Transcript
Speaker: We are recording this podcast on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Novel Feelings, where two psychologists take a deep dive into your favorite books.
Speaker: I'm Priscilla and today I'm flying solo as your host, so hopefully nothing breaks today.
Speaker: I'm not alone in this episode though, because today we have an interview with Sarah Sussan, author of Tidelines.
Speaker: Sarah Sasson is an Australian physician writer living on gottical land in Sydney.
Speaker: She completed her studies at University of New South Wales and Sydney University and has spent time living overseas in Chicago, Singapore, Montreal, Hanoi and Oxford.
Speaker: Sarah's poetry, short stories, and non-fiction have been published in Australia, the United Kingdom, and USA.
Speaker: Sarah's debut literary fiction novel, Tidelines, was shortlisted for the Veruna House Publisher Introduction Program and longlisted for the Queensland Writer's Centre Publishable Program.
Speaker: Tidelines is published by Affirm Press in 2024.
Speaker: And let me tell you a little bit about Tidelines.
Speaker: it's sydney in the early two thousands and grubb is spending the summer with her universally adored older brother elijah and his magnetic but troubled best friend zed their days are filled with surfing swimming and hanging out life couldn't be better
Speaker: But years later, Elijah disappears and Grubb's family unravels.
Speaker: At first, Grubb blames Zed.
Speaker: He was the one who derailed Elijah from a bright future in the arts.
Speaker: But as Grubb looks back at those dreamy summer days, the sanctuary of her certainty crumbles.
Speaker: Was Zed really responsible for her brother's disappearance?
Speaker: Was anyone?
Speaker: Tidelines is a tender, coming-of-age novel about growing up in the face of unimaginable loss.
Speaker: It examines the stories we subconsciously write for ourselves and what remains later when we have the courage to tear them apart.
Speaker: Thank you to Affirm Press for linking us together.
Speaker: And before we get started on our interview, here are our usual disclaimers.
Speaker: We are trained psychologists, but this podcast should not be taken as direct therapeutic advice.
Speaker: Please consult a professional for more specific and tailored advice.
Speaker: The first half of this interview is spoiler free, but the second half contains some spoilers for tidelines as we dig into the mental health content and what happens in the second half of the book.
Speaker: Here are some content notes.
Speaker: Today we are talking about topics such as grief and loss, addiction and substance use, burnout and trauma.
Speaker: And now let's get started with our interview with Sarah Sasson.
Speaker: Welcome, Sarah.
Speaker: Thank you again for taking the time to do this interview with me.
Speaker: Congratulations on the release of your debut novel, Tidelines.
Speaker: That's really exciting.
Speaker: How has it all been?
Speaker: Thanks, Riscilla.
Speaker: Yeah, really great to be here.
Speaker: Thanks for having me on the podcast.
Speaker: Yeah, it's been a big week.
Speaker: The book came out on Tuesday.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's been really exciting to see the novel start appearing on shelves in local bookstores and, you know, friends messaging me with pictures of it.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's been, feels like the end of a very long road and the start of another.
Speaker: That would be, I can imagine, quite a mixed bag of relief, but also anticipation about seeing what people's reactions would be to the book.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So yeah, this first, the first few days, everyone's buying it and then you're sort of sitting at home, drumming your fingers, waiting for people to sort of finish reading it.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Wonderful.
Speaker: So your biography states that in addition to being a writer, you work as a clinician and a scientist.
Speaker: How do you balance it all?
Speaker: Not just in terms of the time demands, but also the mental demands of your jobs.
Speaker: It's a good question.
Speaker: I guess some days better than others, but I always had really broad interests.
Speaker: So in high school, my favorite subjects were English and biology.
Speaker: And I didn't have like really definitive career pathway, but I feel like
Speaker: the whole time I've been trying to balance sort of the humanities with my more sort of analytical quantitative side.
Speaker: So, yeah, at the moment I'm just very interested in, you know, medicine obviously and science but also writing.
Speaker: Yeah, so my week is really split between a job at a public hospital, a large public hospital in Sydney and a university where I do medical research.
Speaker: Yeah, really my writing has happened in
Speaker: you know, in the evenings when my children are asleep and on the weekends.
Speaker: And yeah, every day is a little bit different.
Speaker: Yeah, I actually find that really rewarding.
Speaker: Yeah, wonderful.
Speaker: That's totally impressive.
Speaker: I'm just, I'm always impressed by people who can balance a full-time job and writing as well.
Speaker: I used to want to be a writer and then a full-time job happens.
Speaker: I haven't gotten around to it.
Speaker: Yeah, I would also say it took me a very long time to write the book.
Speaker: And yeah, I have a lot of these conversations now with people who want to write.
Speaker: But I also I did very much chip away at the early drafts of Tidelines over many years.
Speaker: So I would also say you don't have to pull out a novel in a year.
Speaker: But yeah, I did chip away at those first drafts over the
Speaker: many years just a little bit at a time and you know and there's there's many winding roads to putting a book out so it can be very slow work but I think yeah equally is rewarding yeah great speaking of balancing humanities with the science side of things in a previous interview you said that medicine and literature are both ultimately concerned with the human condition would you mind speaking more on this
Speaker: So I guess long before I became a doctor, which I became a doctor sort of in my late 20s, I would consider myself, you know, a reader and a writer long before that.
Speaker: So I always just, I always had my nose in a book and I always wrote, you know, a lot largely for myself to sort of make sense of the world.
Speaker: So I think by the time I came to study medicine, I
Speaker: Those parts of myself were very developed.
Speaker: And I remember when I found out I got into the graduate medicine degree, one of the first things I did was sort of I sought out medical humanities literature and other books about caregiving and the patient-doctor relationship.
Speaker: That's the way I went into medicine, sort of with a strong grounding in those sort of
Speaker: humanistic elements.
Speaker: But as a physician, yeah, that's very much a part of my work is, you know, face to face with patients.
Speaker: And, you know, in the first step of being with a patient is really taking history and talking to them, you know, that's a very humanistic kind of process.
Speaker: So for me, yeah, there are common threads there.
Speaker: You know, I'm very interested in
Speaker: you know, people and their stories.
Speaker: And, you know, as I often say, medicine is full of stories.
Speaker: And it's very, it's also because when you start as a junior doctor, you work very long shifts and you come home and then you turn on the TV and it's actually full of medical dramas.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That shows that popular culture fascination with the medical world is really because it's full of interesting stories and, you know, the human condition and conflict and drama and, you know, that's all very true to life.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: That is how I imagine Grey's Anatomy has reached 13 seasons or something like that now.
Speaker: How do you think writing has influenced your work as a physician?
Speaker: Yeah, I'm not so, apart from that, it's just sort of I definitely don't approach medicine as a hard science alone.
Speaker: I think there's just those humanistic qualities.
Speaker: I think the other commonality is really empathy.
Speaker: So I think doctors and writers share often people with a great capacity to empathise with other people, I think, to write.
Speaker: a novel and to have readers come along with you and suspend their own reality you know you have to be able to tap into um understanding other human beings or and uh how emotion works and similarly when you know when you're a caregiver you know empathy plays a huge role in developing that therapeutic relationship so I also think that's a common uh common thread so I think
Speaker: writers often have empathy and develop it.
Speaker: And so I probably brought that into medicine as well.
Speaker: And I guess on the flip side, how has medicine influenced my writing?
Speaker: Well, I'm still very interested in the medical humanity.
Speaker: So I'm very interested.
Speaker: No matter what story I'm writing, I always seem to find the edges that interface with medicine.
Speaker: And I think that's because I've spent so much of my working life, you know, thinking about cells and molecules and disease processes and how that changes the person's lived experience.
Speaker: So I can't seem to get away from it.
Speaker: So, yeah, I suspect a lot of my writing will be on that medical humanities interface.
Speaker: Yeah, well, it sounds like then your writing is that Venn diagram between your two great passions, which is, it's wonderful to find a niche sometimes, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, hopefully I can just find that sweet spot in the Venn diagram.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Do you ever think about...
Speaker: balancing your writer persona or brand, I suppose, as you would call it these days, with your professional image as a clinician?
Speaker: Yeah, it's an interesting question.
Speaker: I think for a long time, as I said, I really wrote for myself to process and understand the world better.
Speaker: And occasionally I would send things off for publication or competition, but it never really happened.
Speaker: impacted my, yeah, my working life at the hospital.
Speaker: And a lot of people didn't know I wrote.
Speaker: So that's been really interesting.
Speaker: I kind of kept my two worlds separate.
Speaker: So the very interesting thing about releasing a debut novel is, yeah, the cat's out of the bag.
Speaker: and colleagues for the very first time know now that I write.
Speaker: So that's been a little bit interesting and, yeah, a little bit stressful for me, but not in a bad way.
Speaker: I just feel like my worlds are colliding.
Speaker: I am a little bit conscious of the fact that, you know, I'm still seeing patients and, you know,
Speaker: that sort of doctor caregiving role is, you know, a huge amount of trust is put in you as a physician.
Speaker: And then, you know, on the other hand, I'm writing fiction.
Speaker: So that's interesting.
Speaker: And I think sometimes I probably, yeah, sort of,
Speaker: temper myself or I probably take less risks in my fiction because because of the way that maybe I'll be perceived you know in my professional life yeah it's hard to write really risque or avant-garde things you know when you know you're in this very public sphere but yeah apart from that though yeah it's overwhelmingly been a positive response from my colleagues but yeah it has been funny that it's all out in the open now
Speaker: Yeah, that's good.
Speaker: I think that sounds a lot when I fantasize about publishing a novel, that's kind of my thought process as well.
Speaker: Like what would happen if a client come in and say, I've read your book?
Speaker: And you know, what would that be like, even with this podcast, sometimes I'm like, oh,
Speaker: what would happen if the two kind of collides and someone, you know, my colleague knows about this, but what if a client finds out and, you know, things like that?
Speaker: I think it's always interesting to think about the balance of the different parts of ourselves, I suppose.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: Yeah, and I don't think, yeah, I think we probably overthink it, or I probably do, but I often look at other writers on, you know, in social media or the lay press, and, you know, artists play a really important role in challenging social norms and driving political debate, and, you know, often they're right on the edge of cultural change, and they can be quite disruptive figures in, you know, in both
Speaker: positive, negative way, but, you know, physicians in public hospitals, you know, we were bound by guidelines.
Speaker: We can't really speak to the media without prior approval.
Speaker: So that's quite, I can't just speak for myself at all times.
Speaker: You know, I do responsibilities to the organizations that I work with.
Speaker: So yeah, that's sort of when I often think about it is sometimes like, oh, wow, look at those writers.
Speaker: They're really, you know, they're just really out there putting the
Speaker: their thoughts into the world which is wonderful but I always have to have that voice in my head like um you know you gotta go to clinic on Monday yeah yeah fascinating sounds like you're doing a good job maintaining that balance yeah all right let's dive into timelines um since we are in the first section of this interview we'll keep it non-spoilery
Speaker: So the main character in Tidelines is referred to as Scrope or Dr. Donnie Hu, but her actual given name is never actually mentioned in the book unless I've missed it somehow.
Speaker: No?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What prompted that decision not to give her a given name?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Great question.
Speaker: And a few people will ask me, they're like, did I miss it?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: So I'm, look, I'm a huge Margaret Atwood fan.
Speaker: And when I was young, I think I was 20, I went over to Montreal in Canada to study at McGill University.
Speaker: And I studied Canadian literature.
Speaker: And one of the books we studied was one of...
Speaker: I think it's her second book called Surfacing, a beautiful novel, which I would highly recommend.
Speaker: And I read the whole book of Surfacing and loved it and then went to lectures.
Speaker: And then I realized that she was an unnamed narrator and it kind of blew my mind.
Speaker: I'd never read a book with an unnamed narrator before and I just couldn't believe she'd gotten away with it.
Speaker: I thought it was amazing.
Speaker: So it's a little bit of a riff off.
Speaker: on outward surfacing.
Speaker: So yeah, for most of the book, the main character is known as Grubb, which is a family nickname.
Speaker: And then towards the end, you know, through her own ambition and hard work, she, you know, she graduates from medical school and becomes Dr. Donoghue.
Speaker: So yeah, I just kind of like that development of
Speaker: of you know she starts the book with a name given to her by her family but she finishes you know she's um created her own name for her own choices so yeah you definitely haven't missed it i didn't put any other names in there but um yeah it was sort of a tribute uh to another writer essentially i love that it's that it's a marker of that transition and her growing up from being this little girl to her own woman and
Speaker: And I can see how that is tied to what happens with Elijah as well and his impact on Grubb.
Speaker: Speaking of which, Tideline tracks the unraveling, so to speak, of Grubb's brother Elijah, who started out as the golden child, so to speak, as the one who is full of potential.
Speaker: One contributing factor to Elijah's difficulties is addiction.
Speaker: What are some of your considerations when it comes to portraying his substance dependence and how it impacts his relationship with Grubb?
Speaker: I should start out by saying, so before I wrote this novel, I'd only ever written poetry.
Speaker: So I didn't have a clear and finished vision of how the novel would finish.
Speaker: But I did know I was writing a coming-of-age novel and I did know I was writing about ambiguous loss.
Speaker: So in the first drafts of the novel, Elijah disappears in the third act and we don't really, we initially,
Speaker: don't find out what happened to him.
Speaker: And then I realized that was very unsatisfying for the reader.
Speaker: And so I was sort of working backwards from that, like, well, what could be the factors at play that would cause a young man like Elijah to disappear?
Speaker: So, and then as we spoke earlier, you know, through, you know, I'm trained as a physician, so I spent a lot of time in public hospitals, but I did spend a few months in
Speaker: in a rehabilitation centre for mental health and addiction and trauma.
Speaker: And I think through some of my life experiences that came into the novel about, yeah, how that might lead someone to disappear.
Speaker: I just find it interesting.
Speaker: Addiction is quite interesting.
Speaker: Often in the book I'm playing with that idea too about genes versus environment.
Speaker: So, you know, obviously genetic factors, inherited factors probably contributing to addiction, but then, you know, the environment we're in also plays a hand and that sort of, you know, thread in the guidelines as well.
Speaker: So that was some of the thoughts going through my mind and then obviously their relationship is one of the central relationships of the novel.
Speaker: It's really a book about sibling love, but then how that love, you know, is challenged and put through the ringer a bit by the addiction and health issues that Elijah has.
Speaker: Yeah, and I feel that definitely comes through later as I suppose Elijah becomes more of the dependent one.
Speaker: I don't know if that's the right word, but when they were growing up, it seems like Elijah was...
Speaker: forging ahead and Grubb was following and then the tables turn later in life and you can see how that role refers or impact or have a strain on their love for each other as well.
Speaker: So I thought that was fascinating.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: Yeah, so growing up, yeah, there's a three years age gap.
Speaker: It's also interesting to think about when you're, the book opens when Grubb's 14, Elijah's 17 and I think when you're younger, you know, three years is
Speaker: is a huge, but then, you know, as you go into adulthood, really, you know, five and 10 years doesn't even seem like that big deal in like relationships or friendships.
Speaker: Um, so yeah, but definitely, uh, yeah, I was writing into that, um, reversal of, uh,
Speaker: Yeah, I think she says at one stage in the novel, for the first time I felt older than him because, yeah, as you said, his life is starting to unravel and he's starting to lean on her rather than the other way around.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You mentioned that you knew going in that you were writing about ambiguous loss and that really stood out in the book as well, particularly, and I don't think this is a spoiler because it's in the blurb, but
Speaker: that Elijah disappears in the course of the novel.
Speaker: Can you talk about your considerations when approaching writing and ambiguous loss?
Speaker: Yeah, I was really fascinated that you picked up on that with the question because if I trace back to, you know, the very origins of this novel, so the novel and the characters are all fictional but it was written in
Speaker: at a time when I was going through a lot of personal grief as well.
Speaker: And so if I had to trace back the kernel of the novel, so I lost my dad's mother, my nana, who I was very close to.
Speaker: She died, you know, she was 85 and she'd lived an amazing life and was really quite fit and healthy to the end.
Speaker: But she died very suddenly.
Speaker: And while I was grieving her, there were a couple of very high profile cases of missing children, both here and
Speaker: and overseas that were being televised a lot at the same time.
Speaker: And it was really sitting in my own grief and watching.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, it's so, my grief is so heavy.
Speaker: And yet, you know, my loved one was 85 and had a good life and we know exactly what happened to her and she didn't really suffer.
Speaker: And it was really that empathy with these cases that were very high profile of these missing children.
Speaker: And really that was the kernel of timelines because I just thought how,
Speaker: how do these families cope and move forward and live with that ambiguous loss of losing their child and actually not knowing what happened to them?
Speaker: So those are the two things I knew coming of age and writing about ambiguous loss.
Speaker: You know, as I said, because of the narrative arc in a book, I didn't think it was fair to the readers to leave it completely wrong.
Speaker: open at the end.
Speaker: I think that would have been a satisfying road.
Speaker: But that's really in solving those sort of writing issues was how the rest of Tideline sort of came to be.
Speaker: There are more that I would love to talk about in regards to the book's themes that would be spoilery.
Speaker: So before we move on to the spoiler questions, do you have any author or book recommendations to share with our listeners?
Speaker: Yes, definitely.
Speaker: So yeah, I'm very aware with Tidelines that I'm writing from the point of view of a sibling, of someone with mental health issues.
Speaker: So I think really great companion pieces would be sort of
Speaker: First Personal Owned Voices accounts of people actually living with mental health challenges.
Speaker: So two books that I read sort of quite recently, Anaspargo Ryan's A Kind of Magic.
Speaker: I mean, she's a stunningly beautiful writer and really it's such a personal story, but I loved that book.
Speaker: And more recently, Roz Bellamy's Mood, again, a memoir, an Australian memoir about children
Speaker: living with, well, it's actually part of it is getting the diagnosis.
Speaker: So Roz really beautifully writes about how difficult it is sometimes to link symptomology and feelings with finding the right caregiver who can make the right diagnosis.
Speaker: They sort of bounce around between the
Speaker: clinicians and diagnoses as well, but it's really powerfully portrayed.
Speaker: More from overseas novelists, after I wrote Tidelines, I read Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi.
Speaker: And that's really, it's a stunning novel, but it's very interesting.
Speaker: It's sort of in dialogue a little bit with Tidelines.
Speaker: It's written in America during the opioid epidemic.
Speaker: So again, there's a brother-sister relationship, but it's more heavily centered around the opioid
Speaker: epidemic, but there's some interesting comparisons with tidelines.
Speaker: And I recently discovered the work of Patricia Lockwood, who wrote No One Is Talking About This and Pre-Study and yeah, both excellent books.
Speaker: Yeah, wonderful.
Speaker: Those are great recommendations.
Speaker: We'll include them in our show notes as well so that our listeners can find them.
Speaker: All right, let's move on to the next section of this interview.
Speaker: If you haven't read timelines to the end, please come back to this later because we will be talking in more depth about the plots and some of the themes as well.
Speaker: I'd love to talk a bit more about Grubb.
Speaker: So she studies medicine, but she steps away from the practice of medicine due to burnout and finding it quite confronting.
Speaker: Can you talk a bit about why research is better for her than medical practice, at least at this stage of her life?
Speaker: Yeah, so I think...
Speaker: In high school, Grub recognises, you know, I think she is a quite empathetic person and she says quite explicitly she sort of wants to use her career to sort of help other people and thinks that means studying medicine.
Speaker: But, yeah, finds the hospital work very confronting.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: yeah, I think begins her internship.
Speaker: But then sort of, I think, suffers quite a lot of vicarious trauma through that work and ultimately has, yeah, kind of a breakdown.
Speaker: And then eventually there's an ad and a paper talking about doing PhDs in medical research, you know, and that's a way for her to use her intellect and skills, still helping people and the field of medicine, but in a way that's less
Speaker: yeah, frontline every day.
Speaker: So she moves into the lab.
Speaker: And, you know, I guess I did.
Speaker: I mean, I actually, I was very lucky and I was in a big, well-supported hospital for my internship and felt very well prepared and quite like hospital medicine.
Speaker: But the whole way through my training, you know, there were definitely moments where I would catch myself and go, you know, wow, this is a lot.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I can totally see why some people don't enjoy this and why some people walk away.
Speaker: And actually, yeah, my partner is a doctor as well.
Speaker: And I remember he graduated the year above me and we were so excited when he first stepped into the hospital.
Speaker: And after his first day, I was sort of like jumping around saying, well, how was it?
Speaker: And, you know, the senior doctor that he was working with, you know, that had decided to leave medicine and for similar reasons, actually just saying, you know, it was all
Speaker: getting too much.
Speaker: And he was finding just the amount of trauma that he was being exposed to and sort of other people's pain and suffering, finding it too much.
Speaker: So, yeah, so that's part of Grubb's story.
Speaker: And so I sort of wrote it, you know, in a part, it's sort of the narrative drive.
Speaker: But as I was editing it, I mean, I finished the book long before COVID, but it was interesting how COVID impacted the healthcare system.
Speaker: workforce and you know and you know I was at at the hospital through COVID but was in huge amount of of burnout lots of people leaving and then even the people who are sticking around you know there's just a lot of fatigue and exhaustion it's a very tired work at the moment so it's sort of it sort of held true as I was writing and editing you know that issue of doctor burnout I think has only become more relevant not less
Speaker: You mentioned vicarious trauma, and I feel like that's such an important thing for anyone going into the health or caring profession needs to know about.
Speaker: And I've seen so many headlines, I feel, about young doctors struggling with their mental health at the start of their practice.
Speaker: If we have any future medical professionals listening to this episode, what ideas or suggestions would you give them about looking after their own mental health?
Speaker: You're shaking your head.
Speaker: It's so hard.
Speaker: It's so hard.
Speaker: And I don't, I'm thinking back and, you know, you get a lot of advice as a medical student and a junior doctor about, you know, and make sure to take care of yourself.
Speaker: But really, I can't remember much practical training.
Speaker: We got very good training in Breaking Bad News.
Speaker: We had amazing sessions at Sydney University where I was.
Speaker: Yeah, we had sessions with
Speaker: professional actors and actresses who would come in and we would role play, you know, giving a difficult diagnosis or explaining someone had passed away, you know, just that was an amazing experience.
Speaker: So I felt in some areas quite well prepared, but taking care of your own health while you're, you know, working a really demanding job, caring for other people, it's really hard.
Speaker: And I think there's no easy answer because the answer is going to be very different.
Speaker: for everyone and things that worked, how I take care of myself will be very different.
Speaker: But, you know, the general guidelines is, you know, number one, you have to have your own GP and your own healthcare team.
Speaker: And for some people that also means a psychologist and a psychiatrist because a lot of healthcare workers obviously have their own mental health that needs to be maintained.
Speaker: I think also for me, and this is sort of linking back to, you know, why I'm holding on to writing, but, you know, staying in touch with those things that bring you joy outside of medicine.
Speaker: And when you're going through speciality training, you have to sacrifice so much because the study demands are so great.
Speaker: So you end up, you know, your social life winds down, you know, you do less of everything that you used to, and it's very easy.
Speaker: let those other things slip away things like hobbies and interests and sporting teams and musical instruments and you know for me you know write creative writing having a creative outlet but the more I go on you know they're not added extras they become essential they become essential to going on so yeah the advice I would
Speaker: would be to like really cling to those things in your life that bring you joy because, you know, you're going to need them.
Speaker: And ultimately another very powerful thing when we graduated from medical school, I remember there was a final night and we had a dinner and a very senior hospital staff member stood up to give a speech.
Speaker: And some of his parting advice was, you know, medicine is a career that will devour you.
Speaker: And it was amazing.
Speaker: It's a very funny thing to say because I was sitting there going, oh, it's such a happy occasion and, you know, all of the mood was really elevated and he really stood up there and said medicine is a career that will devour you.
Speaker: I think of that often because I think he was just trying to warn us by just saying, like, don't let this become your whole life.
Speaker: You know, yes, enjoy your job and work hard and you'll get a lot out of it, but don't let it become your whole life because, you know, I think it's, as you would know, as well as a psychologist, I think you can't let anything become your whole life and you need balance.
Speaker: And perspective from the outside world as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I suppose when you go, you know, people who go into these caring professions, you're there because you want to help and look after other people.
Speaker: And sometimes it's so easy to just...
Speaker: bring that home and be in that mindset about, you know, what about that person or that person?
Speaker: What else can I do?
Speaker: Or what did I do wrong?
Speaker: I think particularly my parents are both doctors.
Speaker: So growing up, you know, they would be talking about work at dinner, the dinner table, and they would say, oh, this patient passed away today.
Speaker: And I'd be like,
Speaker: This seems like such a big deal, but they seem to have gotten to a place where that was part of life, I suppose.
Speaker: I'd love to explore the children of doctors and especially two doctors.
Speaker: I think some of them go, I want to be a doctor.
Speaker: And then the other half were like, not pay me enough to be a doctor.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's very funny because, yeah, as I mentioned, my partner's a doctor as well.
Speaker: And so we have, because it's hard because we come home and it's part of our debriefing process too is to talk to each other.
Speaker: And obviously often the children are around, but, yeah, you realise how it's such a rarefied environment and we do have to catch ourselves, you know, depending on what company we're in because normal conversation, you know, can be very confronting for people
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Only children, but just other people who aren't exposed to that trauma.
Speaker: It's unfortunate that Elise isn't here today for this interview because she and I have taken different paths in terms of, you know, the clinical practice versus the research.
Speaker: So that was part of why I was interested in Grubb's journey with that as well.
Speaker: Do you think there will be a time where Grubb will go back to practicing medicine or is research her true love?
Speaker: Oh, that's interesting.
Speaker: I think...
Speaker: Um, I feel like if Grubb had gotten help in the hospital and was supported, I definitely think she had all the attributes to be a very good doctor.
Speaker: So I think she kind of cut her losses very early.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: But the way, yeah, I think she's pretty happy now with the path that she's chosen in research because she feels that she's helping people.
Speaker: But also there's a bit of a sense that, you know, she quite enjoyed and sort of unveiled a talent there for the kind of research that she was doing and was getting involved.
Speaker: you know, some good results and some good feedback from her supervisors.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think she stays.
Speaker: I think she stays on that path of helping people just a couple of steps away.
Speaker: Yeah, still an important role in helping people as well.
Speaker: The other theme that I wanted to talk about is the immigrant experience, particularly of Robin Elijah's parents, who have both been affected and displaced by war and conflict.
Speaker: And we still see the impact of that trauma on Grubb's grandpa.
Speaker: Later in the book, Grubb's friend, Sere, is that how you pronounce her name?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: She talks about her parents fleeing Cambodia.
Speaker: Why was it important to you to include these stories in the book?
Speaker: I think it's very important that national literary canon is reflective of real life.
Speaker: And I think, you know, I have read a lot of Australian fiction in my time and, you know, there's lots of
Speaker: families in this country who can trace their heritage back to the first fleet and colonial times.
Speaker: And then excitingly, we're seeing a lot of books, you know, from new migrants and sort of first generation stories, which I think are also excellent.
Speaker: But yeah, so, but there's also a lot of families in between.
Speaker: And I would, I'll just say, you know, I did lean into my own family history a little bit there because, you know, people, I think often make assumptions about me, but, you know, just based on how I look that, you know, maybe my family has been in Australia for a long time, but, you know,
Speaker: the sort of genealogy that comes through the book is pretty true.
Speaker: So I think, you know, I'm about third generation Australian on my mum's side who was Northern Irish.
Speaker: Yeah, and then my dad had the same immigration story as Rebecca's family.
Speaker: So I just wanted to write into that truth that actually,
Speaker: there are multiple generations of Australians in this country.
Speaker: I wanted the book to reflect that.
Speaker: But also I've spent most of my life living in big cities and Sydney is a big city with lots of different cultures.
Speaker: And it really, like I know so many people
Speaker: people and couples where we're now seeing, you know, all these different cultures are coming together and to each other and getting married and having kids.
Speaker: And I just wanted to embrace that complexity and just say, you know, Australian literature isn't just, you know, about, you know, people who arrived in the first fleet and the very early days and the migrant stories that there's actually a complexity there that we should embrace and celebrate of, you know, what an amazing country we have that
Speaker: has welcomed so many waves of immigration and now we're all bumping up together and living together with neighbours and friends and falling in love with each other.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, and I think that's, you know, I just wanted to write that into the novel.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: And I love this sort of repeated,
Speaker: wisdom around material things don't matter it's what's in your head that you can carry with you I feel that resonated with me because that was something my parents would talk about as well like if anything happens you need to have a good education because if anything happens that's what you take with you
Speaker: Yeah, so that's actually interesting.
Speaker: So some of those conversations are based on real conversations I had with friends.
Speaker: Yeah, and I also think it's interesting so how diverse the migrant stories can be.
Speaker: But, yeah, my dad's family, you know, they were displaced.
Speaker: But then later on I had friends who were Cambodian and, yeah, and I definitely had those conversations where there was –
Speaker: despite the conflicts being completely different and in totally different countries and unrelated yeah those themes that come through you know you yeah you only get to take what you can carry with you or things that other people can't take away I think um there are echoes around that and then also we should just looping back to the vicarious trauma you know we should also recognize um the trauma people and migrants are some migrants are bringing with them and you know um and to understand that a little bit as well
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And it also just popped into my head that there might be some ambiguous loss or ambiguous grief there as well with Grubbs.
Speaker: No, no, because he's there, but he's not really there anymore.
Speaker: And that could be difficult to deal with.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so, and the other thing I did want to say was I was very aware that, um,
Speaker: Well, you know, it's 2024 now and I'm writing about mental health and, you know, Elijah's journey is really challenging and it's really hard.
Speaker: Part of what I wanted to do with both Grubb and Nonna was they both have their own kind of challenges that relate to mental health and I did want to show Grubb sort of...
Speaker: surviving hers and thriving in her challenge of burnout.
Speaker: And then also Nona, that's a sort of complex combination of, like you said, you know, there's the trauma of displacement plus there's like memory loss and dementia there as well with persecutory delusions.
Speaker: But, you know, I did want them as foils to what was happening with Elijah and just also to acknowledge that, you know, those mental health challenges, there's a range.
Speaker: And there's,
Speaker: of severity and how it presents and what happens as well.
Speaker: Yeah, and I suppose the difference between getting help and that cultural shift in terms of how trauma is understood.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, all very fascinating.
Speaker: There's also a very fascinating character in Tidelines that we haven't spoken about.
Speaker: So I would love to chat about Zed, who is Elijah's best friend in the book.
Speaker: I would like to highlight this line.
Speaker: He was the crystallized amber edges of a moon I couldn't help running my fingers over.
Speaker: This feels to me like the perfect summary of Zed's sort of charm and pull and this sort of danger that or
Speaker: almost violence as well that he possesses.
Speaker: What drew Elijah and Grubb to him?
Speaker: Yeah, it's funny.
Speaker: When I started going through the editing process with the publishing house, one of the comments was like, you know, before she becomes interested in Zed,
Speaker: there's a very nice boy at school called Lucas and, and the editor was like, you know, well, I didn't understand, you know, you know, why is she attracted to Zed?
Speaker: You know, when she's, when she's got, you know, Lucas is there and he's, you know, you know, upstanding citizen, a very nice boy and everything like that.
Speaker: And I, and I was like, look, I can't tell you why, but I can tell you it's, it's, it's true of the species.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But, yeah, he is, I think of him as magnetic.
Speaker: I think in one way he's probably very different.
Speaker: So we see, you know, Grubb and Elijah live a fairly comfortable life, you know, very, you know, they've got a close and loving family and there's no...
Speaker: know struggle with money both the parents are employed they live in a you know a nice part of the city and then uh clearly zed is sort of transplanted into that world his childhood from what we understand has been a lot rockier he's living with an aunt he has a lot less in terms of material things um and there's been issues with his um his biological parents so
Speaker: Look, I think some of the initial attraction might be, you know, he was different.
Speaker: Like, you know, he was someone who came into their world and he was a little bit different.
Speaker: I think, you know, there's a very...
Speaker: I was reading this book.
Speaker: There's a book by Damien Cave called Into the Rip.
Speaker: It's a really fabulous book.
Speaker: He's an American journalist and he and his family come to live in Australia and it's all basically about risk-taking in childhood and adolescence.
Speaker: And he makes the comment that...
Speaker: you know, generally and stereotypically, young adolescent boys will take more physical risks.
Speaker: So they will, you know, they will drive fast or they'll experiment more with illicit substances or they'll jump off high ledges.
Speaker: But girls will take more emotional risks.
Speaker: And when I read that, I'd already written a book, but I was like, maybe that's what's going on here.
Speaker: Like, maybe...
Speaker: emotional risk taking here she's not going with the safe boy from school and you know she's attracted to this um that he's older you know he's the brother's friend and there's definitely an edge to that he's always um pushing the envelope a little bit with what they're doing um you know they shouldn't be doing so there was something exciting and I think even Grubb said she links that later to sort of you know he feels a bit like an adrenaline rush and you know and that can
Speaker: confusing um you know she mistakes that for um you know a signal that he's he could be the one um so yeah but he yeah he's definitely yeah very um important character in the book
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And I think he's a great foil for Elijah as well, for everything that you explain.
Speaker: But then later in the book, because for a while, it seemed like their paths run parallel.
Speaker: But then there's that line at the end of the book.
Speaker: where it said, two boys got in over their heads, but only one made it back to shore.
Speaker: Am I mad because it wasn't the one I expected?
Speaker: And I suppose, you know, as a reader, I would expect Elijah to be the one who would make it back.
Speaker: And I'm fascinated because you mentioned before that you wanted to explore gene versus environment and how that interacts in terms of addiction as well.
Speaker: So yeah,
Speaker: Would you like to talk more about this and is it even possible to speculate if why it was Zed who made it back and not Elijah?
Speaker: I think one of the points I was exploring between Zed and Elijah's friendship is, yeah, so they've got these different backgrounds and they sort of...
Speaker: they, you know, go along this pathway where they're taking risks and then they end up in very different places.
Speaker: So one of the points I wanted to make, I guess, was things like addiction and mental health doesn't really discriminate.
Speaker: Like it doesn't matter that Elijah, you know, he's from a loving home and, you know, a very middle-class family and, you know, he's got all this support plus he's got these like amazing talents with music and athleticism, like actually –
Speaker: you know, like addiction and mental health can affect anyone.
Speaker: So that was one point I was going to make.
Speaker: I also did want to pay credit to the journey that Zed had been on.
Speaker: You know, I think Grubb kind of calls him a survivalist, but, you know, he's had a very challenging childhood and I think, you know, he's learned a little bit along the way to take care of himself and not necessarily in a bad or selfish way, but just in a way that was necessary.
Speaker: So I think probably...
Speaker: through the hard scrap of his childhood, you know, he probably did pick up, you know, he's probably quite a strong person and maybe navigated that risk.
Speaker: You know, they both faced the same kind of risk but he was able to get himself out because maybe he was sort of had to develop some earlier skills.
Speaker: But, yeah, when I was working in the rehab centre, you know, there were people who'd come in and, you know,
Speaker: Say just with alcohol, they would just be like, well, I don't understand.
Speaker: I was drinking the same as all my other friends, especially like post high school era.
Speaker: And then it's interesting how for some people that can lead to quite a serious issue with addiction.
Speaker: And then other people can just go, oh, okay, I'm going to give up tomorrow.
Speaker: And so I was interested in that as well.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And I really enjoyed that about the book.
Speaker: And one of the things I enjoyed is Grob's struggle, I suppose, with blame or guilt.
Speaker: We started the book with her essentially ready to accuse it of ruining their lives.
Speaker: And then she comes to a place of
Speaker: forgiveness perhaps or acceptance um and i find that really fascinating because um i think it would have been easy for her to blame zed for all of it and sort of wipe her hands clean um off the whole thing but she decided not to take that i guess um that route so yeah it was uh what was the thought process there for you
Speaker: As I said, he was very important and he really broke the book open for me.
Speaker: So definitely when I started writing the book, I was very interested with temporal associations.
Speaker: I don't know if you've come across it in your work, but if someone –
Speaker: if they, you know, try a new brand of tomato sauce and then the next day they fall ill with like a condition, when you're taking the history, it's very easy.
Speaker: People always blame the tomato sauce or blame like the new thing that just made their life because temporarily it seems to associate, but actually, you know, they're probably unrelated.
Speaker: So I was toying with that idea that, um,
Speaker: Elijah's life starts to waver at the same summer that Zed comes into their life.
Speaker: So I was toying with that idea of, you know, grub, that's how grub associates it.
Speaker: Will everything change when Zed came into our life?
Speaker: And I will admit that when I was writing the very first drafts, you know, Zed
Speaker: Bordered on being a very stereotypical character.
Speaker: So he was very much the bad influence friend.
Speaker: You know, he was one having the bad ideas and leading them down the garden path.
Speaker: But through the writing of the novel, actually there was, yeah, there was a day where very clearly he looked at me from out of the pages and he just said to me, well, you're just as bad as all the rest of them.
Speaker: And that's when I realized that I was,
Speaker: yeah I was using him as a scapegoat and then I had to re and I had to imagine how that summer the first summer and all the other summers um looked from Zed's point of view and as soon as I started like even though the book is always written from Grubb's point of view um I had to on a great Zed's journey and story and as soon as I let that through in the writing the work became far more interesting um
Speaker: And I think it's a far more nuanced story.
Speaker: But yeah, how you finished with your question.
Speaker: I mean, and it's sort of a nice coming of age arc because I think we see Grubb kind of do a little bit of growing up in those 20 minutes that she's sitting in the car.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's part of what we're seeing actually just a moment of emotional growth for her.
Speaker: Yeah, wonderful.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Sarah, for this conversation.
Speaker: As you can tell, I'm fascinated by a lot of the themes that are in Tidelines and I've really enjoyed reading it.
Speaker: And I hope that more people will pick it up.
Speaker: Wonderful.
Speaker: Thanks, Priscilla.
Speaker: Thanks for taking the time.
Speaker: And yeah, really interesting discussion.
Speaker: So I really enjoyed talking to you also.
Speaker: That wraps us up for today.
Speaker: Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker: If you like us, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker: Find us on NovelFeelings.com or on Instagram, Twitter, The Story Graph, and Goodreads via Novel underscore Feelings.
Speaker: You can also find my Bookstagram page with books with an extra S at the end.
Speaker: Check out Tidelines as well by Sarah Sasson.
Speaker: It is now out in bookstores everywhere in Australia.
Speaker: Thank you again to Sarah for joining us for this interview.
Speaker: Thank you for listening.
Speaker: See you all next time.
