Mireille Dushaw

There's a lot of silence and space.

There's a space.

And then she realises that she's actually just found a gnarled knob of ginger.

So she just has this way of kind of presenting things in

She's very irreverent.

Yes.

If you Google her and you look up some interviews with her, there's a photograph that was going around a little while ago that I think Parul Sehgal from the New York Review of Books, New York Times, had posted.

And it's a picture of Jenny Offal's structuring technique.

And it's a photograph of a large piece of cardboard or corkboard that is just covered in these scissored

apart one or two line paragraphs and they're all stuck all over this board.

So I think her technique involves collecting these incredibly compelling fragments and then arranging them after the fact.

And so it was really interesting to see the way that she had laid them all out on this board and presumably rearranges them until she finds the right juxtaposition between two different paragraphs.

So

Yeah, that sort of compression required to work in that way.

And the other thing I think she said in another interview was that she wrote so many things that didn't stay in the book and her ability to excise is just as much of a skill as her ability to capture things.

But she said she had to cut so much out because so many more outrages piled up.

And I can just imagine her folder full of observations and the way that she has to kind of...

whittle them down to the most interesting, the most compelling.

Yes.

I mean, I found this book really interesting because she's dealing with material that, I mean, we're seeing a lot of this material, obviously, in what's called cli-fi.