Amanda Lohrey lives in Tasmania and writes fiction and non-fiction. She has taught at the University of Tasmania, the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Queensland. Amanda is a regular contributor to the Monthly magazine and a former senior fellow of the Australia Council’s Literature Board. She received the 2012 Patrick White Award. The Labyrinth (2021), her eighth work of fiction, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a Prime Minister’s Literary Award, a Tasmanian Literary Award and the Voss Literary Prize.
Why do you tell stories?
I think that if you get it right, fiction can convey complex meaning in a more subtle and richer vein than non-fiction. A good story connects with the deep archetypes in our psyche and has some of the satisfying qualities of myth in that it finds a way to reconcile, for a time, the stresses in our lives, and to give them a meaningful shape.
Describe The Conversion in one (or two) sentence(s).
Impossible. If you can summarise a novel in a few sentences then it’s missed its mark.
In both your novels, The Labyrinth and The Conversion, your characters are shaped, transformed, challenged by the physical spaces they inhabit or create. Can you comment on this externalisation of the inner life that you write so well.
I have a lifelong interest in the design of space and how it affects our psychology. As soon as we enter someone’s house for the first time, for example, we instinctively do a ‘read’ of that person based on the domestic space they have created (assuming they have the means to do so). I also have an interest in the symbols and rituals that are meaningful to us and how they change over time. What, for example, does it mean that so many Christian churches are being sold off and converted into homes, cafes, nightclubs, or whatever? What is a sacred space? Must it be communaI or can it be private? What is the role of tradition in our lives and what are the ways in which we attempt to break from it and reinvent ourselves?
What is it about the poetic space of a church that Nick, and later Zoe, is drawn to?
Nick and Zoe have been through a financial crisis and on a practical level, the church is cheap and in a wonderful position. Nick is not a Christian and thinks of the church as having no inherent poetry; it’s just a big space waiting for him to put his stamp on it. He’s an optimist and a keen renovator who believes in his ability to remake something in his own image. He’s what I think of as a utopian character, a restless perfectionist scornful of convention or limits. Zoe is more pragmatic, more sceptical, and yet in the end she buys the church in an attempt to exorcise a ghost.
I love that the female characters in both your novels do not end up achieving the projects they intend to finish (the labyrinth, the conversion)—is this a radical act of defiance on your part as an author?
Is anything ever truly completed? We’re only ‘finished’ when we die, and in some belief systems, not even then!
In the novel, Zoe comes to understand her husband’s betrayal as something he could never have resisted, cosmically, sensually, or fatefully. What did you want to say in writing this book about long-term marriage or relationships?
I’m always interested in how broad cultural trends impact on relationships at any given moment. (Covid is a good example, though this is not a Covid novel.) These trends change from era to era and those I’ve focussed on in The Conversion are the effect of the global financial crisis; the decline of Christian worship and its replacement by other more secular paths to a meaningful life, including the current cult of renovation and the pantheistic politics that have arisen in recent times around a love of Nature and our desire to protect it. That said, a novel is not an essay and must explore its thematic preoccupations through its characters and the drama of their relationships. How much control do we have over our lives? Does Nick’s betrayal arise out of a character flaw or under the pressure of a particular set of circumstances?
Did you lay any of your own ghosts to rest in writing this book?
It’s too early for me to say. Often, it’s only some years after you’ve published a book that you go back to it and think: oh, so that’s what I was really on about. On one level I know what I’m doing and on another plane my unconscious speaks up without my permission.
You write beautifully about the particularly fine stain glass windows of St Martin’s (Zoe’s church)—were these windows something you’ve seen or encountered?
Like most people I’ve been in churches, and cathedrals with windows of exquisite artistry and the question interests me of what you do with art that no longer speaks to you? It’s too good to discard but you don’t want to live with it. Zoe’s problem with the windows in the church that she buys also connects to the larger question of where we are now in relation to our cultural heritage. What do we want to keep and what do we want to jettison? (This question arises on a minor plane when I attempt to cull my books.)
When and where do you write?
I write in my work-room at home. I write something on most days and it may or may not be more than a couple of paragraphs. These days I usually write after lunch because I can’t settle until I’ve got all the other stuff to do with daily life out of the way.
What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing? Well, there are the practicalities. You need a workspace, plenty of time without interruptions and freedom from financial worries. If you can manage that trifecta you’re pretty much set. Then there’s the nagging idea or image that won’t let go of you and you have to write it out of your system. In the process you go on a journey (apologies for the cliché) and surprise yourself. You write a scene or create a character and think: where on earth did that come from? Finally there’s the desire to create a work that has its own formal beauty, one where all the elements of the narrative come together into a shape that is emotionally and aesthetically satisfying. The process is not unlike putting the pieces of a jigsaw together when you’ve lost the lid of the box with the picture on it. You’re working blind and hoping that eventually it will all come together. Faith in the possibility that it will sustains you.
Bonus Question:
Name three books that you couldn’t live without, or that were crucial to the writing of The Conversion?
When writing The Conversion I returned periodically to the work of the British architect, Christopher Alexander who had a mystical view of the spaces we occupy while at the same time offering a lot of practical advice. His books that have influenced me most are: The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order. In The Conversion one of the characters actually quotes from him.