Ashley Hay

of a different piece of history.

This is a really beautiful piece of writing that looks at this particular time in Paris and then on the French coast as Anna sort of comes into Gauguin's care, in a way, or that's maybe not quite the right word, and has to navigate this odd relationship of being a muse, in a sense, and, you know, working out why she is this muse to this man, you know, not knowing...

his story, his background, but also, you know, being a servant as well, being someone who needs to, you know, run his errands and try and feed him on the no money that he has and this sort of thing.

And sleep with him.

Indeed.

There's a beautiful, you know,

I'm interested that you say that because I purposefully didn't do that because I had, I think I had Miranda's image, you know, so much in front of my mind.

But there's something, part of what's wonderful, and I think you can see the same things in The Fish Girl, is the way she brings this very attentive sort of research and fact, in a way, into a beautifully imagined piece of fiction.

I think that's maybe part of

part of what is making her writing work really wonderfully at the moment.

This novella is called Instructions for a Steep Decline and it begins with the image of a woman going slightly too fast down a hill on a bicycle and she has an accident and the novella does this lovely kind of opening out from that point so that as a reader you are in the same position as Wilhelmina, the woman, in just trying to understand what's happened,

where you are, where she is, what's happened in her past, what are all the sort of points that have brought her to here and also where her life might go on the other side of this accident.

So it is a really, really beautifully kind of plaited and interwoven meditation on consciousness in a way and possibility and potential and

And part of what I think is interesting is I haven't read... I haven't had a chance to read The Thinking Woman yet, but I feel as if there are some of the things that Julianne has been playing with in her non-fiction space that she's now bringing into...

this space of fiction as well.

And I think that there's some very sort of interesting interplay going on.

It's a very moving piece.

And I think part of that comes from the fact that, as I say, you're navigating Wilhelmina's own dislocation in a way, her own sort of sense of being removed from her own life.

She is

outside the narrative just as much as you are in that sense.