Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

When you get writers in a room discussing their work it’s always interesting to me. What is not discussed is as fascinating as what is. The panellists, Tracy Farren, Jacques Pauw, Erica Emdon and Hazel Frankel, are all fresh and friendly new novelists, just come up from being under the ocean of words that they filtered, drop by drop, finding their stories.

Writing a novel is a real achievement in my opinion. Then when it’s good! It’s remarkable.

As a survivor from a fairly vrot family myself (sorry, I had to make that lame joke, because I am who I am, you get what you get, and that’s how it is with me – sung with obligatory air guitar – Jonas Brothers) I eagerly braved the ReaVaya-choked afternoon traffic and arrived just in time for the obligatory ritual networking, which I detest. I hung about beside the table where the books were displayed, and tried to look relaxed by flipping through the four well-proportioned tomes. There was no time to really get more than a smell of the books before we were ushered into the seminar room by Professor Titlestad, the chair of the event, to listen to four brand new novelists.

After discussing the ‘fragile process’ of making books in the Johannesburg environment, the prof welcomed us to the event and invited the writers to speak. I would imagine that making books anywhere is rather delicate, because each time I have to send something to a publisher I feel as if I am skinned and my liver is ripped out without the benefit of an anaesthetic. (Makhosazana Xaba’s poem “Fear” captures this perfectly, but if you want to read more about it you’ll have to get the latest issue of Baobab because my review is in it).

Jacques Pauw said: “we write about dysfunctional families because they’re more interesting.” Schadenfreude rippled around the room, as we all remembered the relish with which we read of the worst of human motives in the newspapers each day. The particular cruelty of Ferdi Barnard, with whom Jacques Pauw shares a strange kind of friendship, was the inspiration for The Ice-Cream Boy, his brand new novel.

Erica Emdon’s Jelly Dog Days was inspired by the resilience of a young girl who survived multiple abuses, and ended up writing a novel after her passion for writing a non-fiction book dealing with child sexual abuse went cold. I could relate to this: in some way, fiction releases readers and writers into a wider realm where the line between good and bad is not prescribed, and we deal with the unpredictable ingredient of humanity. In this context, who you are is of secondary importance to the story. Once you take up your pen to create a new world, populated by people of your imagination, we, the readers are also invited to enter a limbic space where we engage with the characters and are moved, asserting and affirming our individual histories. This where we truly draw the moral line.

Whiplash, the oldest of the four and already distinguished by a nomination for the prestigious Sunday Times Prize, came to Tracey Farren because she is “fascinated by people who see themselves as worthless.” In the novel, the main character discovers that she has redeeming qualities and so in a sense the novel becomes a journey into being, a woman becoming whole, coming out of a degraded world, she finds dignity.

The panel told us firmly that they were firmly not writing their own lives, although Hazel Frankl said that there were many nuances and atmospheres that she fished from her own life ocean. The artist and poet and author of the poetry volume Drawing from Memory, said that she wouldn’t feel right about writing about something that she hadn’t experienced, although the portrayal of the dysfunctional family in Counting Sleeping Beauties was a work of fiction. Jacques Pauw felt uncomfortable about identifying with his violent and sadistic protagonist, and Tracey Farren is not a prostitute and has never been one.

All the writers are well versed in psychology and engaged in our society: Jacques is the most high-profile of all with his brilliant work exposing the underbelly of our society through television and his non-fiction writing, but Erica Emdon is a lawyer whose sphere of interest is children and domestic violence, Tracy Farren is a journalist too. Their professional and personal identities had a lot to the writing of their books, firstly in the choice of their subject matter and secondly in the way they went about melding this passion into the stories that they created.

Whether or not the story is autobiographical or researched, the novelist has to choose the journey that their characters go on; with love and patience they have to paint the world in which the character lives, and allow them to breathe and speak in their own voices. The particular challenge of writing a first person narrative was evoked during the discussion, and Pauw spoke about characters living in his head for months, literally taking over his life.

Well, they’re out now, nicely packaged in their books so that we can peruse their motivations and measure them against our own. There is no right and wrong, there is only the space for us to discover this, as we discover ourselves and the many lives and choices in the books that we read. Viva the conversation.