Amy Brown is a New Zealand-Australian writer and teacher who lives in Naarm/Melbourne. She has published three collections of poetry, four children’s novels, and completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne. Her poetry, essays and reviews have been published in Australia and New Zealand. In 2022 she was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript.
1. Why do you tell stories?
I tell stories because ever since I can remember I’ve loved being told stories. So, I wanted to try telling them myself. I think what I love most about stories is how they can simultaneously relieve you of yourself and take you deeper into yourself. They’re a way (maybe the best way) of understanding people. I’m a high school English teacher as well as a writer, and I often find myself reminding students that the subject is as much about people as it is about words. Even if students struggle with reading or writing, they can be good at English if they’re interested in people.
2. Describe your novel in one (or two) sentence(s).
My Brilliant Sister is, at its heart, a shadow novel to Stella Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, in which Franklin’s sister Linda writes her own version of their formative years, but more broadly it’s a novel about the compromises, sacrifices and choices women have made and continue to make between caring and creating, domestic labour and art.
3. My Brilliant Sister comprises a triptych of women’s stories that are in dialogue with one another through thematic concern, rather than through plot. Which came first for you, and why?
The historical middle section of the novel came first for me. It grew from an unexpected obsession that developed when I read My Brilliant Career. I was in my late twenties and was struck by how Franklin’s protagonist Sybylla and Sybylla’s younger sister Gertie seemed like symbols of the conflicted sides of myself. Sybylla is a fiercely independent aspiring writer, refusing to marry; whereas Gertie is a virtuous, caring ideal of femininity. I started to wonder if there had been a real Gertie, which led me to Jill Roe’s excellent biography of Franklin, where I found Linda. Reading Linda’s letters to Stella, I knew that I wanted to hear more of this young woman’s voice. I started to imagine what she might have written, had she had the time and ego to respond to her sister’s novel.
4. My Brilliant Sister cannot easily be shepherded into a single genre: it incorporates autofiction, historical fiction, speculative biography... Why was it important to you to play with and against genre in My Brilliant Sister, and in what ways can ‘genre bending’ assist reader understanding of historical and contemporaneous figures and/or texts?
The blend of genres is mostly due to the timespan over which the novel was written (about eight years) and my changing tastes and interests, and even the changed shape of my life, during that period. After having a baby and becoming a full-time teacher, I thought the book was going to remain an unfinished historical novel. But, the questions at the heart of it – about what it takes to have a brilliant career and how balance can possibly be achieved between the competing imperatives of one’s life – didn’t leave me; in fact they became more urgent. I decided to try approaching the project from a different angle, imagining what kind of women Linda and Stella might have been if they were living in 2021. In the depths of lockdown in Melbourne, I had an epiphany that the historical section I’d already written should be braided together with these contemporary voices. While this wasn’t a calculated decision to emphasise for readers the echoing conditions of the historical and contemporaneous characters, I think (or hope) that it has this effect.
5. Early on in the novel, Ida, a woman who has returned to writing through a work that imagines the voice of Linda, Miles (Stella) Franklin’s sister, says: ‘The woman whose voice I imagine is not the real Linda (because there was a real Linda and that presses upon me), and is not me, and is not Gertie (Miles Franklin’s fictional sister), but a sort of ghostly overlapped self who is with me all the time now.’ How much did the ‘real’ Ida and Stella press upon you in the writing of this book? How do you navigate writing of the dead?
This question reminds me of something Hilary Mantel wrote in The Paris Review: “When the people are real, though dead, I have a different feeling toward them. I consider them my responsibility.” This sense of responsibility was at the front of my mind as I was writing, and editing this book, not least because of the reception of Franklin’s own debut novel; some of her relatives were horrified that she’d written about them so flippantly. I’m not even a relative of these women – what right do I have to write their family history? None, I would say. But what I’ve written isn’t a history, it’s a novel – a new, imagined thing. While I wanted to be as fair, true and responsible as I could when writing in Linda’s voice, and Stella’s, I also had to remind myself that the reader would understand that they were characters I was making, not primary sources I was forging.
6. What challenges do you feel continue to face women who write, and ‘women’s writing’ more generally in Australia? How far have we come, and how far do we have to go?
I think the challenges that continue to face women who write are very similar to the challenges most women face, that is, how to share the mental and physical load of domestic labour and/or unpaid care evenly with men. Obviously, this inequity is far less pronounced that it was at the start of the 20 th century when Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career, but it’s still present and worth acknowledging. Franklin’s audacity and strength of purpose in her own career, and in supporting Australia writers’ careers in general, have helped us come a long way. The work the Stella Prize in particular is doing to promote women and non-binary writers is significant.
7. When and where do you write?
Whenever and wherever I can. Sometimes on the couch with my laptop on my lap. Sometimes in a café. Sometimes (furtively) at school in the staffroom. Sometimes in the notes section of my phone. Sometimes in the grubby little notebook that’s always in my bag. My ideal answer to this question, though, is from just after breakfast to just before dinner in my little studio looking out over the garden. I didn’t have this when I wrote My Brilliant Sister, but I cherish it now as I start working on the next book.
8. What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing?
1. Coffee
2. Trees (being able to look up from the screen and rest my eyes on leaves is nice)
3. Cat (ideally on the lap but not interfering with the keyboard)
9. What advice do you have for women who share your characters’ struggle to devote themselves to both the fulfilment of creative ambition and meaningful family life?
Ask for and accept support from whoever can offer it. You deserve it. Your creative work deserves to be supported.
10. Name three books that you couldn’t live without, or that were crucial to the writing of My Brilliant Sister.
“Couldn’t live without” is very tricky, but crucial to My Brilliant Sister is easier:
1. My Brilliant Career – not just for its direct influence on the characters and plot, but also for its precocious autofictional energy. I really think it’s a book ahead of its time.
2. Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days. This novel’s magical structure, which allows itsprotagonist to live (and die from) many possible lives, inspired me to do somethingsimilarly speculative with the structure of my novel.
3. Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, and the whole Neapolitan tetralogy, for its depiction of feminine love and rivalry in all its stunning complexity.
bonus question:
What books are currently on your to be read pile?
I was lucky to read at an event with Yumna Kassab recently. She gave a searing and resonant reading from her new novel Politica. This is next on my list, after I finish New Zealand novelist Anna Smaill’s Bird Life, which I’m relishing for its exceptional rendering of love and grief. I’m also eager to continue my Tove Jansson journey – having recently read and adored The Summer Book, I’m now looking for a copy of A Winter Book.