Where did the idea for Sorrow and Bliss come from?
Sorrow and Bliss was never meant to be a novel. It was just a single page I wrote one day
because a little scene popped into my head, six weeks or so after I’d quit fiction writing forever.
I had spent all of 2018 working on a manuscript that wasn’t very good to begin with and was so, so much
worse by the end, utterly unsalvageable after thousands of hours of work. I was so exhausted and
devastated and bled of confidence that I emailed my editor to tell her I had tried and failed and that was
it for me as an author.
But then this scene—of a woman at a wedding reception, struggling to eat an hors d’oeuvre—came to mind,
and for some reason I wanted to it write it down, and I just found it funny. After that scene, another one
was there, and characters started to emerge, and then a sort of story, and so I kept going without telling
a soul, including my editor, writing with the ecstatic abandon of someone whose dreams have already died.
That was the only idea for what became Sorrow and Bliss, the first scene of which is a woman and
her hors d’oeuvre.
What books have made you laugh and cry?
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, about the Troubles
in Northern Ireland, was devastatingly sad. And Brother of the More Famous Jack by
Barbara Trapido is a book I go back to every year, for the humor and, as a writer, for the object lesson
in how to combine humor and pathos in a single line.
Tell us something about where you live.
Whenever people in Australia gather in some public way—school assembly, a concert, any kind of meeting—it
will begin with an Acknowledgement of Country, which is a spoken statement recognizing that we all live on
stolen Aboriginal land, and depending where you are right then, naming the specific region and people.
I was about to say that Balmain, the part of Sydney I live in, was originally a suburb for the laborers
who came here from England, the first nonconvict settlers, so a lot of it is still tiny, wooden workers’
cottages. But actually, Balmain was and still is Gadigal Land of the Wangal People. It is a beautiful
peninsula that juts out into Sydney Harbour, so water on three sides, you can walk everywhere, and I feel
lucky every day I get to live here.
What’s a funny memory from your time working in newspapers and magazines?
On my first day as an intern at the Financial Times’s How to Spend It magazine, age
twenty-two, I was told to stack back issues of the magazine on top of a high cabinet right by the editor’s
desk. She was at her desk, and magazines are quite heavy when you are holding a slab of them above your
head, standing on a chair in heels, which keep sinking into the seat padding. The shoes were also
brand-new and had shredded my feet on the way to work, but I was so busy trying not to fall off the chair,
I didn’t notice until I saw my editor looking at them that my feet were actually super bloody.
Your first two books, a memoir and a novel, were about motherhood. Did writing them change your
perspective on parenting or your relationship to your kids?
I’m a tiny bit disinclined to revisit my books after they’re published because of that
reading-your-teenage-diary kind of burning-face shame, so I truly can’t remember what is in them,
especially Say It Again in a Nice Voice, a memoir about my experience of becoming a mother quite
young, which came out in 2012.
My children were five and two when I wrote it and when they are at that age, I feel like you can maybe
imagine as far ahead as ten, but not all the way to when they are teenagers or adults. Now that they are,
I realize how careful we have to be—on any platform, books to social media—when we’re sharing about our
children, because it is their stories, and ultimately their story that we’re telling, and one day they will
read it.
There’s nothing in the book—my older daughter, who just read it, told me—that is embarrassing to her, but
it’s made me more considered when it comes to using material from family life in my work.
How did you come to create a list of rules or “falsely cheerful” writing affirmations while working on
Sorrow and Bliss? What was one rule?
Oh, it was out of fear. But also feeling like I didn’t have the time to visit every single individual
thing I was scared of every time I sat down to write. So one day I just typed all my regular anxieties as
a list, then found myself writing replies to each that were strenuously positive and cheerful, and just
lousy with exclamation marks, like I was a confident version of myself, encouraging terrified me.
So one rule—the year before, I’d been heavily reliant on thesaurus.com. There is nothing that makes you
feel phonier as a writer than looking up another word for “walk,” and I was scared of finding myself back
there. The rule was “No Thesaurus.com Ever!” The affirmation was “You already know all the words! And if
you don’t, you don’t need them! Just say ‘walked’!”
I absolutely didn’t believe cheerful me to begin with, but after that, I started every day by reading the
list, and I had convinced myself by the end. And it turned out, the “just say ‘walked’” rule, the decision
to just say what happens in very plain language instead of trying to sound all novel-y and impressive, is
what gives Sorrow and Bliss its quite specific tone.
TV/film rights have been sold for Sorrow and Bliss. If you had to put together a casting
short list, who would be on it?
A lot of writers, or maybe most writers, can picture their characters exactly. But I have strangely
little visual imagination. I think only in words and of my characters as what they say, which is why there
is almost no physical description in the book, and why I wouldn’t have been able to write a short list—except I
just watched Vanessa Kirby in Pieces of a Woman and the first second I was like, Oh my goodness,
it is Martha!—the main character in Sorrow and Bliss.
Now, since the rights sale was announced, there has been a lot of fantasy-casting going on with my
friends via text, and there’s 100 percent consensus on Helena Bonham Carter as Martha’s mother, Fiona Shaw
as her aunt, and even if I have to reengineer the entire novel, we will find a part for Benedict
Cumberbatch, and we will ask to loiter on set on the days he is in.
Coffee order? And cocktail order?
Two piccolos. The stupidest coffee order in the world. Why not just one regular-size coffee instead of
two tiny ones, I don’t know.
And margarita. Ideally two as well.
Last book you loved? Book you’re looking forward to reading next?
Although fiction is my regular oeuvre, I’ve been on a history jag since last year, especially Tudor
history. So Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser. Aside from it being an amazing work of
scholarship that reads like a novel, I found out she was in her early forties when she was writing it and
had just had her fifth baby, literally typing and jiggling the handle of the stroller at the same time, so
now I can never say I’m a little bit busy for writing.
And I just bought The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter, who is one of my three-way split of
favorite writers, with Jenny Offill and Barbara Trapido. But it’s so beautiful and slim, I can’t bear to
start it because then it will be over—I will have read it for the first time.
