Chapter 1: What themes does Charlotte Wood explore in The Weekend?
Hi, I'm Kate Evans, and this is a podcast extra edition of The Bookshelf. Because as we come to the end of the year, this is the time you'll hear lots of people talking about their best books of the year, the ones to watch. And this Australian novel, The Weekend by Charlotte Wood, is already on many of those lists.
So why not listen to an extended discussion about the book from a conversation I had with her in October. Hello and welcome to this conversation with Charlotte Wood about her novel, The Weekend, here at the Australian Institute of Architects, Sydney headquarters, hosted by the Potts Point Bookshop and on ABC RN.
I'm Kate Evans and I host the weekly fiction program, The Bookshelf, with Cassie McCullough. Charlotte Wood, as I'm sure you know, is a novelist and essayist and indeed a highly experienced interviewer of writers, whose books include Animal People, Love and Hunger and The Writer's Room.
and, of course, The Natural Way of Things, a dystopian, all-too-believable story of the many ways in which women are punished.
Chapter 2: How does Charlotte Wood describe the evolution of her writing since her last book?
Her new novel is The Weekend. Charlotte, hello. Hello, Kate. Now, the last time we spoke formally to each other was on the release of The Natural Way of Things. So what's changed for you since then?
Oh, I feel like everything's changed. I think it was the first interview I did with you, which was great because I felt very safe. I was so anxious when that book came out about what people would make of it.
Chapter 3: What emotions are associated with the writing of The Weekend?
whether I would be sort of attacked basically because I'd seen what happened to other women who spoke out about things like misogyny and sexual abuse and so on. But luckily I discovered that men's rights activists don't read literary fiction so I was kind of... I escaped all of that, which was a great relief. What's changed?
In one sense, everything has changed, and in another sense, nothing has changed. Once that period... I mean, I got a whole new readership. The book did incredibly well in a way that astonished me. I spent a lot more time talking about a book than I normally had, so my following book took longer to write. I think in some ways I developed more confidence but at the same time
Chapter 4: Who are the main characters in The Weekend and what are their backgrounds?
I'm only realising kind of retrospectively also was a bit scared about what to do now, kind of thing.
Well, one of the things that you said at the time in that first interview was you talked about a book that was written in anger. And I wonder if there's an emotion that you would associate with the writing of this book, The Weekend.
Well, often the emotions that I associate with the book are not the ones that anybody else sees or feels in a book. But the emotion that I associate with this book now is joy, actually. Even though it's dealing with some stuff that isn't entirely joyful, like one of your best friends dying is not clearly a joyful experience.
But I wanted to write a book that had lightness and that was funny and that celebrated something beautiful, which is friendship. So I feel like The Natural Way of Things was also about a friendship, but that was a kind of survivor's friendship, whereas this is a different kind of friendship. And I feel that it is a more celebratory book.
Chapter 5: How does friendship play a role in the characters' lives?
Well, it wouldn't be hard to be a more celebratory book than The Natural Way of Things. But in one sense, it was a joy to write because Mainly because it wasn't the natural way of things, because it was really a very hard thing to write and living in a very frightening kind of world in my head for three years. So this was, you know, living in a house by the beach for three years.
There's a whole lot of things about both the themes and the research and the way that you approach the book that I think will come out. It would be nice to get to. But why don't we start with the people and the place? But people, place, dogs or cars and forms of transport. I mean, where would you start? talking about this book?
I would start by talking about the people. The people of this book are three women aged in their 70s and their names are Jude, Wendy and Adele. And they have come together for sort of the long, hot weekend just before Christmas to clean out the beach house of their recently deceased and very, very beloved friend, Sylvie. So they're not there for a holiday, as Jude keeps telling everybody.
They're there to work and clean out this house.
Chapter 6: What does Charlotte Wood say about the portrayal of older women in literature?
They've been friends for around about 40 years. There's no frail old ladies in this book. They're sort of feminist... firebrands of their generation and they have been very powerful actually in their working lives. And it's sort of only just dawning on at least two of them that the world doesn't think they're powerful anymore even though they feel exactly the same.
So Jude was a very famous restaurateur. She ran the city's finest restaurants for decades. Wendy is a public intellectual whose books on feminism and politics and power are still set on university lists around the world. And Adele is a very fine stage actress whose career never quite reached the heights that her talent sort of promised her that she would have.
I mean, it is a novel about friendship, but there's one part in the book where you talk about the intensity of friendship in your 30s as being almost like falling in love.
I think it's Adele who says, your 30s was the time you fell most dangerously in love. Not with men, but with your friends. And in a way, I feel that my most intense friendships were formed in my 30s. partly because I felt that I'd grown up now and I could choose the perfect friends for myself.
And I guess some of those friendships were friendships of couples, you know, or people's partners, whatever.
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Chapter 7: How does grief manifest in the story and its characters?
And then some of those last, the couples last or they don't or whatever. But there's sort of groups of friends that I formed in my 30s that, were incredibly intense. It was like a love affair between five or six people. You know, that sort of really giving yourself to the friendship that made you your best self. And that's what these women, you know, they met around that time in different ways.
But that's sort of the time that almost formed, well, certainly formed them as a very tightly bonded group.
So in some ways it's a story about these three women, and in other ways it's a story about the four women, because Sylvia, who they're mourning, is the space around which they circulate. And it's interesting because we don't see her and we don't even get a whole lot of descriptions of her, but we hear her, don't we? We hear her voice and her laugh and her responses to things.
How would you describe her?
Well, it's a bit tricky because they all have their own quite idealized version of Sylvie. Sylvie was the one that they all feel kind of held them all together actually, that they maybe didn't even realize until now she's gone. She was the glue for this group. And so what they're having to do is sort of rearrange themselves around this giant hole that Sylvie has left.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Charlotte Wood provide about the creative process behind her writing?
Now she's gone. And they feel that, you know, they come together. They've got this quite scratchy friendship. Very scratchy. Very scratchy. They still love each other, though. They love each other deeply. But they... They're irritable. I don't know about you or the people in this room, but one of the things I love about my oldest friends is that they just get straight to the point.
They will say, your hair looks great, those shoes are terrible, why are you wearing those shoes? Or that sort of just directness. It's like family. They cut through, there's not too much sort of... I mean, they're very loving, my friends, and none of them are like these women. In fact, all of those women are aspects of myself that are kind of, I hope, slightly stretched and exaggerated.
But they know each other so well that they know how to press each other's buttons. They know what's going to annoy each other.
They predict each other's behaviour, which often turns out to be right. But they feel, each of them feels that if Sylvie were here, I wouldn't be feeling so annoyed with her. Or if Sylvie were here, she wouldn't be doing that annoying thing. Or if Sylvie were here, I could say to Sylvie, oh, Kate, you know, Anna's been, why is she doing that?
And you would say, well, that's because blah, blah, blah. And I'd think, oh, okay. Well, you know, cut her a bit of slack then. You know, that sort of, Sylvie was a smoother over of waters. And so... They don't have her anymore, so they're kind of adrift and they're grieving. You know, they miss her terribly.
The grieving happens in a number of different ways. Obviously, for each of the women respond in a different way. But I was particularly intrigued by Wendy, the woman who was the public intellectual, because she had another layer of grief, and that was that her husband had died a long time ago. And it was almost as if that grief was superseded or not acknowledged enough.
So tell us more about Wendy.
So Wendy is this sort of brainiac, I suppose, and she lives for her work and very... She drives Adele crazy because Adele's very fit and looks beautiful and is very conscious of beauty and of her body. And Wendy drives her nuts because Wendy just has zero interest in what she looks like. And Adele's always saying, she looks mad.
Her hair's all grey and wild and she wears those terrible Indian wraparound skirts and why can't she just, you know... because she's almost a protective impulse to think, people are going to think you're just some old bag lady. Just get yourself together, you know. Whereas Wendy's like, who gives a shit? You know, she's got the life of the mind and she's very powerful.
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