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Alice Robinson: grief, parenting and an uncertain future | Author interview
95 Plays3 months ago
Author Alice Robinson joins Elise and Priscilla for an insightful interview about her new release, If You Go. The novel follows protagonist Esther, who must piece together a timeline between her past and the highly confusing present. We chat about a non-linear experience of grief, the relationship between feminism and motherhood, and speculate about the future.
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Transcript
Acknowledgment of Country
00:00:00
Speaker
We are recording this podcast on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We wish to pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and extend our respects to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people who may be listening.
Introduction to 'Novel Feelings' and Upcoming Interview
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Novel Feelings, where two psychologists take a deep dive into your favourite books. I'm Priscilla. And I'm Elise. Today we have an author interview with Alice Robinson. We'll be talking about her new book, If You Go.
Reflecting on Podcast's Future and Audience Engagement
00:00:30
Speaker
More about that in a sec. We've been doing a lot of thinking and planning here at the HQ, which is not really, you know, it's not a literal HQ, but just in our brains. What do you mean we don't have a big fancy studio with all of our staff and social media managers and audio engineers and so on? No, novel feelings HQ is us. It's just us. Yes.
00:00:51
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um But yeah, essentially, ah we are in a big like reflective thinking period at the moment. And we're kind of trying to gauge interest from our audience, from you guys about whether we should do a season four of book reviews or not. um If we do season four, we definitely want to make it like a book club again. So announcing books in advance, giving everyone a couple of months to read along, having discussion questions. spoilers and non-spoiler sections for those that haven't read the book yet, all all the same kinds of things we did in season three. But we are really interested in having more community engagement and having like a discussion group, you know, whatever that format might look like. We're also thinking about things like subscription tiers and if that might be a viable option for us, just to try to cover some of the base costs involved in running a podcast like
Encouraging Constructive Audience Feedback
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this.
00:01:41
Speaker
So at the moment, we're really just trying to collect feedback and thoughts from our audience. Yeah, there's nothing worse than thinking you're you're doing great work, but you're actually you're shout shouting into the void. So it would be good to just hear from you guys about what you've enjoyed or what could be better, what we could do differently next time. Absolutely. And um at this stage, there's no wrong way to provide feedback. So but we've got lots of options for doing that. So you can comment on our Instagram posts or
Interview with Alice Robinson: Themes in 'If You Go'
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Speaker
send us a direct message on Instagram. You can comment on our latest blog post. We do have a blog post, which is all about the sort of history of novel feelings and our thoughts about the future. So leave us a comment there. We also have the feedback.
00:02:22
Speaker
survey, which is completely anonymous, no sign up required. So go to novelfeelings.com slash feedback if you prefer to give us your thoughts that way. um I don't know, there's just, you know, we have an email address, you can email us if you want to. Maybe if you have like really negative feedback, don't put a review on Apple podcasts, that would be preferable to not get feedback about improving that way. But if you love us, please do, please do. But yeah, we we just want to know your thoughts. So if you have burning ideas, um now is the time to let us know. So please do that. And that will directly inform our decisions about what we do in 2025.
00:03:00
Speaker
to what we're here for today. um So today we have an interview with Alice Robinson, author of If You Go, which is a speculative fiction party. I'd say speculative fiction, which was just released in June 2024. Alice Robinson is the author of two previous novels, Anchor Point and The Glad Shout. In 2012, Alice earned a PhD by research and creative writing at Victoria University for which she was awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Peak Award. Alice lives in Melbourne with her kids and works at Federation University and RMIT.
00:03:36
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Here's the synopsis for If You Go. When Esther wakes with a breathing tube down her throat, she has no idea where she is or how she got there. In terrible physical condition Esther is tended to by Grace, the only other person in the building. In the half-consciousness of her recovery, Esther is desperate to get back to her young kids and grapples with the events of her life as they come flooding back. A childhood spent between warring parents, the demise of her marriage, the struggles she faced when her children were born.
00:04:10
Speaker
Suspicious of grace, Esther takes drastic action to escape. But there are certain facts about the reality of her situation, her place in time, her history, and her life that she will need to uncover first. Thank you to Affirm Press for linking us together. And before we get started with our interview, our usual disclaimers. So of course we're trained psychologists to please don't take this as therapeutic advice, consult a professional for more specific and tailored advice. And our interview
Balancing Present and Past in Storytelling
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is split into two sections, non-spoilers first, followed by spoilers. For some content notes today, we are talking about topics such as grief, motherhood and intergenerational trauma, as well as some suicidal themes.
00:04:56
Speaker
All right, let's get started on our interview with Alice Robinson. Welcome, Alice, to Knuckle Feelings. We're so happy to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. It's so lovely. Yeah, and congratulations on the publication of If You Go in June. ah This is your third book. Are there certain certain teams that you keep going back to or getting du drawn into in your writing? Oh, definitely. um So the three books in ah in my mind, they're actually kind of an informal trilogy, although that's, you know, they're completely different in their plots and narratives and characters, but they're thematically very connected.
00:05:36
Speaker
And I've always kind of known that. I knew that from the first book that for some reason I had a sense that there would be three. And the thing that kind of differentiates them apart from their particular stories is that Anchor Point, the first novel, ended in about 2018, which was a little bit speculative at the time because it was published in 2015. and The Glad Shouts may be set in my mind, perhaps a 50 years on into the future. And if you go without giving away too many spoilers, it deals with a greater span of time. So they're kind of leaping a forward forward speculatively wow
Exploring Grief and Motherhood in the Novel
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Speaker
in terms of the kind of
00:06:12
Speaker
the thematic concerns they all deal with the same kind of question which is can we be the architects of our own destiny or to what extent can humans chart the course of their lives and to what extent are we also subject to grand narratives like intergenerational trauma which I'm sure we'll all talk about or and forces like climate change or environmental destruction that are sort of coming into impose upon the characters' individual lives and while they themselves are trying to make sets of decisions for themselves. So those two things are in kind of conflict in each of the books around, yeah, what the character's agency and these outside forces that are controlling them to some extent. And is that a conscious choice for you? Did you sort of go out planning, you know,
00:07:02
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this loose trilogy and these interwoven themes or is that just how things naturally unfolded? Unfortunately, it's how they naturally unfolded. And I only say unfortunately, because I think it speaks to it's a bit revealing. Like if you could intellectualize those themes, I think I'm going to write three books that deal with these themes. There's sort of something very um clinical about that. And the truth is that I wrote those books because of something about who I am as a person. I think, you know, those are the concerns that interest me. And so you feel that you've really you've you've told a secret or something about yourself when you've published these three works that are all the same. sort of similar. Yeah, I love this idea that Jonathan Franzen has of hot material. I'm sure it's been attributed to Franzen and he sort of has this idea that every writer has hot material and that's the thing that they'll keep returning to in spite of themselves because of who they are, because of their unique selves and psychologies And so I guess mine is those themes that I talked about in each book, there's, you know, difficult or challenging or interesting to me, relationships between mothers and children. And so those are some of the, you know, my hot material. And I'm sure that much of that hot material is going to be covered as we progress with this interview. um But thinking about ah your most recent publication, of course,
Feminism and Societal Expectations in 'If You Go'
00:08:20
Speaker
If You Go, which is the focus of today. So that novel is told in both
00:08:24
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flashbacks and present day scenes. um Present day Esther is very ah confused and fearful, struggling to understand her surroundings. So how did you balance the present and the past in this book, um you know, writing scenes where we've got this very confused protagonist and flushing back and so on, um particularly in the first half of the book before we sort of as an audience learn what is actually happening and what gaps, you know, filling those gaps in their timeline. The book started out being a very realist novel. So at first, well, the parts that came first were the parts about Esther's sort of formative life, her life with her children, her life in the marriage and with her parents. So the novel covers um Esther's life, as you would know, from you know her earliest childhood to her adulthood um in one kind of timeline. And as you're implying, you know there's another kind of facet, a speculative facet to the novel.
00:09:20
Speaker
um and those speculative elements are kind of interspersed with or framing the memories of her life, if you like. And so I felt actually that I could have just written and written about Esther's everyday life because the speculative parts are much harder to write. Interesting, yeah. Yeah, I think because you're using, you're having to really bring to the forefront and in and harness and master your full imagination to and kind to make something up that's never existed, like the facility where Esther wakes up. um It just felt like really hard labor, whereas Esther's known life is sort of more like our contemporary life, so it's sort of there was more material to draw in in the world.
Character Dynamics and Intergenerational Trauma
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Fascinating. um And of course, if you go as largely themed around grief, especially Esther's grief for her old life, and what could have been, how did you approach writing about Esther's unique brand of grief compared to how it is normally or usually depicted in literature? I think, you know, this book came out of the pandemic and it came out of a time when in my life where my life had really changed just on the cusp of the pandemic, my you know, my marriage ended as well, and which is also part of Esther's plot point, although our trajectories are quite different in many ways. But that that key detail is, you know, the same for both of us.
00:10:42
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And so there was something about, you know, having a huge shift in my life and then going into the lockdown of the pandemic that I think made my own grief and my own emotional state sort of very resonant in a way that it perhaps wouldn't have been if I just plowed on through my life. But I think we all felt to some extent that the pandemic came along and sent us home to our into into our bedrooms to think about you know what we'd done, everything that had happened. And so I can see in the structure of the novel that in some way I was enacting that idea on the page that Esther's you know sort of
00:11:17
Speaker
been been frozen in time, if you like. and And when she finds herself in that facility, she can, or she's forced to reckon with everything that's predated that moment. And yeah, so I could see that that's how, you know, it came about. I'm not sure about the, whether the the quality of the grief that I'm describing was was something that I kind of intellectualized or perhaps I was just trying to evoke to say something that I knew to be true, the most true thing I could say about that, which is, This kind of, for Esther, there's a real anxiety about separation from the children, from her two children, and a worry, at and at least initially, about where they are. and And I think I really feel that too, this sense that being you know that for children, being separated from a parent is probably the the dominant fear.
00:12:05
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of childhood, or at least probably was for me. and And likewise for a parent to not know where your children is, is sort of like a primary anxiety. So that's where her grief kind of begins. It's sort of a fretting, I think. And then it unfolds as she starts to work out what's really happened to her. That panic sort of evolves into more of a very deep sadness and, yeah, without without spoiling things, of course. um You know, it's a grief for what could have been rather than a grief for you know, what has been lost in more of a typical chronological sense that a lot of us might experience grief. Yes. We had a quote that was highlighted, you know, the poem by Maggie Smith at the beginning of the book, which has the line, if you go, you have to stay gone. How how do you feel that might apply to Esther's story?
00:12:56
Speaker
interesting so Maggie Smith's poem is relating to you know it's describing her divorce I think it's something like um after the divorce I think of something my daughter said about Mars if you know basically it's like if you go you have to stay gone and so there is something about that that what to me Maggie Smith is evoking in that poem is a sense of like, um you know, one one
Speculative Elements and Future Vision
00:13:20
Speaker
door closes behind you and it stays closed as you make decisions in your life. You know, our lives are lived in a linear fashion. We're born, we go through the stages of growth and we die. And as the story disrupts that narrative in some way, she has a chance to not stay gone. um and And so by disrupting that, and the linearity of her life,
00:13:43
Speaker
there's a chance for her to to you know to have a great gift, which is that she she gets more time. It's very hard to talk about with that spoiler. So she gets more time, but in some ways, but I guess the question that I was asking in myself about that and and why that Maggie Smith's poem is sort of resonant about, you know do you have to stay gone? And if you don't, what does that mean? So when I came to the novel, I was thinking, um you know it's sort of like is it worth being anywhere in the world without the people and the places and you know the life that you love most and know most. is it where isma Is our one wild and precious life or our mortality and valuable at any cost or is it only really worth living like that if you've got the people around you? Yeah, it also made me think about motherhood or parenthood in general in that
00:14:39
Speaker
you know, once you've made that choice, you can't exactly go back. It's so true. Yeah. And so I'm thinking about and Esther's mother, for example, it seems like, you know, It's hard to talk about her as well without diving into the details, but it feels like she wanted to be two things that might not in her mind align or can exist together. and But she's made the choice to be a mother and she's trying to do that while also upholding her other values. But yeah, there seems to be a lot of- Well, things don't quite mesh for her, do they? I mean, yeah
00:15:17
Speaker
her views and femin on feminism and motherhood lead to so many difficulties in a relationship with Esther. And as you've mentioned, Alice motherhood is such a strong theme throughout this story. yeah We're both but both feminists, we're both considering parenthood down the track and found this really intriguing. So can you can you comment on why you decided to explore this theme of motherhood? I guess partly because I am a mother and it's interesting to me, you know, that's it sort of a that in our culture, mothers are seen, I think, to be
Complex Character Relationships and Personal History
00:15:50
Speaker
no well we're fairly invisible. if if that If you are visible, then you're sort of being annoying or embarrassing. you know You're sort of stripped of um many of the things that make women have the potential to make women powerful in the culture, like sex appeal, for example, as soon as you have a baby.
00:16:09
Speaker
and but But my lived experience ah is that you know mothers are so brave. There's such a huge amount of courage required to like say goodbye to your partner when they go off to work. For example, if you're in the the stage where you've got really little babies and then face a whole day or 12 hours or whatever it is alone with little kids, there's a sort of a certain kind of tenacity and it required for that and I observed that in in the early stages of my parenthood where I thought these women are really amazing you know they're they're really doing something very complex that the culture really doesn't recognize or value very much
00:16:49
Speaker
And I think in terms of Esther's mother, you know, she was a character that I really enjoyed writing a lot. I found, you know, some people have, some readers have sort of suggested that the book's quite bleak and I can see that, but I, but, but Esther's mother to me was quite funny. You know, she had a lot of great one-liners or, you know. Definitely. I really enjoyed her a lot. She's sort of a little bit of a Jermaine Greer kind of public feminist and with quite a bit of success in her work. And one of the kind of characteristics of Esther's childhood is that her mother leaves to pursue her work, and which we we could see as a kind of an abandonment or a complexity that has a negative impact on Esther. And I think it certainly does. But I also think the mother Vivienne is also
00:17:36
Speaker
She says later, you know, your father was the one with the family house. So she sends Esther to live with the father. And I see that as still an extension of her version of caretaking. She's trying to be a good parent, just that it looks different from the expected route. Yeah, I love that introduction to Phoebe N, where Sarah has that memory of being ah suffocated accidentally while playing. And then she goes to Phoebe N and something about being picked up like she was ah an old coat and kind of just put on her lap. um While Vivian just kept talking to her friends, you know, like that's such a beautiful imagery. yeah
00:18:14
Speaker
Thank you. There's something as you're saying that I'm just thinking for the first time, you know, Esther's childhood
Parental Impact and Family Dynamics
00:18:20
Speaker
with her mother before she goes to live with her father. yeah yeah By virtue of that description is sort of she's very much in an adult world with Vivian as a little kid. She doesn't have the kind of mother who's pandering to her and and putting her at the center of a life. I'm just thinking now, perhaps that's a, you know, actually a great gift for some children, you know, to be absorbed into the adult world. But I know that Esther in the book really longs for the type of mother who would centre her. um Even though, yeah, so it's just interesting. She's sort of, Vivian's very, you know, very much on her own path. She's not going to be standing around making jam sandwiches after school or anything.
00:19:01
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that certainly, you know, a lot of mothers are a combination of both where they can, that they don't pander to their children, but they can also recognize the distress that their child might be feeling in any moment and address that. But I think it's that it feels to me, and I might be wrong because you're the writer, so you can tell me, but that scene feels like maybe Vivian wasn't quite reaching that balance in that moment, or at least in Esther's perspective anyway. And that becomes, To Vivian it was probably not a significant moment, but to Esther that was quite a defining memory.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right. i think So there was a lot of material to from Esther's Life to choose from for the book. I had probably had another 80,000 words or so um of scenes from Esther's Life that never made it. you know The balance was kind of off with the speculative and realism. As I say, I felt I could keep writing those scenes forever. So in the end, you're trying to pick out the moments that seem that maybe tell the story of Esther's Life that are not repetitive so that we don't need lots and lots from every part of her life. And yeah, that formative memory at the moment that predates Esther's mother picking her up like an old coat or putting it down like an old coat where she's being smothered. I remember that from my own childhood. So that's when that really came from my life as a little kid where some kids put a bean bag or some pillows over my face and I was too little to push them off, sense of suffocation.
00:20:29
Speaker
Yeah, and those visceral embodied memories sort of do, you do hold on to them all your life. It must be such a challenge to pick out those resonant moments from your writing when you've got so much, so much content to choose from. And it ah it sounds like so much of it had that personal touch as well. What was that process like of that editing down and the tough decisions to decide what to include in the book? Part of it was about ensuring to the best of my ability that the characters felt balanced, so I didn't want there to be a sense ah that Vivian or but as does Esther herself or her father or any of the characters or Jean-Paul, her ex-husband, that any of them were the bad guy in the story. I wanted to try and give a kind of a balanced
00:21:16
Speaker
perception of all of them. So that was part of my thinking into picking and choosing so that there was a kind of, we got different visions or different views of these different people, but also part of it was sort of about trying to tell the story without having, you know, being too heavy handed. So eliciting, you know, that some light moments as well, because the moments in the bunker are are a little bit fraught for Esther. I'm calling it a bunker. I think I ate in the book. I call it a facility. The moments that we remember, and I'm sure that you both, because of the nature of your work, understand this better than me,
00:21:53
Speaker
I reckon the moments that we remember from our histories ah are often moments where something went wrong, you know, where we felt overlooked or ah wounded in some way or someone said the wrong thing that, you know, you take it to heart and sort of shocks you in some way, it sticks in your mind. So that posed a little bit of a structural problem for the book in that um the parts in the facility were going to be difficult for Esther and then I was probably going to be telling you know if I'm really picking out the parts of her life that resonate with her they're going to be also the difficult moments and so um trying to find some of those moments where they're also funny interjections there's a there's a lovely moment that where one of the children she observes what her children speaking and they say one of them says to the other
00:22:38
Speaker
don't worry moths are just the bad guys of butterflies and you know taking lovely moments like that just to kind of lift the the grimness where was important i think i think i'm i really want to dive into some spoilers to be honest so i think we might come to the end of our our non-spoiler section now but we do want to ask one final question just in case anybody's about to turn off and go and read the book and then come back but uh A question that we ask everybody who we interview, which is, do you have any book or author recommendations that you'd like to share with our listeners, aside from your own, your work, of course.
00:23:14
Speaker
I would love to share a book that I i think consider one of the most beautiful novels, which is
Reflections on Hope and Legacy
00:23:20
Speaker
The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels. It's a book I return to very often. Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet, but she's written three novels now. Each one takes about 10 or 12 years for her to write, which I think speaks to the beauty of their construction and their language. And and The Winter Vault was the second novel. i I just think it's so beautiful. And she does things with language because of her poet poetry. that is that's really remarkable. So that's a book that I would recommend and that also deals with these you know intergenerational concepts with time, with inheritances and so on. And I also just, I mean, I don't think this book needs any extra readers because it's been so popular, but I really did really enjoy Miranda July's new book all fours, which is, you know, so in a way, I feel like If You Go is a little bit of like ah a grief-soaked cousin of that book because it's sort of dealing with the same issues, but it's very funny. So I would really recommend that book as well. Brilliant. Wonderful. All right. Well, I think that's the end of our non-spoiler section. If you haven't read the book yet, um please go ahead and read the book and then come back.
00:24:29
Speaker
All right, let's dive into our spoilers um as I feel like we've been dancing around some of these naturally.
00:24:38
Speaker
Let's start with ah some speculation or some of the speculative elements, of course, of if you go. So as the novel progresses, the audience is able to fill in the gaps around the time jump, Esther's cryogenic car private realize i don't know how to say that would aogenic freezing yep um And why she awoke 100 years later.
Concluding the Interview and Book Recommendations
00:25:00
Speaker
Can you talk us through your vision for what the world looks like in 100 years time and how much of this was. prediction versus a more sort of dystopian view of the future. Interesting. i I didn't know anything about the world and actually I tried to avoid, I think, and ever evoking the outside world because it's more work. So you've got enough on your plate when you're trying to write a novel. At first, actually, so
00:25:26
Speaker
Backing up, i the first thing I knew about what had happened to Esther, you know, of of course I was interested in cryogenic freezing and I had a vision or I had the kind of the scene in mind where she wakes up and that was the limit of my kind of understanding and I had to kind of build it from there. But I didn't even, so she's when she wakes up, she's in the facility with one other person, an older woman called Grace, who's about, you know, the age her grandmother might be, she's about 70 or so, maybe more like her mother. um
00:25:57
Speaker
So I originally thought that maybe even Grace wouldn't be part of the the facility or I was thinking like it would be better if it would be less work if Esther was alone but then I i thought I were kind of worked out. I tried to write those things so maybe she's just in the facility and it can talk to her or um But you think this is going to be like that to Tom Hanks film with the volleyball, you know, she'll just be talking to herself the whole time. You think, okay, I'll have to put another character in there. But I didn't know the nature of their relationship, which is one of the big reveals in the book. So that only came about because first the character was there and then they're interacting and then over a number of months or years, I suddenly think, what is their relationship? and it
00:26:40
Speaker
you know so there's revelations that are occurring for the writer in that sense as you go along as well and certainly that's the case for the outside world eventually they you know i had to have them going outside it felt like the right choice and then i had to invent that future i was a little bit reluctant to, I'd written a lot about speculative futures in the previous book in the GLAAD chart, which is about a storm destroying Melbourne. So, you know, I didn't really have another completely invented future to draw on, but my work for the last 10 years has been about climate change. So in terms, going back to your original question of is it invention or is it dystopia, is it prediction?
00:27:26
Speaker
I think it's not that hard to trace things forward, given this
Closing Remarks and Call for Feedback
00:27:30
Speaker
way, the information that we have. And of course, the kind of futures that I've evoked in my work, ah futures that all of us hope never come to pass. None of us want the those outcomes. But the people do often say that they feel prescient. And I think that's because it doesn't take a great leap of imagination to conjure something like that in the in in an imaginary given the state of the world now. So it's probably a little bit of both. Well, I.
00:27:58
Speaker
have this tendency to watch a lot of like American crime murders, you know, like Bones and Castle and things like cryogenics is not surprising because all these shows need to have at least one episode ah about someone getting frozen. So yeah, see all my knowledge of cryogenics is from Futurama, which is not exactly accurate in any sense. So this is perhaps a more ah thought provoking edition of Such a Future. yeah so you know What sort of research was involved for you regarding the the technology of cryogenics?
00:28:30
Speaker
with There is, weirdly, at the time I was writing the book, the first facility for cryogenics was being built and has now opened. It opened like almost at the same time as the book was published. And I believe someone's already been frozen. It's in Holbrook. um And the thing that interested me about that, so I had a kind of decision to make as I was writing the book and I knew this place was being built about whether I would go and have a look. And when I looked at it online, it was one thing that I loved about it was that it just looks like a big shed. It doesn't look all fancy and schmick or like techy. It looks like it's a shed on someone's farm and that really delighted me. i like So my facility is also quite daggy. It's not, you know, not very slick either.
00:29:13
Speaker
But I decided not to go in because I thought, ah you know, I always come back to this idea of, you know, I'm a fiction writer, like I can make up whatever I like. So I did do some research about how cryogenics really works and what types of people usually go for it and how they preserve the bodies and so on. And then I just gave myself license to deviate from that and invent my own technology and my own processes that fit with my book. Because it's one of the great perks of the job. Yeah, absolutely. You're not writing a non-fiction textbook about Liz, are you? it's it's all It's more in the biggest service of the human story that you're telling, right? It doesn't have to be accurate all the time.
00:29:59
Speaker
No, no. And I'm sure that theyre there will be real diehard sci-fi fans or so indeed scientists who are saying, you you know, who might read the book and think that can never happen. And that it only has to have the like enough logic within the structure of the not the narrative for a reader to go with you, I think. I'm not expecting anyone to take these ah as blueprints for their own facility. So we would love to chat about Esther's relationship with hit her ex-husband at this stage, John Paul. Can you reflect on their relationship and what contributed to its breakdown?
00:30:32
Speaker
Yeah, I am confused about that myself. And in a way, part of the the writing of the book was to work this out. What went wrong between these two people? So there's you know we can surmise a few i you know potential reasons. One of the reasons that I think is sort of implicitly in the book is related to this kind of sense of intergenerational marriage breakdown. So Esther's parents were were together and then they separated and her father repartened so she had an experience of this kind of family dynamic herself and then she's you know both sort of there's a sense of rightness about it I think almost when it happens to her and also a sense of sort of horror
00:31:16
Speaker
that it's happened to her and that she's enacting the same fate on her own children. And there's a line where one of the children says something like, just about everyone gets divorced after a while. You know, so this sort of, Esther feels this great sort of sense of grief that she's provided an intergenerational precedent for this type of marriage breakdown. Her children now accept there's normal. Is this fate? Yeah. Is this inevitable? Yeah, it's going to happen. It's coming for you. So that's sort of one, perhaps one of the reasons we could draw on. I think something became very clear to me in the book.
00:31:55
Speaker
When I read, it's ah sort of a weird thing to say, but ah but probably four years into the writing of the book, I picked up um and this really new biography of Sylvia Plath and I loved it. It's really, see it's over a thousand pages long and I read the whole thing and I really loved it. And I just suddenly but felt very uncanny because Plath's story is very similar to Esther's in many of the plot points. And you know is um Ted Hughes and Plath bought a big house in the country, which Esther and Jean-Paul also do. um They moved out there and had two kids in quick succession. Things get difficult. They separate and come back to their apartments in the city, which is basically the same
00:32:36
Speaker
trajectory for Esther and John Paul. So that gave me a lot of comfort, only in the sense that I'm thinking, you know, I'm working with this narrative and thinking, what happened, what went wrong between these people? And then a real example of this turns up in Plath's life. So it just gave me a sense of, ah, there's something about that trajectory but that's that's difficult and if there's a real world template for it then it sort of gave me the confidence to to persevere with it for Esther in spite of not you know not really having that answer say it's not an intellectual thing it was a sort of working by feel. I think Jean-Paul is very
00:33:16
Speaker
like a very kind man and he's a good father he's sort of lovely and but there's something in Esther and that's the thing that I'm not sure about that makes sort of being in the world and loving and assuming the roles that she thinks she should take on um complex you know she's always sort of uncomfortable in all the situations it seems to me and she also harbors this part of the complexity between her and Jean-Paul is the the complexity around her ambition which is to be a poet even though in her lifetime she's getting no joy there at all but she's always wanting to kind of pursue it and feels hamstrung so the thing I'll say about that is that she set up a life with the little kids in the country in Jean-Paul with Jean-Paul
00:34:01
Speaker
that's very domestic. It's almost a kind of, in my mind, a kind of a real pushback against the feminism of her mother. You know, she's determined to do the right thing, to have the picket fence and the canara and you're probably making her own bread, or that's how I imagined that part of her life. But she, she can't maintain it, you know, because it's not sort of really her real essence. She really wants to be an artist. Not getting that full fulfilment out of it that perhaps she had expected as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, our first glimpse of their dynamic or what you're talking about I feel is that scene of Esther staying up with, I think it was Claire, their newborn, and John Paul was asleep with earplugs on. And I was like, oh, but also Esther was saying but that she was encouraging that at the same time. And so
00:34:52
Speaker
It's like she was playing into that the gender roles that were happening in their marriage, rather than having a proper conversation with John Paul about how they make her feel. Yeah, so that um conflict that you were talking about really came through, I think, in the book. I'm so glad to hear that I really didn't want there to be a narrative where it was like, things went wrong because of gender, or things are wrong because of John Paul. You know, and that part of that insight was only really possible in a very clear way for me, because the book took five years to write. So you're thinking, it would be very easy to say this is a story about a man and a woman where things went wrong because of who they were in that respect.
00:35:34
Speaker
and And actually what I came to feel more and more as I wrote was they they went wrong, not because of who Jean-Paul was or how they were even in a dynamic together, but really because of something innate in Esther. Like yeah the earplugs is such a a small but so poignant evocation of that idea. Absolutely. And I think and another one That was interesting, that speaks to that in her conflict for Esther, probably it's towards the end where she said something about how divorce seems like the feminist thing to do, that she was taking charge of her life, but she was unhappy, and clearly you know there was the financial aspect of it as well, and she wasn't fully happy on her own either.
00:36:17
Speaker
Yeah, it took herself with her, where wherever she went, yeah you know that with that sort of quintessential horror. Yeah, I think she you know, she strives, that's for sure, you know, she's trying to first setting up this very, you know, nuclear family kind of ideal in the country and then taking charge of things as you say to to go off on her own but at each stage she's sort of yeah she's a bit naive or a little limited in her capacity in some way I think so she's floundering and perhaps like her mother that you know she would have been better off just doing something else doing her own work or
00:36:58
Speaker
I'm not sure I'm going to therapy. Well, I don't know if yeah being married to a psychiatrist might put you on therapy. I do. think Oh, one moment that definitely so stood out to me was i I cannot I didn't write down this quote, so I'm going to butcher it. Apologies. But the moment where Jean Paul says something to her along the lines of, you know, I work long hours because I'm literally saving lives. And I could see why Esther might develop some negative comparisons to him and, you know, feeling, you know, we've already got a sense of her not having that fulfillment or not having that deep happiness that, you know, perhaps would be desirable and seeing, you know, maybe feeling inferior to John Paul at times. And I don't know, it just it sort of adds to this complex picture of why, you know, perhaps there was something not meshing in their relationship that was not so healthy in the long term.
00:37:50
Speaker
He's sort of living out his, yeah he's got this very meaningful work, but it also takes him out of the family, which I think is really hard. Yeah. Just imagining saying to my husband, I work long hours because I'm saving a life. yeah ah You can save that one up and roll it out when as needed. yeah ah Well, it ah this is, of course, building into the themes of um motherhood and this almost intergenerational trauma aspect of the work too. So yeah we touched in the non-spoiler section on Esther and Vivienne's relationship. um But there seems to be this this pattern over time of this intergenerational trauma that their mothers are experiencing across the three generations. so
00:38:35
Speaker
from Vivian's relationship with her own mother to Esther and Claire's, you can sort of see these relationship challenges playing out over time. In your view, how did Esther's relationship with her mother inform her own parenting and perhaps her perspective around motherhood? Hmm, I think she tries very hard to be a very different type of mother to the mother that she received. And she did have other templates in her father and stepmother as well who were not no complete, you know, not binary with Vivienne, they have their own complexities as well.
00:39:09
Speaker
I think Esther comes to kind as sort of an insight about her mother. There's a kind of a revelation of the the type of mother that Vivian had in Lorna, her name is, who had her own traumas that were passed down or that were enacted upon Vivian. And that that makes sense to Esther. And that's a kind of one of the keys of the story for Esther's kind of reckoning, I guess, that she answer you know gains insight into why her mother is the way that she is. And in terms of how she then parents, I think she holds herself to very high to a high standard. but But one of the kind of interesting things about the to me about the way that the novel unfolds is that we have these sort of three generations. We've got Lorna, Vivian and then Esther. And then we have um
00:39:59
Speaker
Claire and Grace who follow on, if that's not too spoilery. say i have we're full in spoilers now yeah So we learn that Grace is Esther's granddaughter is the kind of the punchline there um and that she's been hanging around the facility for many decades to wait for Esther's moment to wake up. And so I really thought it was important for Esther to be in the center, I guess, of this kind of and chain of women so that it wasn't a story about sort of mother blame. It wasn't a story where the blame all flowed backwards through the generations. But we also, you know, there is perhaps a bit of that with some understanding, as I've said, but it also but can flow forward because we get to see the outcome of through grace of Esther's own parenting. And, you know, it's not
00:40:49
Speaker
You know, Grace doesn't have a great time with Esther's child, Claire. And so one of the questions I was asking myself as I was writing in that capacity is, what would you say to the person who raised the person who messed you up as a kid? So if you had a chance you know most of us don't reach adulthood with grandparents so you never have a chance to have a big reckoning with your grandmother about the way that she raised your mother for example usually and it's sort of too late by the time you might have these thoughts like what would I say so that was sort of one of the delights of the time frame in this novel that the granddaughter and the mother and the grandmother
00:41:29
Speaker
ah who who are sort of their age as a skewed according to normal linearity, that they can have that reckoning together. Yeah, it makes me think of that. I can't remember the exact poem, but about how parenting always means messing your child up and you don't really have a choice in the matter, it will just happen. And the only way to not do it is to opt out of parenting. Yeah, I think you're talking about Philip Blacken's wonderful poem about that. Yeah, yeah probably. That's correct. yeah um But I think you know you mentioned earlier that you don't want anyone to be a bad guy. And I think Vivienne's complexity um becomes more and more clear as we go on in the story. And this this quote from Esther's dad was particularly striking to me. ah Your mother's politics made it difficult for her to love me. It was like every time I left dishes in the sink or was laid home from work or had dry washing on the line,
00:42:28
Speaker
I was forcing her to reconsider hundreds and thousands of years of women's ah oppression. She acted like it was her civic duty to leave me. And this was followed by Esther thinking, you know, what about me? So I thought that was really, it was a beautiful line. And it made me think about, you know, all these conversations, um women who have male partners probably have about mental load. Like, yeah. yeah Thank you. I'm thinking as we're talking about this as well about this idea I had as well as I was writing related to it's sort of it's a fear and I think it's sort of evoked in the book that we can step very carefully as parents to try and do our best and and most of doing our best relates to trying and to protect the children and raise them to the best of our ability so they can go on and have happy lives.
00:43:20
Speaker
But in reality, and and again, I think you probably both know lots about this from your work. I think probably often it's us, the parents, who usher in the greatest wounds of for the children. It's not the outside world at all. And and in a way, you're kind of lucky, I guess, if that's the case, because it means no other external disasters have occurred in the life. But that's such a kind of a complex thing to kind of own as a parent. Go to all these extreme lengths and in the end it will be me. i'm you Harking back to what you were talking about earlier about how these yeah we have these moments of deep clarity or you know very strong memories about our childhoods.
00:44:02
Speaker
often those negative ones which feel so formative to us that a parent might not even realise that that was you know something that you you might have held on to over the years or shaped part of you or contributed towards a belief you might have about yourself or the world. So it's it's you know we all do our best and we just cannot avoid these moments happening, unfortunately. um and It's just such a complex way to to look at how we shape the next generation, of how we shape our children, I think. One nice thing that rose out of the book in that way was that ah a narrator said to me, um I really love the book and it's made me reconsider the like the small moments that I have with my child and that made me think well that's a really positive way of thinking about it. I think if you're aware that you are having an impact and that time only goes in one way in most of our lives and that you know children grow up, then
00:44:53
Speaker
If you could kind of stay centered in the present because of those those factors, it's a lovely way to think about a relationship with a child. Yeah. And I think what you said about how Grace and Esther can have their moment of reckoning together about this intergenerational trauma, for lack of a better word. I think that's lovely because, yes, I think parents always leave some sort of wound or impact on their children. But I guess the the good ones, I suppose, also have that those moments of repair and you know recognition and, I guess, apology as well, if that was needed. And so you're not, you're you know the child not left carrying this wound forever. It does heal over time.
00:45:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's really lovely. And I think that was something that some some readers have suggested that it's, you know, as I said, that there's a bleakness to the book. But to me, it was a hopeful ending, you know, not not without sadness. But I think that between in that reckoning or repair between Grace and Esther, it's sort of repairing many generations in some sense, because Grace stays. Grace stays where where Vivian leaves Esther as a child. Grace stays to Caretake for her in sort of a mother by proxy in that facility and she recognizes that and it's very healing to Esther in that moment. So I think you're right, you know, repairs always possible even a hundred years down the line. Interrupting the passion, I think. Yeah. yeah
00:46:27
Speaker
We're so curious to see what happens after they leave the facility and and so on, but let's not let's not speculate too far into the speculative fiction. It might bring us to our final question, um which is, yeah of course, we have to talk about the concluding chapters of the novel in particular, where the audience learns about Esther's drowning, hurt her death that led to the cryogenic freezing and so on. um We are so curious about your perspective on this and understand if you you know just want to leave this ambiguous. But can you comment on how much of this was accidental versus intentional? Keeping in mind, Esther was not in a great mental space at the time that this happened.
00:47:11
Speaker
I think it's so, you know, again, that ending is I never quite knew it took a long time to work out. How did she get into that facility? That was one of the kind of workloads of writing the book. And it only came right at the end when ah originally, I think I had it that she volunteered to go in. And one of my early readers, a wonderful writer called Tegan Bennett daylight said, I think this woman loves those kids so much, she would never volunteer. ah even fight for financial gain or for any reason to do something, to to be taken away. And I thought, what a perceptive idea. So, and then I, you know, I guess partly a little bit informed by Plath's life, you know, she ended her life. And when her body was found, the manuscript for Ariel, I think was sitting on her desk. So, you know, it's very tragic. I don't see Esther's act, which was, you know, partly self-destructive, but i don't I don't think she intended to die.
00:48:06
Speaker
I don't think it was a suicidal act. um But I definitely think that she was in a very dark place. And and in that moment, she enabled a scenario that that killed her. and But yeah, I'd be interested to know what you both felt about that, whether you thought it was and purposeful. um I didn't think it was purposeful, but it seems like you said self-destructive and she wasn't sort of in the space to realize that she was be taking risk there. yeah Yeah, I was similar. I didn't think of it as a you know ah clearly intentional um decision on her part, but I'm also mindful that when people are
00:48:50
Speaker
at a point where they might be starting to think about ending their life. You know, they might not necessarily have clear thoughts and clear plans about what they're going to do. Sometimes people engage in what's called suicide rehearsal behavior, where they might start acting in ways that are more impulsive or not with as much caution as they might normally do. And depending on the scenario, sometimes that can be fatal. um It just might not have been intentional at the time. So I think perhaps you know my interpretation was that she was in that point where she was not you know, deciding to end her life that was perhaps in this more ambiguous space about wanting to live versus wanting to die. um So, but I wasn't sure that was why I wanted to ask you if you, what your, you know, intention was there. What you've just described is so um articulate and I think it's really, yeah, that would be how I would be positioning it as well. Makes sense. Yeah. What made me sad, I think.
00:49:44
Speaker
when the reveal happened about her last day was the interactions she had with Claire and then reflecting on how great Grace said, whatever happened to you, you really screwed my mom up. And I was like, oh my gosh, I can so see what happened in Claire's mind and then you know afterwards. Yeah. She feels responsible for the mother's death. Yeah. and it sort of passes that on in the generations. I think one of the other redemptive qualities that we haven't mentioned is also, so there's that redemptive element between Grace and Esther, but also the fact, for better or worse, I don't know how much this has surfaced in the book, but the fact that her poetry gets picked up and is clearly and successful in its own right, she didn't get to see that, I think is a sort of, you know, a positive to come from her death.
00:50:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think oh this is not said in the book, but I like the idea of sort of maybe John Paul or her mum picking up that manuscript and thinking this is actually really good and pursuing that publication. yes It's almost like a legacy piece, um you know, the success that she didn't see in her own life, but knowing that um you know, how many of us get to see what impact you had in the years beyond your death. Like it's not, it's not a common thing. my It's impossible really with the current state of the world, but it was nice to see like, oh, okay, well, I did make a difference. um It makes me think almost of, there's an episode of Doctor Who where, a very famous episode where
00:51:13
Speaker
um they take Van Gogh to see the impact he made and and yeah a gallery of of his work and, oh, it made me cry so much when I watched it, seeing him. It's especially true with artists, isn't it, you know, that they're often famously on their lifetimes, so I can imagine the impact of that. the The quote that actually came to my mind is that line from Hamilton about how a legacy is planting a seed in a garden that you will never see. yeah So it's sort of lovely that Esther gets to actually see her legacy, both in the positive one in terms of the poetry, but also Grace.
00:51:50
Speaker
I think we haven't spoken much about Grace, but just ah in the sort of like a little note on her, I took a lot of delight from her too, because although she might say like, you know, I had a hard time with my mum, who's Esther's daughter, I think she's such a robust human in the world, I think instead of jolly and and a duer and you know it's very capable and so I think there's sort of a redemptive quality to her the way that she's forged ahead and she doesn't have the brittleness of Esther at all I don't think she's much more sort of forthright and capable.
00:52:24
Speaker
Yeah and like you have to be I think to live with with bodies for years and years and look after these all these people and and then make that decision in the end that you know you know what they are they were under my care I can do you know I can make the best call for them. In that sense, I often think that Grace has an opportunity there that perhaps Vivian, who really fought against, kind of, or felt constrained by her choices and then chose to leave Esther and so on. And Esther, who kind of tries to do the right thing and then can't, Grace has a much, much more agency. You know, she makes a decision. She does what she thinks is the right thing. And then when it's no longer the right thing, she makes a new choice. And so in that way, I also feel that she has
00:53:09
Speaker
you know is is it ifs If each generation improves on the last, then she's in much better shape, I would say, than the others. On that note, I think we might wrap up our questions for today. Thank you so much, Alice, for joining us and for taking us on this journey through your thought processes behind the books and the the the complex generations that we've got covered in If You Go. um It was absolutely wonderful having you on the show. It was so lovely to talk to you. Thank you both so much.
00:53:40
Speaker
Thank you once again to Alice for that wonderful conversation. Of course, we will put her book and author recommendations up on our website, as well as more information about if you go. And that wraps us up for today. Thank you so much for listening. If you like us, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. As we said at the top of this episode, we'd love your feedback in whatever way that is convenient for you. We can be found on novelfeelings.com or on Instagram, the Storygraph. Thank you so much for listening. All right. Have a great day, everyone. Bye. Bye.