I, much like everyone else, knew of Bri Lee from her fiery works of nonfiction, so I was keen to get my hands upon her debut novel, The Work. Between her freelance journalism, lecturing and completing her law PhD, advocating for law reform, her dedicated weekly newsletter ‘News and Reviews,’ and well as a sold out run of a book tour, and writing workshops, she managed to find time to allow me to interview her.
She arrived in a leopard print trench coat, dressing the part of the ‘sexy sexy funtime novelist,’ which in her panel ‘First Fictions,’ she says she now describes herself as. Before her publication of the multi-award winning memoir Eggshell Skull, she said she would give writing 10 years and then go back to law if she did not make it, and she has certainly found success.
Prior to her on stage appearance, I had the privilege of personally being in conversation with her, discussing the changes between her fiction and non-fiction works, how people now view her as a writer, her compartmentalized process of writing, and other questions floating around my mind due to The Work.
Date- Thursday, May 24, 2024
Location- Carriageworks
Firstly, thank you for speaking with me, congratulations on another bestseller. Do you feel like The Work was a coagulation of many of the topics you grapple with in your non-fiction pieces?
Coagulation is a great word. I actually chose fiction for this one, because I felt like I had questions that I wanted to ask and issues that I wanted to explore, that wouldn't necessarily have answers. I think people often come to nonfiction, and especially Bri Lee nonfiction expecting an argument, or a thesis statement or a conclusion of my point.
The questions I was interested in asking were about love and art, and there's no thesis statement about that. I wanted to create believable characters and put them into believable situations and then not only allow, but basically force the reader to decide for themselves what they thought.
You said in an article with the Guardian you were less nervous about this one because it was fiction, and there was less ‘you’ in it. Do you think your work is stuck being read through a particular perception or lens because of your non-fiction works?
I think women writers in particular because of sexism are more frequently read autobiographically. When I first started working on this book, like over five years ago, when I knew that there would be two characters on opposite sides of the planet, one would be Australian one would be American and I wanted that relationship to be heterosexual I made deliberately made the American character the woman and the Australian character, the man. I knew even then, that if I put an Australian female character in a book, lazy readers would assume that that was me.
We were briefly interrupted by Bri being delivered a coffee, which she is very appreciative of as she comes off the conclusion of her book tour.
So, a book is such a huge undertaking. Mine takes years and it's a very solitary craft, you know I don’t get to like jam with a band or rehearse with a cast, it's you. I have to choose subject matter that will sustain a multi year completely independent inquiry. My books are made of subject matter, that's really important to me, and that does not mean the characters in my book are autobiographical, and that sounds really simple.
I think there's a way in which the current media interest in the identity of creatives, as well as what they're creating, has sort of conflated where people are just as interested in the artist as they are in art. We are often not careful enough to keep those things separate in our habits as readers.
How do you think people have received this compared to your previous works?
I feel very lucky to have cultivated quite a direct relationship with a lot of my readers like in my own way and through my own work and through my own channels. News and Reviews is like a huge part of that, it's become the nexus point where all of my other kinds of presences in whatever way I engage with the public comes together.
The benefit of that is that I have the gift, basically, of hearing from my readers much more directly than I presume a lot of other writers do. Many, many other writers, of course, have their own communities in different ways, shapes and forms, but I don't have to guess. I know that my readers care about certain things and are interested in certain things and are gripped by certain things and not by others, because I talk to them every week. Whether about my stuff or other things that overlap with those things, and in that regard, in terms of having created art that resonates with people, it has done very well.
'The Work' appears on paper like a classic romance about a long distance relationship, yet it is a heavily layered nuanced piece addressing class, power, wealth, loss, love, and the list goes on. What was the root of the story, and how did the issues you speak on develop from it?
I start with questions or issues, and then character. Character has to come first, and it has to stay first. Almost every decision I made with this book, and I'm in the process of making my next one, is just informed by what I do and don't like as a reader. The only kind of criteria sheet I have is ‘What do I love reading and what do I hate or get frustrated with reading?’
To me, a smart reader, and I will always presume a reader is smart, can sniff from a mile away when a book is just an author using characters as like avatars. Not necessarily for them individually in an autobiographical sense, but so that they can make arguments, where ideas have been put ahead of characters.
For me, it started as Pat and Lally and always in every stage of the editing it had to come back to, ‘Are these real people? Would these real people behave with each other and with others in this way?’ If you get that right, then there is an opportunity to really affect people, because the art itself is good. If you just try to be kind of clever or insightful, but haven't actually made art good, first and foremost, it's neither project or work. That's how I feel.
The characterization in The Work, feels so fully formed particularly and is key to the story’s progression. How did you decide on each of their backgrounds and the dynamics that they create?
Well, part of the answer to this question is that on a very technical level, I wrote only on Pat sections for weeks or months at a time, and then I put the whole project away in a drawer and left it for weeks or months. Then when I came back to it, I would not read any Pat sections, and I would only work on Lally sections for weeks at a time. That went on for about two and a half years, and it required a lot of spreadsheets and graphs and tables.
At the end of two and a bit years, it was weaving them together, and making sure that the puzzle pieces joined up. The reason I did it like that was because I wanted them to have very distinct voices, even though it was in close third rather than first person. The only way I could have any confidence and I might be able to achieve that was by not working on them both at the same time in case they bleed into each other. What it means, I hope, is that the individuality or idiosyncrasies of these people sing, because they are not known to each other. Each character's perspective, and chapter is only theirs.
How did you find that process of compartmentalization? Did you follow the same kind of style with your previous books?
They are kind of crutches or approaches or tools or structures that I can trick myself into writing by using. What would be 10 years ago, almost, when I started writing what would turn into being Eggshell Skull, I couldn't write. I didn't know whether or not I was a writer in quote marks, and so I would put down the things I wanted to happen in any given chapter in really quick dot points, like top line dot points. Then I would just add one or two more sentences to each of those dot points. Then I would do that again, then I would just highlight them or remove the dot points, and then I had short parts that I could work with.
I don't know if you ever get to the stage where you are confident that you can do the thing. Most creatives, not just writers, most artists of any shape or form have the kind of tics and idiosyncrasies. For me, it's like, ‘Oh, my God, how do I silence the ego, and have some kind of pathway like steps I can follow to just try and get into it and forget my own insecurities and fears.’
I was going to ask, you lecture, research, do other writing and so much else. When you’re writing do you take time off or do you just manage it into your day to day tasks?
This is such a good question. I can do every single other type of writing I do, if it's for PhD, or for freelancing, or for advocacy things, whatever it is, I can do any of those anywhere, anytime. I can only work on a book in book time. It is so hard to hold hundreds of thousands of words and worlds in your mind.
Also, I think it's really important to be honest about this. I have not yet ever really been able to justify working on a book financially. This novel, The Work has been a sort of a breakthrough for me, like with the size of the tour and how well it's done. My absolute dream, my basically, one huge goal as a writer is to get to the stage where I can mostly write and do the other stuff a little bit. Whereas right now, I feel like I'm still mostly doing all the other stuff and a little bit writing. I'll spend the next decades trying to go from 80-20 to 20-80.
I’ve seen you talk a lot about cynicism compared to creativity, and the influence of looming capitalism? Do you ever find that the way can balance being cynical with your creative self?
For me, in most areas of my life, the pendulum is the balance. It's like that with, like, my body and food. It's like that with work. It's like that with travel. I don't know any of us, and I would love to meet someone who did figure out how to achieve this mythical balance. For me, it's more about avoiding unsustainable extremes. So, I am perpetually swinging between, like romanticism and cynicism. Which is okay, as long as you don’t go full ball in one direction or the other.
Readers may be surprised by The Work’s ending, and what is left unaddressed. Was this your original intention going into the book?
I did not fully know how the book would end until I was quite a way into the book because it had to be real to those characters. So I had three or four different options for, their professional endings, and their personal relationship endings, and whatever. Ultimately, I picked both the professional and the personal ones that I thought were most realistic. I very, very deliberately kept it so that, some questions are answered and some new questions are posed, so the reader is not only allowed, but kind of forced to decide what they think.
The original manuscript was significantly longer than the published version. Do you think you’ll ever return to Pat and Lally’s story?
They're cut for a reason. The original version of the manuscript was about twice as long, because a huge number of those words were from the supporting cast. One of the strengths, and one of the weaknesses of this book is that it has such a large supporting cast. I did that because as a reader, I don't appreciate contemporary fiction in which people don't really have parents or don't really have friends, because that's not realistic. It’s very convenient for a novelist to not have to build those out. Again, I think a smart reader can sniff when a supporting character is a kind of marionette, that is just a cardboard cutout, so that the protagonist can go on the exact journey that the author wants to push them on. A lot of the cut words are so much about their lives and their relationships.
Ultimately, if it does get optioned to screen, which is a huge if, that would be where I might go into that material. There's a way in which, if, hypothetically, it was a TV show, that would be when you build out a supporting cast, because you have that kind of course line. But, I had to do that drafting to get to the best trimmed version. I absolutely do not think that it was wasted.
Your own newsletter, ‘News and Reviews,’ and The Work explores whether the production of art can ever escape or balance the influence of capitalism and media? Can we ever have art for art's sake?
I don't think anything can be separated from capital. Nothing. In particular, the two things love and art are things people often want to believe or talk or act as though the pure versions of them, are the ones unaffected by money. And that is just an absolute farce. Everything is political. It is absurd to me to deny that. The only way we can be less uncomfortable by the ugly things in life is by staring at them and talking about them, and appreciating that most things in life are a spectrum rather than a binary.
In her SWF talk, she commented that only people with secret trust funds still believe in the purity of art and love.
What made you choose the world of art to write about? Did you have any previous knowledge or experience?
I knew that I wanted to set it in a creative industry, where neither of the characters themselves would be creatives, or the artists. I wanted to explore that question of like capital, rather than creativity and genius muse type stuff.
This was one was about the industry and the economy of it all. There's a way in which visual art in particular lends itself to this sort of old versus new dynamic. I knew that I wanted to have two characters and alternate perspectives and everything. I know more about visual art than I do about music or film and TV, as well as in music and film and TV there is not that old versus new set up that people can clearly understand.
You create characters who have such clear distinctions of good art and bad art in the novel, did you want to interrupt the ‘all art is subjective and can be enjoyed’ type of statements that usually accompany creativity?
What I love about Lally is that even in her opinions that some I agree with and some I disagree with, she is so fucking passionate and enthusiastic. In a way, although she is so cynical about her industry, I think there is romanticism in there. The sheer commitment to that world is something I really admire and respect, even though she like fucks shit up in general. I had questions when I began this work about love and about art. Lally’s opinions about what average art is versus bad art versus good, don't have answers, but by putting people like Pat and Lally together, you offer up many different options for readers to pick what that they agree with and that they disagree with.
I feel like you also called into question readers' complicity with the actions of Pat and Lally. Did you want readers to question how they would have reacted in similar situations?
I think of Charlotte Wood, who’s a huge kind of hero of mine, when she talks a lot about making decisions about which readers you want to alienate. Which readers are you willing to piss off and leave behind? With The Work I thought about that a lot.
There is a kind of reader, which is fine; all reading is good reading, I’m not gatekeepey about genre or anything. But there's a type of reader for better and worse, who wants a more passive reading experience. This book would presumably piss them off, it's not for them, and it cannot be for them and be for the people who want to meet a text in real life.
This structure was so important to me that not only do the chapters alternate between their two perspectives, but you never ever see the same event from both characters' perspectives; not an occurrence, not even a conversation. It forces the reader to imagine what Lally was thinking in Pat’s chapter and what he was thinking in Lally’s chapter. There are very deliberate gaps, like 50% of this novel is gaps.
You are dedicated to creating lifelike situations, and I saw you went to Antarctica for a new book. How was that?
That changed my life. I went for a month last year, for my next book which is well underway. I'm about to go totally offline in June to work on it.
It was such an immense, immense privilege to get there. It's very expensive to go, I had to get two separate grants to cover it. It was quite terrifying, frankly, because I had to commit to paying my own way, and hope that one came through and then both came through. It had a profound effect on me. The next one is a novel that is set there.
You’ve been writing and public speaking your whole career, what excites you most about the Sydney Writers Festival?
I love festival time, I'm really romantic about the art, the craft of it. I love being surprised, I love going along to a panel with like one or two I’ve heard of and one or two people I haven't, and keeping an open mind. That's what's so good about a festival, you're not just going to one author's book launch who you are already aware of, and you know what you're about to get. It's the unpredictable factor of good programming.
I saw Lauren Groff at Melbourne Writers Festival and I booked in and saw her again here, and I loved her just as much the second time.
Australia is so far away from the rest of the world. It's so expensive to get anywhere and to hear directly from your heroes, your creative heroes, I'm fangirl. I hope I am forever. I think it would be sad if you ever lose that feeling of excitement about people who are doing what you do fifty times better.
