Charlotte Wood, THE WEEKEND
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[1:54]Charlie Wood is the author of six novels and two books of nonfiction.
[1:58]Her latest novel The Weeknd won the 2020 Australian Book Industry Award for literary fiction
[2:04]and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal
[2:08]among other awards. Her previous novel The Natural Way of Things won the 2016 Stella Prize,
[2:14]the 2016 indie book of the year, and novel of the year and was joint winner of the prime
[2:18]minister's literary award for fiction. Her nonfiction works include The Writer's Room,
[2:22]A Collection of interviews with authors about the creative process, and Love and Hunger,
[2:26]a book about cooking. Her features and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian,
[2:31]Let Have, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Saturday Paper Among Other Publications.
[2:35]In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of Australia for significant services to
[2:40]literature and was named one of Australian finance reviews, 100 Women of Influence. Her latest project
[2:46]is at podcast The Writer's Room with Charlotte Wood in which she interviews authors, critics,
[2:51]and other artists about the creative process. And also, Charlotte was the inaugural Judy Harris
[2:56]writer and resident at the Charles Perkins Center, a groundbreaking multi-disciplinary
[3:00]health research center at the University of Sydney and has made a seven episode podcast
[3:05]with two of the center's leading scientists, Stephen Simpson, and David
[3:09]Robin Heimer about their 35 years of friendship and research and the resulting book
[3:14]Eat Like the Animals. Welcome, Charlotte. Thank you so much for coming on,
[3:17]Mom. So don't have time to read books. Thanks for having me, VB for now.
[3:21]I'm so excited to discuss the weekend with you. This book was so lovely and moving and really
[3:27]well written. And I just, oh my gosh, I was just really looking forward to this conversation. I
[3:32]still think about your character sitting on the side of the road. Like whenever I'm getting
[3:36]in my car now, like trapped under an underpass, like two narrows to even get out. And I'm like,
[3:43]I'm glad I stayed with you. Yes. Can you please tell listeners what the weekend is about?
[3:49]Sure. The weekend is about friendship and getting older. And the book opens when three friends,
[3:59]some people have described them as frenemies. But I think they love each other more than that.
[4:04]They're aged in their 70s. They're named the Jude Wendy and Adele. And they come together
[4:10]on a very hot weekend in Australia, just for Christmas, which I know is kind of weird for American
[4:17]readers to think about Christmas being in the middle of the boiling summer that in Australia,
[4:22]that's what it's like often. But they come together at the beach house of their fourth friend,
[4:27]Sylvie, who has died just around I think a year before the book opens. And they are there to
[4:35]clean out Sylvie's house. And they've been friends for a really long time for around 40 years.
[4:40]And they, you know, their kind of, their friendship is kind of worn by this stage. And worn by
[4:48]grief as well. And they've discovered that they're discovering over this weekend, particularly that
[4:53]Sylvie was the one who really held this group together. And without her, they kind of lost
[4:59]the sense of how to be with each other. They feel that they, you know, they just feel kind of lost
[5:06]to one another. And it's a very difficult time for them while they grapple with their grief for
[5:12]Sylvie. And their grief for their friendship that seems to be kind of dissolving in front of them.
[5:18]And what inspired you to write this book? Why these characters? Why this weekend? How did you
[5:23]come up with a structure of it? And the whole thing? Why not the month? Or the long, yeah,
[5:29]or you know, yeah. Well, the, the reason I wanted to write about these women is that I've always
[5:36]been interested in female friendships and how sustaining they are for so many of us. And I've always had
[5:42]quite intense friendship from when I was very young. And I have, you know, quite a lot of women
[5:47]friends who are, you know, I have, I have a really nice husband and my own siblings, but
[5:52]friendships are the thing that kind of propel my days, I guess. And I, my last book, the natural way
[5:59]of things was about really young women. And it was very dark and kind of fairly brutal sort of
[6:05]book about misogyny. And I wanted to kind of release myself and my readers from the darkness of
[6:11]that book by, and sometimes I just sort of the way to get away from a previous book is almost
[6:17]just a flippant. And go to something opposite. So that was young women. It was older women.
[6:22]That book was said kind of in the middle of the desert in Australia.
[6:27]These book is at the beach of the coast. And it's a much lighter book even though
[6:32]Dory is about these women. So having to face the fact that they are in the last,
[6:38]you know, years of their lives, even if that's another 10 or 20 years, it's obviously the last
[6:44]phase of their lives that they're heading into. And they haven't really thought about that properly.
[6:49]That's one of the things that each of them is sort of grappling with. But I wanted to,
[6:55]one of the things I was interested in is how does, how do long friendships sustain themselves?
[7:00]Or not? You know, I think, you know, I have friends of sort of 25 years standing
[7:06]and I love them, but we have changed a lot over that 25 years. And sometimes I feel that
[7:13]old friendships, we can just sort of park some of it. We can put them, we can sort of set them
[7:21]instrument in some way. And I feel like we need to be able to have our old friendships
[7:28]move and change and live and be as rich as sometimes, you know, when you meet a new person and
[7:34]you kind of fall in love as a friend with this person because they're kind of facing up with
[7:40]the contemporary view where sometimes our old friends and we all do it to each other can think,
[7:46]well, no, I know who you are. You're the person that I met 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And so
[7:52]I was really interested in sort of casting forward for myself about what kind of woman might I be
[7:58]if I'm lucky enough to reach my 70s and how will that woman live within the friendships of old
[8:06]and what might be the forces at work upon all of us at that point? Well, you had a great quote in
[8:13]the book. You wrote, the 30s were the age you fell most dangerously in love Adele had discovered
[8:18]after the fact not with a man or a woman, but with your friends. And you write lovers back then
[8:24]came and went like the weather, but you said, no, it wasn't lovers but friends. These courageous
[8:28]shining people, you pursued romance with dinners and gifts and weekends away. It was so long ago,
[8:33]40 years. It's so true because usually your life is somewhat set. Friends, I mean, obviously you
[8:40]can get divorced and remarried and whatever, but that's like one or two major changes in your life.
[8:45]But the friends are things you can, they come in and out. I feel like so often it's just the right
[8:49]times for what you need. Yeah. And for these women, they all met Adele's in their 30s. They were
[8:58]all of them were quite powerful in their professional life. And a lot of this book is about work,
[9:04]actually, and how women don't just identify with their family identity. They identify with their
[9:10]work. And I feel like, you know, the ways that we think about older age in popular culture,
[9:16]in television and in books often women, older women are just identified by their family roles,
[9:22]by their older mothers or grandmothers or whatever, but for spouses. But often, you know, the women
[9:28]that I know in their 70s are working or wish they were working. You know, they've had very
[9:34]some feeling professionalized. And these women in my book, Jude, was a restaurante. She ran the
[9:40]city's finest restaurant. She was one of those sort of very powerful women in the hospitality world.
[9:47]And everyone wanted a table at her restaurant, you know, in the city in this book.
[9:52]Adele was a very well-known stage actress. And Wendy was a public intellectual and sort of
[9:59]globally.
[10:00]known as a feminist academic and intellectual and her books are still on
[10:04]university lifts around the world. So they and in their 30s was you know sort of
[10:10]the really blossoming time of their sort of cultural power and that had this
[10:16]kind of blazing allure for all of them and they came together through various
[10:21]means and they were this kind of shining little crowd in their in their world and
[10:28]now they're looking at each other going oh man I remember when you were so
[10:33]powerful and now I feel that you're you know you might be hiding something your
[10:38]health isn't great your or you are in a bit of denial about what's going on
[10:45]for you professionally but they all kind of think about it think of that about
[10:49]each other while not really facing their own you know doubts and and little
[10:54]crises and confidence that they they feel like they can't afford to look at
[10:58]some things that are that are creeping into the edges of their vision but this
[11:03]weekend together forces them to look at those things and actually just going
[11:08]back to your earlier question about why are we can it's really helpful I found in
[11:12]fiction to kind of bring in the boundaries of time and space to kind of create
[11:19]pressure on people and for a book like this that is about it's about you know
[11:25]the kind of internal lives of women but not a lot of dramatic things happen I
[11:31]mean it does build to some a big crisis for them but you know there are not
[11:36]world events crashing in on these on these women so bringing those those sort of
[11:43]edges of this of the setting in time and space in more partly allows a sort of
[11:50]concentrated focus and that is kind of a crucial effect I hope that the
[11:55]pressure to sort of build and part of that is fact that they are just they're
[11:59]kind of trapped together in this house for three days and tell me about the
[12:04]writing of it so you started out and you found the structure that would work
[12:07]for you and what would create the most pressure to exhibit all these wonderful
[12:12]things and goals that you had for the book how was the writing process for you
[12:16]and how did it differ from your first book where do you do right right there or
[12:19]how do you how do you do it I'm right here in my studio and Sydney I also
[12:25]write at a house at the coast where the you know there's town that the town
[12:30]and the book is kind of modeled on it's a couple of hours north of Sydney and
[12:34]it's a kind of middle class people's holiday town and that's where still
[12:38]each has is I ran it over a few years so my previous book was the first one I
[12:44]had published in the States but this is actually my sixth novel a lot of books
[12:48]published in Australia before that and I kind of start usually with the
[12:52]place and this time I get as I said I knew I wanted to be I wanted to be me the
[12:57]ocean for the kind of I felt like I wanted light and air and where that kind of
[13:02]at my disposal I guess fiction me and I knew it was going to be about friendship so
[13:07]then I just sort of put them in this house together for ages still we didn't
[13:11]exist I just had these three friends and I had them in this house and I don't
[13:16]really plan my books at all apart from this kind of setting I guess and they
[13:21]were having these kind of fractious moments and I needed to figure out why
[13:26]are they there you know they could easily if they if they are having such
[13:29]struggles with their friendship why did they just not go or and so then I
[13:35]finally hit on the idea of Sylvie and actually because
[13:39]it's fairly early on in the process of writing the book a really lovely friend of
[13:44]mine died became sick and died and she was a writer and she was the name was
[13:51]George Ablaine and she was very very loved in this country as a writer and I
[13:56]was really kind of astonished by my grief for Georgia my the kind of
[14:02]ferocity of my grief and she was my first friend who had died and I was kind
[14:10]of like I've been through grief before in my family but this was really
[14:15]different and and I was I was kind of slightly well I felt really overwhelmed by
[14:22]the kind of primitive feelings of my grief and the way that I felt like a
[14:28]child and felt angry and so kind of jealous and such a weird series of feelings
[14:35]that I needed to kind of work them out and and so then and I knew that Georgia
[14:40]would kind of approve of this way of doing it because she wrote very close to
[14:44]life herself and that I could pour all my feelings about this
[14:50]sort of unmanageable grief into these women and their feelings for
[14:55]their friend Susie and I guess when I said jealousy it's that thing of sort of
[14:59]feeling that I think early on in the book Jude Jude confessed and sort of
[15:05]in her own head that she she was just impatient at hearing about anybody else's
[15:11]death it was sort of irrelevant. Susie was the one who died
[15:15]and she just couldn't tolerate anybody else you know kind of whining about
[15:19]people dying and she says well people die all the time of course they do
[15:22]but still we this is this is different and I think we all you know on some level
[15:28]can feel that sense of ownership and protectiveness of this person you know
[15:34]that they have they were had a rich and beautiful
[15:39]individuality that shouldn't be just lumped in with anybody else's and I actually
[15:42]think this is one of the saddest things about the pandemic that you know
[15:46]and you've been through it more than anybody
[15:49]that there is this is lumping all these people in together and they
[15:53]are not like other people so I channeled all that stuff into the story as well
[16:00]and then you know I just sort of observed as much as I could
[16:04]people around me people I see in the street thinking about my own friendships
[16:08]and how they may or may not change over the next you know 20 years
[16:12]and about how we are used to think that as we grow older we necessarily
[16:18]begin to know ourselves better and better
[16:21]and I'm not sure that's true I don't think that anymore
[16:24]and I feel like we can carry on kind of illusions about ourselves forever
[16:29]but sometimes it's our friends who present us with a really
[16:32]kind of shocking assessment of who we are and and I was interested in
[16:37]exploring that as well I'm so sorry about your friend that's terrible
[16:41]thank you did it help did the pouring into the characters of all the
[16:45]you mentioned did that actually work did it in a way that you know it
[16:51]didn't go away I still miss her and but I feel like I kind of
[16:56]honored her in some ways that you know way that she would understand
[17:00]because she was a writer a fiction writer and also she was a very funny person
[17:05]she was very very she had a very dark sense of humor and I think that she
[17:11]you know I like to think she would have liked this but it helped to express
[17:16]some of those things that you feel kind of a shame dog I don't know if
[17:19]other people do but I in my grief for her I felt like I should be more
[17:23]grown up about this I should be more you know I've been through
[17:26]the deaths of both my parents I've been through other deaths and
[17:30]and I should know how to do this by now but I was just kind of
[17:34]hammered by these very primitive kind of savage feelings
[17:38]and and I think you know sometimes that's what right what's what
[17:42]literature is for is to allow space for these kind of things that are
[17:46]unspeakable that we feel like we're feeling too
[17:49]not allowed to have that literature is the place where we are allowed to
[17:52]have them it's funny to think about like the bookshelves behind you and
[17:56]everything that in each one is all the feelings that people couldn't say
[18:00]and so we open it up and we're like oh my gosh you know it's like poured out
[18:04]like like it's almost like containers like a wall of
[18:08]Tupperware almost for everybody's feelings
[18:12]it's like that's your container store yeah and it's private you know it's a
[18:16]private place for us to go to I think unlike
[18:20]television or film or other sort of media a book is such a private space
[18:25]for the reader and the story and I feel like that's why
[18:30]reading is so precious to me because it's it's only me in the book
[18:35]and I mean I know you can watch television by yourself but somehow it doesn't
[18:38]have the same effect because it's in your own
[18:41]head I guess you're not all the pictures I pictures that you make
[18:45]and the people are people that you make as a reader
[18:48]so I feel that it's almost you know I feel
[18:52]it sounds weird but it's kind of almost a whole thing to me
[18:55]that space of a book for a reader. Sure it's like it's like the only
[19:00]form of mental telepathy that we have right it's spilling out
[19:03]the insides of your mind that goes right into the insides of someone
[19:06]else's mind like how else would you do that? TV or like I don't know I'm on my
[19:10]phone and I'm like whatever you know this is like and it also requires your
[19:14]complete attention or else you can't actually read
[19:17]so yeah that's right that's right the absorption that comes
[19:21]with reading yeah you can't cook and read at the same time
[19:25]where you see audiobooks I guess what it makes. Yeah that's true actually
[19:29]I mean it's another hope it's not pretty skilled. Are you working on
[19:33]another novel now? I am I just started taking me a while to
[19:37]settle in you know the pandemic just I mean we've been really lucky in
[19:41]Australia very very lucky in terms of the scale but it's certainly
[19:45]you know everyone was terrified and we had a big lockdown
[19:49]that you know it has gone on for some parts of the country
[19:53]for a long time there so the mental focus was not there for a long time
[19:58]but I'm getting back into it now.
[20:00]And the new one is going to be about, in some way, it's so embryonic that I don't really
[20:06]know anything about yet, but it's kind of involved non-Catholic science.
[20:11]I grew up at Catholic and I've never really written about that part of my, you know, the
[20:16]influences on me and I just thought, it's an interesting stuff here, that sort of tension
[20:21]between being in the world and being out of the world is really interesting to me, you
[20:25]know, that's a kind of big capitalist world with the rest of it.
[20:28]But it's very early, so, you know, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[20:34]I think my advice would be don't wait to start doing it, just start because, you know,
[20:41]life is short, we know that now more than ever.
[20:43]And so just dive in wherever you are, even if you don't have time, even if you were working
[20:49]full-time in a job, you know, my first several books were written when I had full-time
[20:54]work, I used to write on the couch at night or on the weekend, you don't need a space
[21:00]to work in, you'd all you need really at the most basic is a pencil or the piece of paper.
[21:06]So there's nothing stopping you, but your own mind really.
[21:12]And it can be a home to go to, it can be the most thrilling, wonderful, liberating thing
[21:19]to have in your life.
[21:20]So I would just say don't wait and the other thing I would say is just try and tell
[21:24]the truth, not sound weird when you're talking about fiction, but to write stuff that feels
[21:29]true to you, not to please anybody else, not to impress anybody else, not for the market,
[21:36]just because you really will respond when you are deeply connected and immersed in the
[21:42]work.
[21:43]And I think a lot of new writers spend far too much time worrying about whether this kind
[21:48]of work will sell or you shouldn't write in person because, you know, there's so many
[21:53]bits of really silly advice after it's another one of those, but just, you know, start
[22:00]and be sincere and put everything into it.
[22:05]Well, thank you, Charlotte, thank you for sharing your grief in this way that now comes
[22:10]and helps the rest of us and thanks for your lovely wonderful book and for introducing
[22:15]us to these characters.
[22:16]Thank you so much to Divi for having me and I'd send lots of love to everyone in the
[22:21]state right now.
[22:22]Thank you so much.
[22:23]Thank you.
[22:24]And to Australia.
[22:25]Well, just some love to our entire nation.
[22:27]So why not, you know?
[22:28]At that stage.
[22:29]At that stage.
[22:30]And that's it is.
[22:31]Good evening.
[22:32]Yeah.
[22:33]Thank you so much.
[22:34]Bye bye.
[22:35]Bye bye.
[22:36]Bye bye.
[22:37]Bye bye.
[22:38]Thanks again to today's sponsor SugarWish, send a surprise SugarWish to somebody you love
[22:44]and check it out yourself, SugarWish.com.
[22:47]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[22:50]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram, at Zebi Owens, and at Moms Don't Have Time
[22:54]to Read Books.
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[23:02]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing.
[23:06]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim
[23:10]music.