From “The Bride Stripped Bare” To “Notes On Life” – With Nikki Gemmell

Wake up on Saturday and reach for The Australian Weekend Magazine – then flip to Nikki Gemmell’s column. Nikki is famous for her lyrical honesty and for fearlessly saying those things other women think, but dare not say. In France she’s been described as a female Jack Kerouac, in Australia as one of the most original and engaging authors of her generation. Nikki Gemmell is also author of five novels, Shiver, Cleave, Lovesong, The Book of Rapture, The Bride Stripped Bare and its follow-up, With My Body, and two other works of non-fiction: Pleasure: An Almanac for the Heart, Why You Are Australian and most recently Honestly – Notes on Life. In conversation with Alice Grundy, managing editor of Giramondo Publishing and editor-in-chief of Seizure magazine, Nikki Gemmell spoke at The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 12 February 2013 

FROM “THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE” TO “NOTES ON LIFE” – WITH NIKKI GEMMELL

 Alice Grundy: Thank you Gerard and Anne for inviting me to do this in conversation with Nikki, I’m delighted to come along his evening. I thought that we could start with the year that was, in 2012, the year that was in publishing specifically.

Nikki, there’s very little in common with your books and the “Fifty Shades of Grey” book,  but the re-release of The Bride Stripped Bare in 2012 meant that your novel entered the bestseller charts in the UK for the second time in its life. Can you talk a little bit about the popularity of fiction that explores female sexuality?

 Nikki Gemmell: Woah! First of all I would just like to say thanks to Anne and Gerard for inviting me back. It’s always wonderful to be here. Gerard, I hope I haven’t traumatised you too much by asking for an interview tonight.

 Gerard: Well, I got over it.

 Nikki Gemmell: Back to your question Alice, thank you. Last year was a watershed in women’s reading. Yes, The Bride Stripped Bare and the “50 shades” book are very, very different books, with different purposes, from a lot of literature. But it’s really exciting to latch on in a little way to that whole phenomenon. I think it’s a flowering of honesty and truth amongst women. I started to think, “Wow, something seismic is going on here”.

I was listening to conversations at the school gate, which is very much my world now, from women whom you would never expect to have conversations about intimate experience saying, “Oh yeah, I could there. I could do that.” It was like, “Gosh, what’s going on here?”

Women have always very much enjoyed reading those kinds of books if they ever had access to them, but it was always very furtive and very secret. If you were, you know, reading on the tube or the train or the bus you’d be putting a magazine around it or whatever. And now it’s like women are out and proud and kind of owning their sexuality in a really exciting way.

One of the reasons I did request an interview for tonight’s talk is that I’m in the maddest stage of my life at the moment. I’ve got a child who’s just started kindergarten, another child who’s just started high school, a puppy that needs to go to puppy school, two other kids there in the mix, plus I’ve just finished the third in the Bride Stripped Bare trilogy, and also a children’s book that’s coming out this year.

Life for me is completely crazy. I’m basically going from one editor in London with The Bride book and another editor here in Sydney, simultaneously dropping editorial notes on my lap and trying to juggle all of that. It’s been really hard. But now that I’ve finished the concluding book in The Bride Stripped Bare trilogy – called I Take You – and out in the middle of the year, I feel I’m done. I’m done with that. It’s a genre I have loved exploring but I want to go on to something else now. I also feel readers may be done with this whole phenomenon too.

Now I wonder what is next for all of us, now we are embracing the honesty, embracing the truth, the kind of raw and ugly and beautiful and terrifying world of a woman’s secret sexuality. Where does it go to from here? There could be a vast reining back, in some ways. Who knows? The publishing industry certainly doesn’t know, I don’t know. Personally I feel I’ve done all that I possibly can with that world for the moment, and I just need to put it behind me.

But I’m excited by the whole flowering of truth and honesty. Certainly for me, with my non-fiction, my columns, I do find that so many people react to the honesty in them and I don’t want to lose that from my writing in any way. What the Bride taught me when it all came out was how potent the truth is and how connecting. It’s so true that adage “only connect”. If you can do that through honesty, it’s a very powerful tool as a writer.

So that’s what writing this kind of fiction has given me, kind of the flint of truth to connect.

 Alice Grundy: When you talk about connection, I wonder what effect writing a weekly column has had on both your writing but also on the way in which you engage with your readers and your perception of the media landscape as well.

 Nikki Gemmell: It was a big task. The Australian approached me to do it and I had to think about it because I had just had a new baby and my life was crazy. I thought, “Gosh, the discipline of writing 700 words week after week, after week. It’ll be a tough call.”

I’d done it about eight years previously with The Mail on Sunday in London. What I had found then was I was writing those columns like they were a novel. I’d draft and re-draft and I’d spend six-seven days redrafting and redrafting so my whole world was that column.

So when The Australian approached me I said, “I’ll do it on the proviso that I can maintain somehow my fiction writing world”. And I knew that I would just have to be so disciplined to do that and to have a set amount of time and then let it go. And so the past 12-18 months has been a process of distilling and honing the way I work so that I can do it faster now, in fact I can do my column in a day.

And people who know my writing say they can tell the difference, they can tell that I’m getting better at it. Sometimes I think, “Oh okay, wasn’t too good at the start was it?” I don’t say that to them though. But I guess it’s made me more economical as a writer.

I love, love writing the column. I get so many responses. I must admit that one of the most significant columns was one I wrote on Julia Gillard – I was absolutely swamped by responses. Another one I wrote on Tony Abbott saw me swamped, including from the man himself who said, “You must meet me because you got me completely wrong.” So I did and yeah. And one recently that I wrote on female vitriol

 Alice Grundy: Yes, I have some of that here – do you mind if I read it out? One of the paragraphs was:

 Female cruelty. Such a flinched, dark, raging little world. Given spectacular life by the Pandora’s Box of social media, with its Machiavellian delights and delicious anonymity; our brave new world so embracing of sneer, jealousy, abuse. Out spews a new mode of discourse: things that, in the past, women may have thought but never voiced. Civility, for the most part, used to prevent us from spitting such demeaning bile so openly.”

 So, what sort of response did you have to this column?

 Nikki Gemmell: I guess you don’t have the original letters there that were quoted in that column do you.

 Alice Grundy: Not on me

 Nikki Gemmell: No. Basically when I write my column in The Australian there’s an email address on the bottom so anyone can write to me. I just got another one, a shocker, today because I wrote a column last weekend on Sylvia Plath. They’re horrible. These letters do have the ability to nibble away at you and eat away at your confidence and your equilibrium. Usually you can tell in the first couple of words or line what they’re going to be like. They usually don’t say “Dear Nikki” in any way or sign off in any way, it’s just this spewing forth of bile.

But what I decided to do with two of these letters was quote them in the column. Not mentioning the names of course and they’re really, really shocking. I just wanted to explore that underbelly of the female psyche, of things women may think but usually not say, that some now feel they have the power to say in this exhilarating world of social media and anonymity. I could tell they were women from the email addresses. I’m fascinated by that.

I got so many letters from so many women in the workplace who said that they’ve come across similar vitriol, or witnessed it. Or they’re managers and are trying to manage younger women and so on. I also got many letters from bewildered men who work within predominantly al-female environments, men bewildered and befuddled that women do this to each other. And the two biggest culprits in terms of professions were nursing – so many people who work in the nursing profession say this – and teaching.

I was fascinated by all that and I must do a follow up column, perhaps on ways of getting through the reaction and coping with all of this but I’m no expert on it.

 Alice Grundy: I note that the inspiration for your first novel came out of a journalistic assignment that you were on. And you say the way you write your column has changed over time. Do you compartmentalise? Does one inform the other?

 Nikki Gemmell: How do you mean? Fiction and non-fiction?

 Alice: Yes

 Nikk Gemmell: It’s hard when you’re a writer generally. A criticism of my column from some people is that it is too poetic, it’s not journalistic enough. It’s not, kind of, dry enough for them. It’s like we’re used to reading novels but we don’t really want to read that in a newspaper. But for me, I use poetry as a tuning fork. Michael Ondaatje is the most extraordinary poet, and the poetry of his lines bleeds into his fiction. He’s just extraordinary.

And I guess for someone like me, I look at that and think that’s what I want to be. Another one of my favourite writers is Anne Michaels, another Canadian, she’s also a poet who’s a novelist as well. When I write non-fiction, that’s my mark and my standard. I want to write beautiful prose, I want to be uplifted by beautiful prose.

Some of my favourite columns are about basically nothing. One of them was writing about a mulberry tree and just watching the kids in the school yard climb up and eat mulberries. With that sort of column it’s almost like poetry.

I have very little to do with the editors of The Australian, – I only deal with is my wonderful, inspiring editor at the magazine, a woman called Christine Meta. I have no idea what the rest of the newspaper thinks of the whole thing.

Alice Grundy: You were talking about your children. It’s been four years since you wrote Why you are Australianwhich in a way was a letter to your children. Is there anything that you would change that’s come out of your experience in those four years?

 Nikki Gemmell: Why you are Australian was a book I wrote when I’d lived in London for about 15 years and my husband and I had this tussle for many, many years about whether we’d come back or not and raise our kids in Australia. And my husband is an Anglophile and I, for a long time, was an Anglophobe. Embarrassingly, I had the light in my bones and the Southern sky was just singing me home for years and years and years.

I couldn’t get it out of my system. So what I decided to do was just leave the bloke for a term and bring the kids back to Australia and stay near my family – just to be with them, because we have ageing parents.

Crucially, I had two grandmothers then who were nearing 100. One of them is 100 on Thursday and the other one sadly passed away since then. I just wanted to be with them. To just revel in them, because it had been so long and they’d help raise me. I was very close to both of them.

So I brought my kids back, put them in a little public school on the shores of Lake Macquarie for a term. My little Londoners with their Hugh Grant haircuts and their pale, pale skin and they just kind of honeyed up and turned into little Aussies.

So I wrote a book about that. My one regret about that book is that I was so harsh on England. If I was writing it now I’d be less rosy eyed about Australia and more clear-eyed about the country I’m living in. But I think that’s the mark of a writer. We have the observer’s eyes and it’s hard to actually write about a place that you’re immersed in.

I Take You  is a modern day version of Lady Chatterly’s Lover  set in a communal garden in Notting Hill. I lived in Notting Hill for almost 15 years. It basically ends with the London riots of July 2011. I could never write about that world within the thick of living in it. Now that I’m away from it, it came very clearly and very easily – being able to write about that environment.

I’ve never tackled Sydney. I’ve lived in Sydney on and off my whole life but I’ve never been able to write of it. John Mark-Dykes said about New York that it was almost too noisy to write in. I feel like that with Sydney. It’s noisy and it’s clangy and it’s so known. I have family and friends stretching back to primary school, you know, everyone kind of wanting a piece of you and all of that. It’s hard to actually write about such a world. Perhaps if I don’t live in it again I’ll be able to.

 Alice Grundy: Well, on that, do you feel a tug back towards London? Do you think you could live there again?

 Nikki Gemmell: I do! It’s funny, the longer I’m here I do. I guess, perhaps, that’s also the mark of a writer or human nature perhaps that we’re perpetually dissatisfied on some level and think that the grass is always greener.

Now that I’m away from London, I miss so much. That feeling of being immersed in the centre of the world. Just walking down Soho, you feel all of life is around you, that everyone from all over the world is here, in this place, and there’s such a scruffy, big, ragged, dynamic energy to it. It’s incredibly exhilarating.

I also miss my darling London library which is where I wrote several books. It’s this deeply eccentric institution on St James Square, set up by Dickens among others in 1847 as a tool house for writers. It’s run along the lines of an old gentlemen’s club, and it’s a bit hard to get into and very expensive. I couldn’t afford to keep up my membership.

London is an exhilarating place to work and there was a coterie of writers there which was very stimulating. Although, I must admit, after a while it drove me bananas. We’d go for lunch every day and all you’d be talking about were publishers and book deals and agents and film deals. And everyone seemed to be doing so much better than you were. After a while it can completely infect you.

But I do miss that world very much. In fact one of the writers there, John O’Farrell, is about the stand as a Labor MP. I feel now that whole world is expanding and I am so far away from it. Still, I don’t think there’s a better place in the world to raise children than here and that’s the main reason I came back.

Alice Grundy: Overseas your novels have had a great reception, particularly in France. Do you think that is in part a result of your having lived away from Australia as an ex-pat or to do with the nature of the content in your writing?

 Nikki Gemmell: I don’t think it’s got anything to do with being an ex-pat. But some of my favourite writers, beside the Canadians, are French women – Collette particularly whom no one reads very much anymore. Some of her earlier stuff – not so much the fiction but the non-fiction – is so truthful, warm and tender. And also Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. The French were intrigued with me as an Australian writer and adventurer. When I wrote Bride, my French publishers were horrified as they had me selling as the Crocodile Dundee girl. Suddenly they were saying to me, “But we write sex; you’re not meant to be doing that!” So I changed publishers at that point.

I must admit that when Bride came out what I loved was that I was getting letters from all over the world. You know, it’s been translated into about 25 languages. They were universal stories and I felt it was touching on universal themes of womanhood. So it didn’t matter where you were from. Honesty connects.

Alice Grundy: You were saying that you’ve just finished the final in the Bride series. Does that employ the second person as well and do you think that you will move away from that style in the future?

Nikki Gemmell: Do you find it difficult?

Alice Grundy: No, actually, I really like it. But it’s almost impossible to do well.

Nikki Gemmell:  That is such a good question. I had a real tussle with this third one because The Bride Stripped Bare and it’s follow up With My Body were both written in the second person, as in “you did this, you did that, you walked to the shops, you whatever”. I love the intimacy it implies but it also conveys a sense of distance. It’s a rigorous form of writing and very hard to sustain over a long novel because it’s a very intense way of writing. I first chanced upon it when I was writing The Bride Stripped Bare. The voice just didn’t ring true and I tried the first person which then felt too indulgent, with things that were so intimate. And the third person didn’t feel connected enough.

I picked up J McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. He does it beautifully and he was my tuning fork in terms of the voice. Then I did it for With My Body and tried to do it with I Take You and it just didn’t work. Perhaps that was me getting sick of it and some of the reviewers had said “Oh come on we’re over this now. Tick. That’s her thing, second person.” I’d also written a book called The Book of Rapture in between which was also second person. And I was becoming obsessed with that form. But I’m over that now. I’ve written I Take You in the third person.

Alice Grundy: Well, I look forward to reading it. Could you talk a little bit about working on a children’s book?

Nikki Gemmell: It’s hard. It is something that’s been brewing for several years and writing never gets easier. I don’t know if other writers say that. It’s like I’ve never worked out a magic formula for doing it. Early on in my career, people would say to me, what’s the secret? What’s the trick? And I’d say, “Oh god, just write as if you’re dying, it’s a great motivator.”

I found this children’s book one of the hardest things to do. It’s taken me years and years to crack it. I still don’t know if I’ve cracked it. Still, I have a sense of uncertainty about all my writing. I set out with such grand plans of “this is going to be the one and I’m going to crack it this time” and then it’s a gradual process of “oh”. It kind of runs away from me, the whole book and it turns into something else almost of its own accord. That, in a way, is what fuels me. But I must admit as a writer what also fuels me – and I do it with my columns every week – is a violent reaction to the previous work that I’ve done.

So, with my columns if you read them, one after the other they’re very different. One week it will be humour about motherhood.  The one coming out this Saturday is about the quality of openness in your life, just being open to the world. My son was starting high school and there were lots of rumours and flurries about certain teachers and the headmaster. I wanted to shield him from this. I wanted him to go into that world totally open, not hearing the buzz. I just wanted him to make up his own mind and be his own person. That  little thought sparked the whole column about openness.

And then the week after I had filed one on Drones, I thought, “I wonder if Phillip Adams is looking” because it’s his territory and not mine. I don’t know. I find also with my fiction that I love doing something that reacts or bounces off the previous work in some way. I’ve loved disappearing into a world of children’s fiction. My children’s book is also my first historical novel. It’s set in December 1945, in London in Kensington, just after the end of World War II. I had to recreate that whole world of Britain, hauling  itself back on its feet during rationing, rubble everywhere, facades of buildings and struggling to have a proper Christmas – with the world struggling to have a proper Christmas again after, you know, five /six years of not having a proper Christmas. That’s the world of my children’s book. I’’ve loved doing it. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. Have a rest I think.

Alice Grundy: It seems you deserve it. And to finish off, would you like to read from your latest book, a segment you would like to read?

Nikki Gemmell: Do I have time Gerard? Thank you. This is just one aside from the Tony Abbott and the Gillard columns and the female vitriol. And one I wrote about buying a puppy – I happened to mention that I bought the puppy  in a pet shop and it unleashed the forces of hell upon me. I had no idea you’re not meant to buy puppies in pet shops. I do now.

I also wrote a column sparked by a goddaughter. I wanted to write a little letter to her – she’s only very young, a year old now – about being a woman in this world. I received such a huge response that I wrote one about boys as well. And I’ve had so many people come up to me afterwards saying, “We were at a parent-teacher night and the teacher had photocopied the magazine page and given them out to us” or telling me a headmaster at a farewell dinner had read out the whole thing. I thought, wow, that connects”.

I’ve got three sons and I wrote this for my sons as much as anything. It’s so hard to raise boys. They get such a rough trot in so many ways. Here goes:

 I celebrate the young men in my life. Yes they’re regular rough and tumble boys who love their nerf guns and footy, but alongside that stack the dishwasher and cook and have sensitive, questing conversations about relationships, grown-ups, life. That’s what this generation of mothers are teaching their boys, these complex, tender, open and lovely young men who have us roaring with laughter. We can’t wait to see how this generation will grow up, how they’ll treat women, change the world. But we worry for them too. May they never be crushed, by women most of all, those mocking attitudes increasingly on show in blockbusters like “Brave”. So here they are…little lamplights of observation for those beautiful, shining boys in our lives.

May you have soldering fellowship of good,

                   reliable mates.

          Never be afraid to speak out if you’re not happy –

                   real mates will support you.

          Never underestimate the healing power of a “man hug”,

                   there’s no greater bonding signal.

          Keep your head pulled in; tell your friends to pull

                   theirs in too if need be.

          Impulsive behaviour is often not the best;

          thoughtful action gives you leeway to find a better way.

          Slow down. Watch. Think.

          The world, your team, your peers, may still expect

                   a particularly male response –

          if that isn’t right, don’t be that person.

          Have the wisdom to know that strength can come

through tenderness, gentleness,

          and that calm resolve will always beat boorish behaviour.

          Remember, a gentleman always does the kind thing.

          May you never clamp down, shut off, slink away

 into grumpiness.

          We women see some little boys bursting with light

and spark and life,

and then something happens, we’re not quite sure what;

a retreat into sullenness, inarticulateness,

the brightness dampened as life chips away at them.

May you have the gift of a male mentor who’s not your

parent;

 someone who filters advice you’re getting from mates,

tells you what’s what, allows you to be emotionally open,

and who steers you through those days of self doubt

 and indecision;

the awakening, the awe.

          I wish you’d read as much as you play computer games.

          Lift up that beautiful head of yours, gulp the world.

Travel.

          Pick a footy team and stick with it through its tough times

as well as triumphant.

          Seize the joy of a physical sport so you can learn to be as

 tough as nails

on the field as it prepares you for the great journey ahead –

 and teaches you that getting knocked down

is all part of life

and getting up again is the real challenge.

I wish you a sense of self that is comfortable rather than

conformational.

Don’t be afraid of eschewing convention, of embracing

 difference, the ‘other.

Don’t cover your fears with base, herd-like

          behaviour.

Have the courage to be different –

 for you may find that by your actions you lead

by example

 and gives boys around  you someone to follow,

 to look up to.

          Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable.

          It’s a close cousin to honesty and people always respond

                   to the truth.

          Your real self will always know it’s false opposite;

          don’t succumb to it.

          I wish you discipline.

          Self control.

From that comes great achievement.

Perseverance is the key.

I wish you the ability to love and to articulate it.

Be passionate about what you love and who you love.

Take risks. Have fun. Laugh a lot.

Don’t be too serious –

don’t be afraid to sing.

And finally, remember the little boy you once were.

May you never, entirely, grow up.

Never lose that joy that sings through you

as you arc across a creek on a tyre, skateboard down a

          path,

whoosh through the surf on a boogie board.

All the women who cherish you are looking at it –

their hearts in their mouths, well, yes –

but giggling at the sheer lovely crazy life affirming

          beauty of it

and wanting you to retain something of it.

forever.