Author Alexandra Joel on her fascinating life
Author Alexandra Joel opens up on a childhood spent among princesses and popes, plus the loss and grief that sent her on a new career path.
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Some authors find their job torturous. Others dash off novels as if the stories have been sitting there, urgently waiting to be told, all their lives. Alexandra Joel, on the other hand, makes the process sound as effortless and whimsical as a stroll through the garden.
“I’m like a story-catcher,” she enthuses. “It’s like I’m out there with my invisible butterfly net and sometimes I’m lucky enough for one to flutter in. I’ll think, ‘I have to unravel this’. There’s a mystery, a secret, so off I go and once I’m in the thick of things I find it so exciting.”
As she celebrates the publication of her second novel, The Royal Correspondent, Joel concurs that if lightness and delight inform her writing process, it’s a multi-layered life rich in experiences and understanding which both anchors and drives her narratives.
As the daughter of the late politician, journalist and PR supremo Sir Asher Joel, the 60-something mother-of-two grew up hobnobbing with princesses, presidents and popes (or, at the very least, watching from the wings). But if her childhood provided a characterful and colourful start, her own life and career have augmented that process as she progressed from Washington DC intern to celebrated magazine editor then psychotherapist. As she says, it’s a life “bathed in stories” and now – as with her first novel, The Paris Model – she’s parlaying those tales into yet another career which promises to be just as satisfying as the last.
“Writing is like being a skydiver,” Joel says from her Double Bay home where she lives with her husband and former publishing boss Philip Mason. “It’s like stepping out of a plane and hurtling through space. I’ve usually worked out the plot just to the point where the protagonist is in a whole world of trouble and I’ve no idea how she or he is going to get out of it. It’s both terror and joy.”
While her first novel was inspired by a story told to her by a good friend, this time around Joel takes flickers of her own family life and weaves it into a tale involving the Royal Family. Blaise Hill, a feisty young journalist from one of Sydney’s toughest neighbourhoods, is dispatched to London at the dawn of the swinging Sixties to report on Princess Margaret’s marriage. Just as family secrets, betrayal and unrequited love have made The Crown such a compelling television series, Joel’s glamorous and intriguing blend of media and monarchy looks set to deliver her another bestseller. As she delightedly points out, the rights to the novel, which is dedicated to her father, have already been sold in North America.
“I was really interested in this contrast between someone born at the bottom of the heap and someone who was at the pinnacle of power. Of course, that’s what happened to dad. Who would’ve thought that an Enmore boy who left school at 14 would end up dining with the Queen, lunching with Princess Margaret and walking with presidents and popes!”
That she is now in what she calls the “third stage” of her life makes such success all the more thrilling. “I’m not in the first flush of youth so to have my first novel be so well-received was a joyous experience for me,” she says. “I’ve learnt to go into things without expectation because it’s the process that’s the most important. However, when America wanted to buy it, and then it was in [bookstore] Barnes and Noble and then it was being translated into various languages and there was a hard-fought three-way auction going for it to be published in Romania, it was really exciting.”
The truth is, Joel’s own story is as full of light, shade and reinvention as one of her plots. The first girl to be born into the Joel family for 70 years, she was christened Susan Lea but changed it to the regal Alexandra (her father’s middle name was Alexander) soon after leaving school. After gaining an honours degree in Government at the University of Sydney she worked for a Congressman in America before returning to Australia to work in regional television in Queensland. Writing for publications as diverse as The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald and Cleo saw her appointed editor of Harper’s Bazaar then Portfolio, the nation’s first magazine for working women.
As she says, her generation was at the forefront of change and she’s glad that women are now CEOs and board directors and, as such, are written about in mainstream media. “We had no role models so we had to make it up as we went along,” she says. “I do feel incredibly grateful and so fortunate that I’ve been able to keep working in such stimulating and creative ways but the true joy is seeing my daughter and her friends forging ahead without so many of the inherent obstacles my generation of women faced.”
With her warmth and effervescence – not to mention the opportunities afforded by her family and connections – it’s natural to assume Joel has had a blessed life. But at the same time as she was blazing a trail for women in the workplace, she was not only raising children, but coping with the devastating loss of her firstborn daughter.
Joel has never spoken about the sudden death of her middle child, Marina, born after son Bennett, now 34, and before Arabella, 29. In fact, when the newspapers prepared to report the story it was her father who stepped in and persuaded editors to respect the privacy of his heartbroken daughter and son-in-law.
It’s the only time in our interview when her smile fades. “As you can imagine, there’s nothing more devastating than losing a child. She was young and perfect and died suddenly of an unknown condition so it was a tremendous shock,” says Joel, who was still breastfeeding her baby daughter when she died aged six weeks.
Suffering such a catastrophic event led, circuitously, to her second career as a psychotherapist. She says her loss influenced her decision to work as the president of the Royal Hospital for Women Foundation which, in turn, led to her wanting to help other families who had gone through trauma.
“I knew the meaning of despair yet I also knew about hope and the resurrection of one’s spirits. There’s an expression in therapy called ‘the wounded healer’ which I think is very beautiful,” says Joel, who particularly enjoyed her work with adolescents. “Often they’re very oppositional but we got on like a house on fire. It’s such a privilege to be able to work with a young person and empower them to take the right fork in the road. It’s the difference between a life well-lived and potential disaster.”
Joel’s own life and work have taught her two other valuable skills: to suspend judgment, and that things are not always as they seem. Her father helped organise the visits to Australia of Princess Alexandra of Kent, former US President Lyndon B. Johnson and Pope Paul VI and she appreciates, more than most, the flip side of a public persona. “I grew up in a situation where you see behind the curtain and you sometimes see the worst side – the humanity and vulnerability in people. I also saw that in my psychotherapy - it’s so easy to form a view that everything is shiny and complete.”
A deep fascination with people and history – along with a desire to be more available to her family – saw Joel springboard out of psychotherapy and back into writing. She also had a fabulous story to tell – that of her great grandmother who left behind a marriage and child to run away with a Chinese fortune teller called Zeno the Magnificent. Building on her father’s research, she began investigating and discovered the couple had completely reinvented themselves to become the toast of London. “They were complete impostors yet they led this extraordinary life,” she says, laughing.
That book, Rosetta: A Scandalous True Story, not only fulfilled her father’s desire that the story be told but gave Joel the confidence to turn her hand to fiction after an earlier foray writing books on the history of fashion. As she says: “I thought that since my grandmother made up an entire life, maybe I could channel her!”
While the pandemic has thwarted her trips overseas to immerse herself in the places that provide a backdrop to her stories, she still tries to walk in the footsteps of her characters as much as possible.
“I have this universe, which only exists in my head, and all these characters talking to me,” she says. “Sometimes I can be writing until 4pm and realise I haven’t stopped for anything to eat. For me it’s like cinema, like a film unspooling and I just have to catch it. I create these worlds and I just want to live in them.”
Originally published as Author Alexandra Joel on her fascinating life
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