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I am in love with Toni Jordan\u2019s house the moment I enter: climbing the stairs toward her spacious, light-filled lounge, each nook and crevice offers a small army of books. I am half-asleep, having just returned from holiday, and feel I must be dreaming: this is the platonic ideal of a writer\u2019s home.<\/p>\n
I confess to Jordan that part of the reason I am still asleep is not only jet lag but the fact of having read her incredible new novel, Tenderfoot: it kept me up all night.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s very kind,\u201d she laughs. She speaks in tidy, concentrated bursts that speak to her life as a former scientist (and current practiced interviewee). The process of writing the book, she says, was a \u201cslow burn\u201d.<\/p>\n
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Melbourne writer Toni Jordan.Credit: Jason South<\/p>\n
During the 2018 Sydney Writers\u2019 Festival, Jordan, whose 2012 debut Addition was an international bestseller and was long-listed for the Miles Franklin award, spoke about her mother.<\/p>\n
Later, in an ABC interview, she reflected publicly on her family and childhood. It prompted her publisher, Hachette, to ask if she wanted to write something about her life.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mum died, a few years ago, in 2018. I couldn\u2019t have written Tenderfoot while she was alive. I don\u2019t know how she would have handled it. She certainly read my novels. I remember when she read Addition, which is in the first person, she said to me, Who\u2019s she talking to, love? And I thought, hang on, who is she talking to? There\u2019s something about first-person fiction that always makes people think it\u2019s you. And this certainly has intersections with my life. It\u2019s different from what I\u2019ve done before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tenderfoot is set during a period of immense change in Australian society. Gough Whitlam is in power, but it is the life of its young narrator, Andie Tanner, in 1970s Queensland that provides the emotional locus of the story. She is a girl struggling with her mother\u2019s separation from her father \u2013 a greyhound trainer \u2013 and growing up in an insular community during the Joh Bjelke-Petersen years. Andie provided Jordan with a way of accessing the world she wanted to capture: a vanished childhood, a vanished country.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all about conjuring that feeling up. It\u2019s like method acting. You sit down and you go, today, I\u2019m a 12-year-old girl: what is that like? What am I interested in? I think people underestimate the incredibly rich inner lives children have. I remember vividly those childhood feelings of being utterly powerless, of having no agency over your life. Anything your parents said, it was something you had to do. One of the things I\u2019m so happy about, getting older, is that you have more control over your life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jordan edits as she writes, spending the first hour of her writing looking back over the previous day\u2019s writing. She describes trying to capture the \u201cintegrity of memory\u201d. She has never done anything quite \u201cso close, that\u2019s quite so inspired by my own life\u201d.<\/p>\n
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Jordan\u2019s first degree was in molecular biology. For a long time, she worked as a research protein chemist. The novel\u2019s voice, she says, took a few months to settle on; the chemistry fiction requires, it seems, comes from a different place. She sees writing as less front-brain oriented, akin to performing \u201clittle experiments on myself\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m fundamentally lazy \u2013 which is really a superpower, I think. Because I don\u2019t have the energy to stuff around. I played with narrating it in a straight child voice. I played with an adult voice, looking back. And then I tried to make it fluid, sometimes in the same paragraph. I was thinking about books that do that kind of graceful shift in perspective, the way Emma does. That fluidity of the perspective of the voice was the hardest thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Has she ever tried writing with more planning involved?<\/p>\n
\u201cAbsolutely shit for books! The goal of characters and fiction is to be at once surprising and inevitable,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Planning, she says, resulted in books that were \u201cstilted and predictable\u201d. Jordan attempted working on two novels according to a plan; she abandoned both. One, she says, she \u201ccarved up\u201d, taking bits and using them elsewhere. \u201cThe other one\u2019s just too bad,\u201d she says resignedly.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes I think, as I go along, books get harder. Because you pick the low-hanging fruit first. Whereas this was really a joyous book to write.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Jordan as a baby with her mother.Credit: Courtesy of Toni Jordan<\/p>\n
It\u2019s surprising to hear; Tenderfoot is often sad (I have a collection of empty bedside tissue boxes to prove it). Its affection for its characters stems, in part, from conveying the powerlessness and emotional opacity of adults. Andie\u2019s own attempts to exert control and to express her feelings put her at a great deal of risk.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of our sadnesses, I think,\u201d Jordan says, \u201care normal, quiet, human. And control is futile. It\u2019s an illusion to think that we have any at all, really. It\u2019s something I\u2019ve always wrestled with. The more I look over all of my novels, all the way back to Addition, almost every single one is about control.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s something that just keeps coming back. It\u2019s why I still love writing fiction. Because the challenge is to get out of my own way. I\u2019ve got to sit down every day and understand that I\u2019m skiing down a mountain with a blindfold on and give myself over to it. That\u2019s the only way it works.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Andie\u2019s adult self looks back and reflects on her childhood, she becomes conscious of the fallibility of memory: how memories can become true by virtue of being repeated and relived until they come to seem true. It\u2019s an apt metaphor, I suggest,for the process of creating fiction: making something that is both entirely real and entirely false at once.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI think that\u2019s absolutely right. Memory is something that I\u2019ve always felt doesn\u2019t actually exist. We have an idea that memory is sitting there waiting for us. But really it\u2019s constructed and new every time we demand something of it. And that can change over time. It does change over time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having written a novel that hews so close to her life, does Jordan ever worry about having used up most of her low-hanging fruit?<\/p>\n
She smiles archly.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really interesting that you ask that,\u201d she says. \u201cBecause the thing that I\u2019m working on now is a love letter to fiction. I\u2019m trying to resurrect a dead person, reimagining their life. Someone who died but shouldn\u2019t have. It\u2019s doubling down on that idea of the power of fiction. It\u2019s about fiction being the antidote to that tragedy.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of novels that I\u2019ve read lately, by writers I admire, there\u2019s a feeling that fiction has run its course. I never feel that. It\u2019s the most powerful thing. \u201d<\/p>\n
Toni Jordan\u2019s Tenderfoot (Hachette Australia) is out now.<\/p>\n