Keridwyn Dovey

interesting to me, you know, that cliches actually get us stuck in a rut, both in terms of, you know, how we think about language, but even the effective impact on our own brains and minds.

That's right.

She says, fiction and poetry are doses, medicines.

What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

So yeah, that sense that I think for many of us, it's reading fiction that actually helps us knit together that feeling like that your world is often kind of torn to bits and there's something about that act of reading that can make things whole again.

Whether it's just by reading a narrative that...

gives the illusion of wholeness or a life that seems real and whole in that book.

I don't know, but it's certainly what I feel when I'm reading.

I actually get really depressed if I'm not reading fiction.

And sometimes, you know, life gets in the way and you're working too hard or you're not prioritizing it.

But it's actually my number one self-care thing if I start feeling down.

It's usually because I haven't made time for fiction in my life.

Oh, gosh, yeah.

It's terrifying, isn't it?

Thank you so much.

Well, when Chris from Black Ink first got in touch with me about possibly writing this book, and he suggested that I write on Coetzee, I said, absolutely not.

It was the most terrifying proposition I'd ever heard in my life.

I think, like many people, the thought of having to interpret his work is quite terrifying.

But then I thought about it over a week and I realised if I could come at his work through the lens of my mother's deep engagement with his work as a literary critic in the early 80s in South Africa, that maybe there was something that I could add to that enormous conversation around his extremely complex work that I think no one can ever really get to the bottom of.

And so I really wanted to try to find a way to write about how my experience of his books has always been in a very domestic, very female space, thanks to my mum.