Heather Rose reveals the turning point that shaped her new book
After witnessing the monumental work of performance artist Marina Abramovic, Stella Prize-winning novelist Heather Rose made a mighty bold move
Fresh from a literary win as dazzling as her smile, Heather Rose exudes joy when she opens the front door of her Kingston Beach home. Such is her elation, you would swear the Hobart novelist had just won the lottery. And, in a way, she has. Being awarded the prestigious Stella Prize for The Museum of Modern Love, a novel inspired by performance artist Marina Abramovic, brings the author a greatly expanded readership well beyond her loyal Tasmanian fan base. That’s a gift in itself. Rose is also relishing the sense of encouragement imbued by the award, and the pleasure and pride of bringing it home. “The Tasmanian community has been so supportive of my work,” she says. “They have been so loyal and warm towards it, and it has been my biggest market by far.”
Beyond that, crucially, the $50,000 prize money from last month’s award, which is open to fiction and non-fiction by Australian women, gives the former advertising copywriter and businesswoman time to work on her next novel. With the additional support of her first Australia Council grant, this year Rose is devoting herself full-time to fiction for the first time. “What I am loving is the incredible thinking time that I have,” she says. “This year I can actually do my research first, and with the luxury of time, I can read really widely and gestate ideas before I get to the page.”
It is here, in a cosy downstairs nook of her two-storey 1920s weatherboard home, that Rose does a lot of her reading. Piles of books and journals are stacked on the coffee table, including the autumn edition of the literary journal Meanjin, with its coverline: “Is writing still a way of life?” The question seems academic: for Rose, the dream is clearly alive. Wearing a long knit draped over loose black separates, the author radiates contentment as she pours tea – after deftly positioning the tea tray among all the books – and proceeds to tell lively tales about the dreadful (but, you gather, also marvellous) difficulty of writing The Museum of Modern Love. It is the 52-year-old author’s seventh book, and she tussled with it over 11 years, breaking away at times to complete her novel The River Wife, which was published in 2009, and to cowrite three successful children’s novels with fellow Hobart author Danielle Wood under the pen name Angelica Banks. She wrote her first novel, 1999’s White Heart, after moving home to Hobart after years working in Melbourne, and published her second, The Butterfly Man, in 2005.
This year, the mother of three has broken a decades-long practice of writing late at night whenever she could – she would often start at 9pm and write until 2am or 3am – to begin her writing day pre-dawn. She pauses for breakfast with her 17-yearold daughter Belle, the youngest of her children (her sons Alex, 28, and Byron, 21, live in San Francisco and Sydney, respectively) and then writes until mid-afternoon, when Belle gets home from school. It’s often only then, says Rose, with one of her frequent bursts of laughter, she finally gets out of her pyjamas. Sometimes she returns to her laptop after dinner for a third session.
Rose, who grew up at nearby Blackmans Bay and credits her parents for fostering her love of literature, says Tasmania is a wonderful place to be a writer. She has always made time for writing alongside raising children and working. In 1999, she cofounded advertising agency Coo’ee Tasmania, which later became the award-winning Green Team Australia – Australia’s first green advertising agency – and later a boutique consultancy. She won a Telstra Tasmania businesswoman of the year award in 2004, chaired the Festival of Voices from 2008 and 2012, and was an inaugural director of the Macquarie Point Corporation from 2013 until last year.
Over the years, she has also immersed herself in and drawn sustenance from what she describes as Hobart’s remarkably nurturing creative community.
“The many gifts of living in a community of such talented people are almost incalculable,” she says. “I have so many friends who are really talented writers, artists, sculptors, actors, actresses and filmmakers. And to live with people who are all going through the same creative processes – just with different outputs – has just been so inspiring. We know each other, we applaud each other, we celebrate each other and the warmth and connection in this community between artists is spectacular.”
Rose needed all the stamina and support she could muster to get The Museum of Modern Love, which she describes as a particularly challenging work that forced her to become a better writer, over the line. Her fascination with the woman at its centre, New York-based Serbian artist Marina Abramovic, began at the National Gallery of Victoria about 12 years ago when she was there to see a Dutch Masters exhibition.
In another gallery space, she came across a curious black and white photo relating to a 1974 Abramovic performance entitled
Rhythm 0. The photo showed 72 objects laid out on a table at the original Naples performance, when Abramovic had invited audience members to do whatever they wanted to her body with the items, which included a feather boa, a razor, a rose and a loaded pistol. “I was thinking, If I’m meant to live, I live; if I don’t, I don’t,” the artist later commented.
The descriptor next to the photo also mentioned Abramovic’s epic 1988 break-up piece with her romantic and creative partner Ulay, when they turned their separation into a performance – walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China to embrace and say goodbye.
“And I thought, ‘Who does that?’,” Rose says. “As a writer, my imagination went, ‘What happened to you that you have become that person?’ And then, of course, it just became more interesting because her life is just so interesting.”
Rose had her muse. But at this stage Abramovic was just that, an inspiring real-life character on whom she was basing a fictional one. It was not until 2010, when Rose flew to New York to see the breakthrough work The Artist Is Present, that she realised she had a creative problem on her hands.
Every day for 75 days, people queued for the chance to sit on a chair opposite Abramovic in silence in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa). Pale and beatific, the artist looked into the faces of strangers, this confronting act of intimacy – of being “witnessed”, as Rose describes it – causing many of the sitters to break down. At times, the artist also wept. The show became a global phenomenon, attracting more than 1500 sitters and a further 850,000 visitors. It also turned Abramovic from a high art icon into one of the most famous living artists in the world.
All of which was confronting on multiple levels to Rose, who joined the long queues to eventually sit four times. Blown away by the intensity of the encounters, she realised she could no longer keep fictionalising this supremely powerful and charismatic being. Her novel demanded the real thing.
“I had that moment in my third sitting where I thought, ‘I’m going to have to see if she would be willing to be herself in the book’,” Rose says. “It was just so evident that I couldn’t do it any other way. I had no idea how she would receive the request, which I sent off to her curator and gallerist. I mean, I’m some little writer from Tasmania and she had no sense of the quality of my work, but she unequivocally agreed, no caveats.
“And then I realised what I’d done, because then I had a very much alive, very powerful Serbian woman at the centre of my book. It was quite paralysing at times, the sense of responsibility to convey both the emotional intent of her work and the historical content of it. And I think it also meant I couldn’t give it up. I could not confess to her that I had let it go. Marina Abramovic does not abandon things.”
When she learnt Abramovic, by then aged almost 70, would be coming to Hobart for the opening of a retrospective of her work at Mona during 2015’s Dark Mofo festival, it felt both serendipitous and somewhat alarming for Rose. As Mona’s inaugural writer-inresidence, she was well-positioned to meet the artist in person.
“But I really, really didn’t want to meet her,” she says. “The prospect of it felt like breaking the fourth wall. Still, to this day, I have only met her for about 30 seconds. I was introduced by a mutual friend at the Mona opening, and Marina was lovely, so warm, and said, ‘You must come with us’. I had had a lot of champagne because it was so exciting having her show here, I knew all the pieces, but meeting her, I just had to let them go.”
She did, however, send her a copy of the novel when it was published last year, and received an emphatic thumbs-up. Which is also how Australian reviewers received it, along with the judges of the Stella Prize, which was created five years ago partly to redress the male dominance of the Miles Franklin Literary Award (both awards are named after late Australian writer Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, best known for her novel My Brilliant Career).
Through a masterful construction and meditative prose, Rose places Abramovic at the heart of The Museum of Modern Love and builds around her a cast of characters who are all suffering in their own ways and drawn to the MoMa performance. There, troubled film composer Arky Levin, recently widowed teacher Jane Miller and others converge, interact and change. Hovering over that centre is a vivid portrait of the artist, and even the consciousness, possibly ghost, of Abramovic’s authoritarian mother.
If The Artist is Present was Abramovic’s breakthrough show, coming after decades of devotion to her craft, then The Museum
of Modern Love, for which she wrote 70 drafts, is Rose’s version of that. And she couldn’t be happier about the recognition.
“I have only ever wanted to be a writer,” she says. “Writing is by far the hardest thing that I do. I have run businesses. I have built festivals. I’m a mother of three children. All of those things were spectacularly difficult, but writing is the most difficult for me. It’s so challenging and that’s why I love it.”