Bio:
Susan Johnson has been writing books since 1985, when she received the first of three grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council which allowed her to write full time. Before that she was a journalist (starting at the Brisbane Courier-Mail and going on to work for such diverse publications as The Australian Women's Weekly, The Sun-Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald and The National Times). She's written ten books: eight novels; a memoir, A Better Woman; and a non-fiction book, an essay, On Beauty, published by Melbourne University Press. Susan has lived in the UK, France and Greece, but returned to Brisbane, Australia, in 2010. In 2019 she took off again to live on the Greek island of Kythera with her 85-year-old mother, Barbara. A memoir about their adventure is forthcoming.
Why do you tell stories? I think it’s mainly to do with trying to replicate the exquisite feeling of being “inside” a book that I first experienced as a child. Here is an alternative universe! Where anything might happen! I still believe it is the most magical thing—having the world in front of your eyes, and this whole other world in your head. I want my readers to experience that—the feeling that another human soul knows what it is to be alive, and full of the same joys and sorrows.
Describe your novel, From Where I Fell, in one sentence.
A funny, sometimes angry and sometimes challenging conversation between two women who never meet who tell each other the stories of their lives.
From Where I Fell is written in a contemporary version of the epistolary form. Can you comment on this form and why it appealed to you? Were there structural limitations/opportunities to the form?
I love novels in letters – from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road. But reading them is easier than writing them! And writing a whole novel in emails made it even trickier, because the language of emails is demotic, colloquial, and I wanted From Where I Fell to read like a novel, to be a novel, in that I wanted it to sit within a literary framework. So it was much harder, technically, than I first envisaged. The main limitation I had to get around was showing the two “voices” in the round, as it were, as in how they were in their lives, interacting with other people. Once I found a way into this, I was away—it was strangely freeing, too, this form, because it meant I could make it much more like a play, a dialogue between voices, which gave me a chance to branch off into broader philosophical questions about life.
As your character, Pamela, does in the novel, have you ever sent an email to someone in error? And if so, with what consequences?
Yes I have, and in fact that’s how I got the idea for the novel (although ideas for novels very often turn out to be just that – ideas – concepts that can’t be fleshed out by “real” characters). I was writing my good friend, a publisher in St Paul, Minnesota, but she had changed email servers, so my email ended up going to some random guy in San Jose, California. But the thing was, he wanted to be a writer (he was a teacher) and so he was really interested in the things I was talking about with my friend. How did I get published? Did I have an agent? Etc etc…so we ended up corresponding, and we are still in touch, some ten years later (he is finally writing his novel now he has retired). But other readers have similar stories – the most common one is sending an email to the person you are gossiping about! Email has been part of our lives for thirty years now, and most people have an email story.
I love the contrasting characters of Pamela and Chris. While Pamela lives with her heart on her sleeve, Chris is much more reticent and therefore more enigmatic. How did you come to know these women in your writing?
I think Pamela came first but, strangely, it’s often hard to remember the exact genesis of a novel. I know I wanted to write about divorce (my novel before this one, The Landing, was about divorce too, so you can put two and two together!) The reason I found the subject so interesting is because, as a society, we have come to think of divorce as a commonplace, you know, one-in-three-marriages end in divorce etc. But I think divorce is quite often the most painful thing anyone will experience in life, and you only have to look at the black count of horror stories in the Family Court to realise it has the potential to arouse our deepest and most primitive emotions. So I knew I wanted a character right in the middle of crisis and then – out of the blue –and this is why I share Eudora Welty’s belief believe that in writing, as in life, “the connections of all sorts of relationships and kinds lie in wait of discovery, and give out their signals to the Geiger counter of the charged imagination...”—the character of Chris arrived. What helped her arrive was a very old friend, whom I had lost contact with and hadn’t seen for over thirty years, sending a query message to my old website. She wrote: “Dear Sue, I wonder if you will remember me? I have never forgotten our youthful summer days.” She is Greek-American, and suddenly I had Chris, who had never forgotten her youthful summer days. Chris took over the novel really (I know other writer friends who say this but it had never happened to me before)—I can’t believe she is not out there somewhere, she was so alive to me.
The writing on (single) parenting is absolutely devastating and some of the most honest portrayals of parenthood/mothering I've come across in literature. Can you comment on this aspect of the novel?
Well, I am the mother of two sons, but thankfully I have never experienced anything as dramatic as Pamela. But my divorce did happen when they were teenagers, and I think any single mother knows how unruly life can be with teenage boys. But my sons went to school with other boys who ended up in real trouble: convictions, drugs, the whole catastrophe. I don’t think anywhere near enough attention has been drawn to mother-son domestic violence either so I wanted to explore that. I think mothers in general carry a lot of guilt, and when you add shame to that (if you are experiencing a feeling of being frightened of your own son), I think that makes for the tension of fiction. I know some readers found Pamela whiney and a bit of a pain in the bottom, but I have seen from friends and from my time as a working journalist that for many mothers guilt and shame can be toxic, which can make some mothers very whiney.
When and where do you write?
I write best in the mornings. I’ve never been a late night person even when I was a young student. I love morning, and the false-dawn sense it brings of everything being unspoiled—at least until 11 am when you realise everything is going wrong! I can write pretty much anywhere, except in public, in noisy cafes or restaurants. To me, the act of creation is very private, and having someone watch me do it, would be like someone watching me shower! I am the kind of writer, too, who gains sustenance from being elsewhere, out of my normal environment, so I often write best when I am in Greece, or France or somewhere far away where we can no longer go, because Australia is now a hermit kingdom!
What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing?
Coffee, dreaming, walking.
Name three books that you couldn’t live without.
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (the perfect novel); Middlemarch by George Eliot (the whole of life, writ large) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.”)
What book are you embarrassed to admit that you’ve never read (but hope to one day)?
You know I have never read Catcher in the Rye? I don’t know how I failed to, but I did.