Carol Lefevre holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide, where she is a Visiting Research Fellow. Her novel Nights in the Asylum, Picador (UK) and Vintage (Australia) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, won the 2008 Nita B. Kibble Award for Women Writers, and the People’s Choice Award. If You Were Mine (2008) was published by Vintage. She has published short fiction, essays, and journalism, and a non-fiction book, Quiet City: walking in West Terrace Cemetery (2016, Wakefield Press). Her most recent book Murmurations, a novella in eight stories (2020, Spinifex Press) was shortlisted for the 2021 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Fiction Prize in the 2022 South Australian Festival Awards for Literature. Carol continues to publish essays and short fiction, and contributes occasional seminars to the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.
1. Why do you tell stories?
So many reasons! Sometimes it’s to capture something small but rather wonderful and embed it in a novel so that it doesn’t disappear. Or it’s an attempt to create order out of life’s messiness, and to find out what I know and what I think. Joan Didion begins her essay “The White Album” with ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’ and there was a time when I used to wonder exactly what she meant. Then I heard about the evolving story of the self, which from the 1980s, psychologists, philosophers, and social theorists have been calling ‘narrative identity’. Apparently, the process of piecing together a narrative identity begins in late-adolescence and evolves across the entire life course, and perhaps for novelists a single narrative identity is just not enough.
2. Describe your novel, Temperance, in one (or two) sentence(s).
It’s the story of two women and two children who embark on a road trip that ends abruptly in mysterious circumstances. It’s also a place-portrait of a certain Adelaide beachside suburb from the early 1960s to almost the end of the 20th century.
3. This book has a particularly evocative South Australian beachside setting—what is it about the seams of suburbia that attracts you as a writer?
My mother lived for most of her life in the suburb where I’ve set this novel. She always insisted that her life was boring, that nothing ever happened. And yet in her street alone there were sudden deaths – several drownings and at least one suicide. I heard of infidelities and marriages destroyed, of young women with unwanted pregnancies who subsequently vanished from circulation while they sought abortions. There were difficulties in families with men who had returned from wars. The suburbs are the setting for every experience imaginable. Quiet streets sheltering lives of quiet desperation are fertile ground for a novelist.
4. Stella, a single mother, finds an awakening through artmaking, and the cover of this book, features a work by Clarice Beckett. How do the visual arts affect or shape your writing practice, or the writing of Temperance?
I often envy visual artists for the immediacy with which we experience their creative work. By comparison, writing is a slow and linear process, one that must be completed by publication before readers can engage with what you’ve made. I’m conscious that this desire for immediacy has had something to do with the shorter fiction I’ve written in recent years. Slender books like Murmurations can be read in a single sitting, and that brings the reading experience closer to that of viewing visual art.
If I wasn’t a writer I’d probably be a visual artist of some kind. I love printmaking, and certain women artists who created glorious work under various kinds of difficulties, women like Norah Heysen, Stella Bowen, and of course Clarice Beckett. Her painting on the cover of Temperance is so evocative of childhood summers spent close to the beach, so that looking at it is like looking into my own memory.
5. Memory—its repression, temperance, misfires, distortions, solace—plays a key role in the narrative of Temperance. Can you comment on this thread of the novel. Did you access your own childhood memories to write this book?
Memory is a huge subject, complicated by its apparent fluidity, its enormous gaps. In Temperance, there are certain memories that at least one of the children, Fran, wishes to suppress because remembering makes her feel unsafe. For her brother Theo it’s not knowing and not remembering that makes him unsettled. The childhood memories I accessed to write the book were mainly to do with place, and with the conservatism that was so restrictive at that time in Adelaide. I remember well the way women put on gloves and squashy hats and walked to church on Sundays, and their disapproval of anyone who lived differently.
6. The sibling relationship between Fran and Theo is beautifully drawn. What did you want to convey about foundational relationships?
Sometimes, when a parent or parents are under great stress, or are not fully functioning, it’s the bond between siblings that helps children get through. But it doesn’t have to be a sibling, it can be anyone who cares. In Temperance, Fran grows up to take another woman’s child under her wing, and although their relationship falters from time to time, the loving care given in the early years makes all the difference.
7. What does temperance, the state of being, mean to you?
I suppose it’s a mind-set that avoids extremes, and in the book there are moments when extreme emotions are impulsively acted upon, with consequences for all involved. Temperance, as in the avoidance of alcohol, has been a feature of South Australian life since the 19th century and is still active today in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In the years I’m writing about, women didn’t drink, and if they did their reputations suffered. In the novel, the two women, Stella and Mardi, draw attention to themselves with their drinking, and it is no accident that the place where their adventure comes to a climax is called Temperance.
9. When and where do you write?
All the time, and in notebooks. I have filled so many of them that I may never have the time to read through them all again. I can write anywhere, but preferably alone and in my writing room. Sometimes the background buzz of a café provides that little bubble of isolation where I’ll want to scribble something down. It has the added bonus of good coffee on hand. Bed is another place, and especially in winter I love a lie-in with my laptop and my latest project open on the screen.
10. What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing?
I’d have to say walking. I walk every morning, and nearly always with some piece of work-in-progress on my mind. Ideas surface as I accumulate steps, and I try not to let them escape. There is an app on my phone called Speechnotes that turns recorded notes into text. Reading is the other thing that sustains me. I take so much inspiration from writers I admire and never stop learning from them. Otherwise, quiet mornings at home are priceless.
bonus question: Name three books that you couldn’t live without, or that were crucial to the writing of Temperance?
Oddly, there is an echo of Henry James’ Daisy Miller in Temperance. I acknowledge this by including it in the novel as a book one of the characters is studying at high school. Otherwise, the novels of William Trevor contributed some inspiration. Particularly his Irish ‘big house’ books Fools of Fortune and The Silence in the Garden, in which he builds up an idyllic existence and then destroys it.