Keridwyn Dovey

She'd actually been a physiotherapist and

was sort of self-taught.

She did a distance degree in literature and then gradually, you know, built up her own frames of reference and then used what she was reading, which was the same theory that, of course, Coetzee had been exposed to when he was in the East Coast of America and in Austin and he lived in London and,

And so she used that theory to kind of decode his novels.

And now that's quite, you know, that's a given that his works come with a whole secondary paraphernalia of these literary theory readings that you need to understand them.

But at the time, no one had made that connection.

So she was sort of like a detective who was joining these dots that no one else had joined before.

My parents were both academics at that time and we were living in a small university town called Peter Maritzburg near Durban.

You know, they were by no means card-carrying ANC members, but in their own ways as intellectuals they were pushing back against the regime.

Dad was in the education department at the university and at the time he was sort of doing things like publishing pamphlets that was critical of the Bantu education system, which was the, you know, separate and awful education system for black South Africans.

And then doing things like taking on black students when it was illegal.

And many years later, they found out that they'd been a government spy actually in his education department at the university.

I mean, it's a bit like, you know, the Stasi in East Germany and people were informing on others in their immediate circles and that kind of thing.

you know, real abuse of power that trickles down to poison the most intimate relationships was very much the case.

So eventually he got a death threat from someone in the middle of the night and that's when we first came over to Melbourne.

I hope so.

I mean, I certainly was trying to play with the idea of what it means to, and these are actually Kutsia's words, to not recall your past, but invent it.

And he speaks about something about releasing your autobiographical imagination in a series of letters that he published with Arabella Kurtz, who's a British psychotherapist.

And his own reading of psychoanalytic theory is very, very deep and infuses all of his work.

So in my own novel, I was also trying to find a language through psychoanalysis for that weird process of trying to excavate one's own past and all the denial that we are wrapped up in and the fictions we tell ourselves and how our own lives remain a mystery to us, even though we've lived through them.