Charlotte Wood: ‘Shut up and listen to people who know what they’re talking about’

Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Charlotte Wood. The writer, 59, is the author of 10 books, including The Natural Way of Things, which won the 2016 Stella Prize. Her latest novel, Stone Yard Devotional, has been short-listed for this year’s Booker (the winner will be announced November 12).

Charlotte Wood: “People don’t realise the resilience required to believe that what you’re doing as a writer is worthwhile.”Credit: Louie Douvis

MONEY

What might readers not know about the financial realities of being a writer in Australia? I don’t think they know how hard it is to keep yourself going mentally and physically. Or the resilience required to believe that what you’re doing is worthwhile, when the culture tells you it’s worthless. The American critic Jerry Saltz has said how he wants all artists to make money, even the bad ones. I love the generosity of that. Why not? If the bad artist makes money, what does it take from you?

And I’m sure there are a lot of bad CEOs out there … Exactly. I just wish, as a culture, that we valued the arts more. When I tell people, “I get paid 10 per cent of the cover price – so if a book sells for $25, I get $2.50,” a lot of people are incredibly shocked.

When you won the Stella Prize in 2016, some winners had previously split their prize money with the other short-listed authors. You claimed the entire cash prize. Why? For lots of reasons, but I was really scared to do it publicly …

What were you scared of? Being seen as greedy. Selfish. I also really respected anyone who’d been so generous as to give some of their money away. But I also thought, this was the first time there was a women’s prize where we attached a lot of money, and we immediately established a tradition of publicly giving that money away. Men had not done that.

You were wary of the potential reaction. What was the reality? Incredible. In my speech, I basically said, “I know there’s this beautiful tradition of people giving some of the money away. And I’m not going to do that.” And there was this roar of approval. It might be a lot of money, but it’s a lot of years without. And you pay tax on that money.

The winner of the Booker Prize gets £50,000 (about $98,000). What would you do with the money? When that question comes up, I always feel like saying, “What do you do with your salary?” [Laughs] Pay my mortgage. Buy food. That’s what I’ll be doing.

BODIES

After writing the first draft of Stone Yard Devotional, you and two of your sisters received breast cancer diagnoses within six weeks of each other. How’s your body now? My body’s fine. And my body was lucky in the scheme of things. Of the three of us, I had the least invasive cancer and the least invasive treatment. Now we’re all on drugs. I’m on them for five years; they’re on them for 10. Cancer is so common, especially breast cancer. One in seven women get it, which I did not realise.

At the same time, was it still shocking? Oh, it was terribly shocking. It was devastating. Both our parents had died of cancer in their 50s; now we were in our 50s. But we don’t have any family history of breast cancer, and we don’t have the genetic kind. We had to all have genetic testing for all the mutations. We don’t have any of them. It was just bad luck.

How has all of this changed your relationship with – or regard for – your body? When you’re out the other side, you want to say, “It’s over.” It’s not over. I have to take drugs that are pretty shitty. Those drugs have given me osteoporosis, so I’m taking other drugs for that. Yet I’m very grateful that I’m fine and alive, and that my treatment was not invasive. My younger sister and I live within walking distance of a brilliant cancer hospital. We are really lucky we could take time off work. We had supportive partners. We had enough money. Now, I just want to be strong. I want to have strong bones.

POLITICS

Your novel The Natural Way of Things both reflected and affected conversations about sexual politics. Ten years on, what has changed? And what hasn’t? It’s different shades of misogyny now. That book focused on the blaming and shaming of women involved in sexual scandals, with or without consent, which seemed to be happening a lot around that time. But what happened to Brittany Higgins is really recent. There’s more lip service to supporting women who report sexual assault. But it seems to me that after #MeToo, a few men lost something, and women didn’t gain anything. Even then, men might have lost a job for a while, then they got a better one later on.

What does Australia get right? We do elections well. We have strong democratic institutions and strong community faith in – and approval of – those institutions, like the Electoral Commission and the electoral system generally. And there is really broad approval for compulsory voting, which has saved us – so far – from the madness and horror of what is happening to the US.

What does Australia get wrong? How we’ve exported our refugee processing model overseas. And I’m so ashamed about the referendum result. As Melissa Lucashenko said, the referendum proved that you can’t give a blackfella anything, even when it’s nothing.

If you ran for office, what would be your platform? Climate change. Giving Aboriginal people a voice. Two really f---ing basic things. Politics pays so little attention to people who know what they’re talking about; it just fills me with despair. So my position would be: everyone shut up and listen to people who know what they’re talking about. Then do what they say.

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