idea of social media and in particular internet trolling, as we've said, it was this which led to Tracey killing herself. And then, after Tracey dies, the trolls launch terrible attacks on Suzy, her Facebook page is laden with sexual slurs, threats of violence, threats of rape. You don't need me to tell you, but it's certainly my observation that that is an occupational hazard for female journalists these days, I've seen the Twitter feeds of Leigh Sales of a Juanita Phillips, Julia Baird and others. How do you deal with that?
Jacqueline Maley
Um, I mean, I think it used to bother me when I was starting out a lot more because you would take it personally. And, you know, I mean, I don't get it so badly. I don't get it nearly as badly as the women that you just mentioned, for example, I think being on TV is like, so much worse for that stuff. And I have noticed whenever I have gone on TV, like though, you do get comments, like there was one guy who, whenever I went on TV would write in and just be like, like writing in emails and be like, hey, chubby cheeks, like and just just say this horrible stuff about my cheeks. And you know, like, one thing that you always think is your flaw, and I was always like, "Oh, my God, he's, it's like, he's seen me. It's like, he's seen into my worst insecurities." And he's just like, it's...anyway. But I could sort of laugh about that. There's been some the sexualized stuff is really awful. And I've had a little, I've had enough of a taste of that to realize it is actually quite upsetting. And even all these years after I'm quite sort of hardened to it. You know, like, I got a, I got a really nasty sort of rapey email a while ago, actually, when I wrote something about atheChristian Porter stuff. I think when, if you're writing about certain topics, you get certain types of correspondence, should we put it that way? And I was surprised, actually, by how much it did upset me. Even though the person who wrote it was clearly a lunatic, or, or very disturbed himself to write such an email. So how do you handle it? Like, I think I only respect the opinions of people I know and respect to put it that way. And so if someone's like, anonymously, making nasty comments about you on Twitter, it's like, well, it's not behavior I respect actually. So I don't care about it very much, I would never do that myself. I would never attack someone personally on Twitter. And I also think getting involved in Twitter arguments is like the definition of wasting your life. And it's just a stupid and pointless thing to do. So I suppose I can see that anyone who engages in that, kind of wasting their time.
Nicole Abadee
Sorry, that seems to be what Suzy says at one stage, she reflects on public shaming, having suffered some of that herself. And she says "the best act of resistance was to not dance along to stay silent in the noise, to absorb the shame and move on." Sems to me. That's really what you're saying, isn't it? That that you just don't engage?
Jacqueline Maley
Yeah, I just think there's, we live in a world where, you know, everybody has a platform that everybody can have a take on a particular issue. Everyone's got a voice through social media, which is a beautiful thing. And it's been very democratizing. And also, it's been, you know, really disruptive to the mainstream media. And I actually, I welcome that. I think it's a really good thing. Because it's um, it's changed the game. And it's up ended a lot of institutions actually, including the media. But I do think it's tiresome for, to know everybody's opinions about everything. And I think it's tiresome to have to have an opinion or to feel that you have to have an opinion or a take on everything that passes through your Twitter feed and is sort of a fad for a day or whatever. And I just think there's so much beauty and power in silence sometimes or, you know, I always admire those people who only speak when they have something really interesting to say, but spend the rest of their time listening. And like I wouldn't necessarily claim to be one of those people because I'm way too loquacious but I think there's that's really elegant or gracious or something. I think it's a good way to live your life. More people should do it, including myself probably.
Nicole Abadee
I want to ask you now, finally about the whole dynamic of men and women in the workforce and sexual relationships in the workforce, which of course, couldn't be a hotter topic, not that you necessarily knew that in 2018, when you were writing this book. So in 2020, as I mentioned, you and Kate McClymont, were responsible for the investigation into the allegations against Dyson Hayden, that was a particular context where a very senior man in the profession who was in his 70s was accused of harassing women in their 20s, who worked for him and fresh out of law school. In this book, we have Suzy who has an affair with her married boss. Here, there's no real age disparity. It's a consensual relationship, there is a power differential. They both pay a price, but Suzy pays the higher price. And one thing that I thought was really interesting, and I wanted to ask you about was, later on Suzy, when she thinks about it, she feels guilty, not just because she thinks that she's probably done the wrong thing by having an affair with a married man, but she actually feels guilt towards his wife. And she says, "because we're all connected." And I wondered if that if that was a reasonable approach? What do you think about that approach by Suzy that she doesn't just feel guilty about herself and her own behavior, she actually feels that she's somehow impacted adversely on the life of the man's wife?
Jacqueline Maley
Well, I just think that's true. I think, you know, I think that people look like I don't, one doesn't judge because people do things for their own reasons. But I don't think you can really have an affair with a married person without at least sort of considering that the person they're married to might be quite upset if they knew Kenny. And that's one of the things that Suzy is sort of so blind about, you know, she's sort of so wrapped up in herself, and her own her own pain that she doesn't, it doesn't even occur to her that in taking something that she wants, she's causing pain to someone else. So that's part of the reckoning. And the sort of. Yeah, I think that the realization that, that Suzy comes through, and she's sort of shaking out of her complacency into to expanding her consciousness and a little bit, a little bit to think about, you know, people that she's heard too.
Nicole Abadee
Jacqueline, thank you so much for talking to me today on Books, Books, Books. That's, that's been a fascinating conversation about a terrific book, which raises so many issues more than we could begin to talk about in this time, but I hope we've given listeners a taste of some of the really important issues that you explore and very best of luck promoting it and appearing live at festivals this year, which is a wonderful thing.
Jacqueline Maley
Nicole, thank you so much for having me. It was really fun and interesting to chat to you. I really I really enjoyed it.
Nicole Abadee
Thank you for listening to Books, Books, Books. If you liked what you heard in this episode, please go to my website, nicoleabadee.com.au to listen to all the episodes and find out more about the podcast. You can also find me Nicole Abadee on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and look for my reviews in Good Weekend. You can subscribe to Books, Books, Books at Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google and all the usual places. It would be lovely if you could go to any of these platforms and viewports are rating or review. Thank you. I look forward to talking with you again soon.