Bri Lee’s first novel The Work is about ambition and passion

Why is so much of the sex in fiction so ordinary – especially for women? That was one of the key questions with which Bri Lee grappled while she was writing her first novel.

Bri Lee’s new book The Work is her debut as a novelist. Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

Why is so much of the sex in fiction so ordinary – especially for women? That was one of the key questions with which Bri Lee grappled while she was writing her first novel The Work.

“For the last 10 years, I have read a lot of fiction in which young women get f--ked badly by men, in particular old men. I was so incredibly tired of it,” says Lee, over a video call from her home in Kings Cross, Sydney.

 

“I felt very strongly that literature couldn’t be like this forever. It simply could not be this barren landscape for women, particularly heterosexual women. It’s quite critical in this relationship (between her main characters) that it’s full of ­really dynamic sex.”

The Work is Lee’s debut as a novelist but she is well-known as a writer, having rocketed to fame in mid-2018 when her memoir, Eggshell Skull, an account of her pursuit of justice as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, came out amid the fervour of the #Me Too and Let Her Speak movements.

Suddenly, a woman who imagined she would climb the ranks of a legal career had become famous as a writer.

“For most of the time that I was writing Eggshell Skull, it was before public allegations against Harvey Weinstein, before Me Too became mainstream in Australia, so nobody was more surprised than I was by its success,” Lee says. “I could just feel the buzz.

“I could feel something happening beyond just me, something that was more than the sum of its parts. If Eggshell Skull had come out just slightly too early, it would have been received as one woman’s story, rather than a story that illustrated issues of justice in a ­systematic way.”

She has since written a meditation on body image (Beauty, 2019) and another book on privilege (Who Gets to be Smart, 2021), and is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.

The Work is sparky, incisive and very steamy. Set between Sydney and New York, it traces a long-distance relationship between Lally, the owner of an art gallery in Chelsea, and Pat, a Queensland country boy turned antiques dealer. The couple tussles with the power, passion and egos that keep the art world turning, pushing their careers towards breaking point. When they find themselves in the same city, first by coincidence and then by meticulous planning, they sizzle with great chemistry and great sex.

Author Bri Lee says she is careful to keep her “real life” friends and family close. John Feder/The Australian.

“I’ve been working on this book for five years and the whole time I’ve been grappling with how to be cynical and clear-eyed about my industry while staying romantic about art itself,” Lee says. “That, I think, is the defining tension of the work.” Importantly, The Work isn’t about artists; it’s about the people who package and sell art – the people who are responsible, in part, for the creation of a classic.

Lally and Pat wield significant power over artists as they help to choose the works that are displayed and sold. And yet, each is simultaneously constrained – Lally, as a young woman working in quintessentially old money New York, and Pat, as a working class man trying to break into an industry that is openly aristocratic. By layering these factors, The Work illustrates how power is dynamic, contextual and elusive – very few of us hold it for a lifetime.

“For the most part, being an artist is really boring if you’re doing the job right,” Lee says, referencing both The Work and her career. “You sit in a room by yourself for a number of years, working diligently until you come out the other side with a golden nugget that you’re ready to share. I wanted to explore how that nugget gets polished for an audience, which meant asking complicated questions about the artists that do and do not get remembered.”

Of course, this is a dance Lee knows well, having built a career of committing her lived experiences to the page. In fact, she views it as an essential element of humanity. “I volunteered to sell my story for a purpose,” she said of Eggshell Skull, “but I also felt what it was like to have my story sold.

“We are fascinated by trauma. It is both one of the most beautiful and one of the most terrible things about humans. We can be moved to act altruistically and to feel great empathy as a result of hearing someone else’s story, but that requires the raw meat of human experience constantly to be fed to the mill.”

While these questions about art and power provide the backdrop, The Work is also a love story. Readers are given the meet cute, the will-they-won’t-they, the tension and the yearning and the eventual climax. As characters, Pat and Lally are flawed to the point of realism but not beyond the point of likability. They are funny and self-conscious and proud.

They’re also hot.

Having decided she wanted the characters to have good sex, Lee plunged in. The sex scenes (which are frequent) feel realistic and physical without losing their cinematic quality. Crucial are the characters’ ages – Pat is in his late-20s and Lally, her early-30s. This small detail, which flips the expectations of a heterosexual relationship, makes their dynamic all the more ­interesting.

The Work fills a particular literary gap: romance novels that also make their readers feel very clever. Another theme of the book is the relationship between art and fame – a tension with which Lee herself has grappled. Like many writers, she hints at a desire not to be ­famous.

“It would be really nice if you could become more and more successful in your art without becoming famous. We can’t all be Elena Ferrante,” Lee jokes. “My books, Eggshell Skull, Beauty and Who Gets to be Smart, they’re all varying degrees of revealing personal trauma and each is divisive and argumentative.

“That means I have often become the focus of people’s anger and frustration and I have had to learn mechanisms to keep myself protected from that.”

While the success of Eggshell Skull gave Lee the security to write full-time – “To a hungry artist there was no greater gift in the world than freedom and means,” she writes in The Work – it also placed a magnifying glass over her trauma, at times producing a white-hot light. Extensive academic research has shown that survivors of sexual and gendered violence often experience what Lee calls a “triumvirate” of responses – a convergence of substance abuse, self-harm and disordered eating. These abuse-induced symptoms intersect and compound, continuing to make the survivor vulnerable long after the abuse ended.

“That’s something I didn’t realise while I was living it,” Lee says. “Now, I look back at everything I went through and see it as totally textbook. But when you’re in the Thunderdome, it’s very hard to see things clearly.

“A skill I’ve learned in the past six years has been to keep the real human beings in my life – my friends and family – close, because the noise can drive you mad if you’re not very careful about when you listen to it.”

In The Work, Pat and Lally’s histories are not the same as Lee’s. Still, they experience the pressure that comes with success and power – and, crucially, with fostering success and power for others.

It’s only just been released but, if you love it, here’s some great news. A second Bri Lee novel is already on the way.

“The next one is set in Antarctica, where I visited on a writers’ retreat last year,” Lee reveals. “I have found a magnificent pressure cooker for human emotions, but this work is still very much in my mind right now.”

The Work by Bri Lee, published by Allen & Unwin, is out now. The author will appear at literary festivals in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in coming weeks.