COVER STORY Author Amanda Lohrey is fascinated by contemporary life. Luckily, for her readers, she’s more than happy to pass on what she uncovers
Acclaimed author Amanda Lohrey always keeps her ear to the ground. Not necessarily to find inspiration for her work, she is simply fascinated by contemporary life. Luckily, for her readers, she’s more than happy to pass on what she uncovers
An interview with Tasmanian author Amanda Lohrey makes for a fascinating journey inside a literary mind thoroughly intrigued by the modern world. The award-winning novelist candidly shares her advice for budding writers – marry a dentist, for a start – and explains why she has zero interest in period fiction or fantasy Lohrey’s new novel, A Short History of Richard Kline, sets out to challenge readers’ long-held attitudes and beliefs. Lohrey, too, in person, has a way of inspiring a rethink on a range of topics, simply through her curious nature. While generous with her responses, Lohrey manages to turn the tables, drawing information from her inquisitor. It makes for a thought-provoking conversation.
She is not only an engaging storyteller with a sharp sense of humour. Her good-natured probing also challenges others to look more closely at their life choices and ideas. It is easy to surmise Lohrey is constantly digging for new literary material in her everyday encounters, although she says this is not exactly the case.
“If you are at a dinner party or wherever you are, as a writer you’re always switched on,” she says. “Just sitting in a cafe eavesdropping is enough to get me going. It’s not that you’re looking for material but you’ve got your antennae out. You’re just curious about people.”
Lohrey, 67, who won the Patrick White Award for her 30 years of literary achievement in 2012, is best known for her novels The Philosopher’s Doll and Camille’s Bread. She lives in the tiny seaside hamlet of Falmouth on the East Coast with her husband, former Labor MP Andrew Lohrey. Despite her seclusion she remains highly engaged in politics, a topic on which she regularly writes for various publications (a handy way to top up the bank balance in between books, she says).
At the time of her interview with Tas-Weekend, Lohrey was about to fly to Canberra to interview Greens senator Scott Ludlam for The Monthly magazine. Her 31-year-old daughter, who is a lawyer with the Immigration Department, had just had a baby and grandmotherly duties were also on the agenda.
A Short History of Richard Kline is Lohrey’s first full-length novel in just over a decade. While highly acclaimed by her peers, Lohrey’s talent has in the past flown to a certain extent under the mainstream radar. It seems likely this latest offering will change that, judging by the initial enthusiastic reviews.
In 2012, the judges for the $23,000 Patrick White Award – an annual literary prize– praised Lohrey for her “outstanding contribution to Australian literature as a fiction writer and her distinguished work as an essayist”. “In her fiction, Amanda Lohrey creates memorable characters shaped by moral or ethical dilemmas and questions,” the judges said.
In the 11-year interlude between the publication of The Philosopher’s Doll and A Short History the author has released a selection of short stories titled Reading Madame Bovary and a novella, Vertigo. In Vertigo, Lohrey’s gripping description of a bushfire that rips through the coastal setting was inspired by the 2006 Scamander fire, which threatened townships including Falmouth. Lohrey’s heart-pounding account of the bushfire and the speed with which it takes hold is testament to her ability to create a visual landscape with words.
The new novel follows central character Richard Kline, a successful computer programmer, as he struggles to find a fix for the terrifying feeling of meaninglessness that keeps nagging at him despite what could be seen as a fulfilling life. The reader is taken along for the ride as Kline reluctantly experiments with therapy and goes against his pragmatic upbringing by taking up meditation. His experiences range from uncomfortable to heartbreaking, with a few hilarious moments in between, which anyone who has felt out of place at a large spiritual gathering will enjoy.
So rich in detail are Lohrey’s descriptions of the various moments in Kline’s spiritual journey, they seem surely based on personal experience. The author says, in fact, the inspiration and anecdotes came largely from men she has spoken with over the years including friends, acquaintances and interviewees. Lohrey’s cringe-inducing portrayal of a road-rage incident that proves the tipping point in Kline’s midlife panic was based on a friend’s experience.
“I wanted the central character to be a male because I think the midlife crisis hits men more often and more hard than it does women,” Lohrey says. “Whether that’s to do with the very prolonged absorption in women raising children or whether it’s the fact some women still have lower expectations in terms of thinking their career is going to bring them everything.”
The book was about 10 years in the making and Lohrey admits there were several false starts before she was convinced it could work.
“Every book is abandoned at least once – ask any writer,” she says, adding she persisted because of her belief the modern-day spiritual dilemma had never been adequately explored in a novel.
“In the late ’90s, I interviewed a scientist for a non-fiction project and he told me he’d been a Buddhist since he was 18 and he meditated twice a day,” Lohrey says. “Then at the end of the interview he said, ‘But you can’t print that because I will lose my scientific credibility with my peers’. Within a year I interviewed another man who was a public intellectual I can’t name and we were talking about philosophy and he said he’d had a profound spiritual experience, unconnected to any religion. And then he said, ‘Please don’t print that’. It was almost the same words. He said, ‘People will think I’m flaky’.”
As Hobart-based novelist Robert Dessaix once noted to Lohrey: “There used to be a sexual closet, now I think the last closet is the spiritual one.”
She wanted to explore the idea of intelligent would-be atheists desperately searching for greater meaning but fearing derision and being dismissed as “an ageing hippie”. Spirituality was a subject she touched on in The Philosopher’s Doll, which is about a professional couple struggling with the question of when to have children.
“I’ve always been fascinated by it [spirituality] because I had a religious upbringing,” says Lohrey, who attended a Catholic school in Hobart. “You never lose that interest in the big questions. I thought, ‘This is an area that’s never been covered by the novel’.”
Lohrey is averse to discussing her beliefs relating to religion and spirituality, opting to wrap the questions up in novel form and watch with interest the varied responses. “I’ve had a few experiences of my own, which I try to avoid talking about because I’m not in the business of being any kind of pundit or giving advice,” she says. “The good thing about writing fiction is you can explore something without taking up a definite position and you can explore opposing opinions and even hold them yourself. You’re not preaching, you’re not writing a polemic.”
Lohrey says she learnt the art of meditation in her 20s, although it would be another decade or so before she took it up in earnest.
“I was very stressed. I had a small child, living in Sydney was stressful, I was trying to write with a full-time job and I thought it (meditation) would give me more energy, I’d need less sleep,” she says.
While some people describe profound experiences arising from meditation, Lohrey says hers were of a more subtle nature, impossible to fully describe.
“I had some kind of epiphanies, feelings of connectedness with another level of reality, very hard to define,” she says.
“One of the reasons I wanted to write this novel was I thought, ‘How much of this can you put into words? Very little’. But you can tell a story and that’s why I used the experiences of some men I met through meditation.”
Lohrey expects to cop some criticism for the novel’s exploration of the New Age and “alternate religion”, as well as the relative lack of insight into how Kline’s wife feels throughout his spiritual odyssey as she is forced to wait anxiously on the sidelines.
“She’s clearly a strong woman but it’s not about her, it’s just him,” Lohrey says. “You are on the journey, you have to fix the problem. But I’m waiting for the reviews that have problems about all these things.”
Lohrey, born Amanda Howard, grew up in what she describes as a “very militant Labor family”, surrounded by her father’s wharfie workmates and trade unionists. She joined the Labor Party as a student, when the University of Tasmania was a “ferment” of political activism.
“This was the ‘60s, this was the height of student activism and there were no shrinking violets in those days, I can tell you,” she says. These experiences influenced Lohrey’s debut novel The Morality
of Gentlemen in 1984, considered a classic Australian political novel, although its narrative structure has been described as challenging. It was through Labor she met her husband, who was elected into State Parliament in 1972 in the division of Wilmot (now the seat of Lyons).
He served as Speaker and Environment Minister before he was defeated in 1986 and has since become an environmental activist. Although no longer a member of a political party, Lohrey Is as passionate about politics as ever. She cannot understand why some people have no interest in the goings-on in Canberra, which she describes as eminently more fascinating than any fiction.
“I grew up in a family with strong political views and it gets into your blood,” she says, as the latest leadership speculation emerges from within the Coalition. “I’m more curious about people who aren’t interested in politics. It’s one of life’s great dramas. Just look at what’s happening with Tony Abbott.”
Lohrey has been writing since childhood, when she penned short stories. She studied Arts with Honours in Politics at the University of Tasmania before taking up a scholarship at the University of Cambridge in England at 21. “I was supposed to do a PhD in politics and instead I wrote a very bad novel,” Lohrey says in her charmingly self-deprecating style. “I didn’t ever publish that novel, I wasn’t that stupid.”
She and Andrew spent a year in the US before moving to Sydney for several years, where Lohrey taught writing at the University of Technology. She enjoys working with young writers and is keen to dispel what she sees as some myths about the art of creating a novel.
“It’s a form of play for grown-ups, it’s not some terribly high-falutin elevated thing,” Lohrey says.
Importantly, she believes there is no need for writers to panic if they are yet to decide on an ending. “If you know the ending when you start, why would you write the novel? You’re bored already,” she says. “There’s always a point about three-quarters of a way through one book and you start thinking about the next one and that’s when you know you’ve almost finished what you’re working on.”
On that note, Lohrey refuses to be drawn on the subject matter for the next novel she is working on. “It’s a superstition writers have. If you talk about it, it won’t happen,” she says.
Throughout the conversation with TasWeekend a few topics emerge that could be suitable fodder for Lohrey’s treatment. The image of 60-something-year-old men pushing strollers as a result of their second marriages to younger women is one that elicits a hearty chuckle from the novelist.
One thing is certain, the next book will also be based in the present. In her delightfully direct manner, Lohrey dismisses the notion of pursuing the goldmine genre of fantasy or a period novel. She reveals she has turned down commissions for non-fiction works including biographies. She has no interest in starting work on a book if she already knows how it ends. “I can’t read a historical novel, it doesn’t matter how well it’s written,” she says. “The meaning of the word is ‘new’ and a novel should be new and fresh.”
Lohrey enjoys the work of Sydney journalist and novelist Malcolm Knox. “He writes about a certain subculture – affluent men on the North Shore – and it’s not my scene, but it’s his world and I learn a lot,” she says. “I’m always a bit baffled at why so many Australian writers write historical novels because it seems to me that what is happening now is so utterly fascinating and absorbing.
“I don’t really have a target audience except people like me who are fascinated by contemporary life.”
I GREW UP IN A FAMILY WITH STRONG POLITICAL VIEWS AND IT GETS INTO YOUR BLOOD. I’M MORE CURIOUS ABOUT PEOPLE WHO AREN’T INTERESTED IN POLITICS. IT’S ONE OF LIFE’S GREAT DRAMAS