The Weekend author Charlotte Wood: ‘The hardest thing to let go of is people’
Sydney writer Charlotte Wood is the author of The Weekend. But she loves watching Midsomer Murders.
Sydney writer Charlotte Wood is the author of The Weekend, shortlisted for the Stella Prize for women’s writing. She loves watching Midsomer Murders
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In your next novel you will be writing about nuns. Will you be spending time with sisters as part of your research?
Yes, I hope to be but it depends on their willingness to work with me … I’m interested in women and Catholicism, and feminism and Catholicism. The obvious symbol of women and Catholicism are religious women, who are known as nuns. I’m interested in what the life of a nun might be like. In secular society we assume [that life] is all about denial and loss. But I can imagine a lot of nuns think that the life of a secular woman is very compromised. I’m interested in challenging my own perceptions of what life as a religious sister might be like.
What’s something people would be surprised to learn about you?
I find Gardening Australia a little bubble of pure optimism in the middle of a whole lot of horror, in terms of what’s going on in the world. I love that it’s full of people obsessively devoting themselves often to a single plant or a single little patch of earth, and I find that very inspiring.
When you want to escape Sydney, where do you go?
I spend a lot of time on the central coast up in the Hardys Bay area. People who know that area would recognised it in The Weekend a bit – although I’ve manipulated it narratively so it’s not exactly the same. Inner Sydney is pretty noisy and crazy so finding a quiet place to write is quite a luxury, really.
Your novel The Weekend is about three women who come together to deal with the loss of their friend Sylvie. They are all too aware of one another’s flaws but they love each other anyway. How do you make these characters so realistic?
Sometimes people say the characters are not entirely likeable and I think, well, neither am I. So, I really like to put things together that are contradictory. Some people would call the character of Jude [in The Weekend], for example, a very controlling person but she sees herself as a very generous person. I was interested in looking at the difference between how we see ourselves and how other people see us. We don’t necessarily recognise our own flaws while we’re very conscious of other people’s flaws. I find great pleasure in creating characters with that kind of complexity. Just because they’re flawed doesn’t mean they’re any less deserving of love and respect.
The women in the book are in their 70s. Do we get to know ourselves better with age?
I used to think it’s inevitable that as we get older we know ourselves better, and I don’t think that anymore. Even for myself as I’ve gotten older, there are periods where I’ve thought ‘I know who I am now and know what kind of person I am, what I’m capable of’’ and then every now and then you get a kind of shock delivered to you that shows you, ‘oh, I was wrong’. I’m keen to embrace the idea that great change is always possible and the only inevitable thing is change.
Grief is a strong theme in the book. What’s the last important thing you had to let go?
The hardest thing to let go of is people. The last person I had to let go of was my friend Georgia Blain, just after I started writing this book. She’s a very well-known writer and loved writer. I pushed a lot of that grieving for Georgia into [The Weekend] when they were thinking about Sylvie. The process of life is a process of shedding things and shedding ideas of ourselves. Life is a constant cycle of gaining and losing.
Charlotte Wood will speak at the Sydney Opera House’s All About Women festival on March 8.
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