Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is an ABC podcast. All right, this is going to be good, isn't it? I loved this book. It's actually a time for poetry. It's a time for slow text. She's a furious woman. It's a time for difficult text. It's a time for text that take a long time to read. So I thought I really have to hook the reader. It's taken up half my heart, you know.
The book actually put a hex on me. Love, relationships, friendships, sex, grief, anger, betrayal. All of these in Sue Miller's latest novel, Monogamy. Hi, I'm Kate Evans, and this is a podcast special for ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf. American writer Sue Miller has written 11 novels, including The Good Mother and The World Below, as well as a memoir, The Story of My Father.
You might have heard me recently talking about her new novel, Monogamy, with Jacqueline Kent. But here's Sue Miller herself on that book and the bookshelf that shaped her. Sue Miller, thank you so much for speaking to us on the bookshelf.
I'm delighted to be here.
Congratulations on Monogamy, a book that circles around one couple, Annie and Graham. Now, it's there in the title, I guess, but how would you describe what you wanted to explore with this book of yours?
Well, first of all, I wanted to explore the characters. I mean, I think it's very much a character-driven novel. I wanted them to be very, very real. So that was my focus. first desire from it and my first impulses and something that I really worked on. But I actually had the experience after my father died and I began to try to write a memoir of him.
He died of Alzheimer's disease in the early 90s, 1990. I did a lot of research and I got a lot of information from friends of his and I had his correspondence, everything except his letters back and forth to my mother, which he had carefully destroyed before he died. And I just felt as though, as I was reading through all of that material, as though my sense of him was changing all the time.
I really felt, not radically, he was the same person, but there were just surprises and things that I was just terribly interested in. It seemed to me that there was some connection and some real new understanding of him that was coming to me after his death.
And I wanted to explore that fictionally somehow, the sort of sense of communication with someone after death, sort of a change in perception as a result of that post-death communication. I wanted it to be very far from my own situation, so I invented a couple, and sort of the plot followed after that. But that was the original impulse, to sort of deal with someone...
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Chapter 2: What themes does Sue Miller explore in her novel Monogamy?
vitally in touch with someone after he's died to the degree that it makes possible a sort of a revelation.
Before we get to that question of the reassessment that happens after death, can we just talk about Annie and Graham? I mean, Graham brims with largesse and Annie is more restrained. So what makes them work as a couple?
I think sex is at sort of the heart of it in a certain way. They're just incredibly attracted to each other. I mean, he animates her, and he is madly in love with her. And she's a little bit more at the receiving end, but he adores her, really.
And his wife, his first wife, he's been married before, has a theory that the reason he adores her so much is because he used to be a very homely man and then kind of embraced her. a lot of changes of the 70s and became kind of sexy in a way, I guess.
And his first wife feels that Annie doesn't know the real Graham, and therefore, and that he's very, very grateful to her because she sort of has free to see it out of his league in a certain way, or would have been for the former Graham. He's had a radical, as I say, transformation.
So there's that, that she's someone he feels is very elegant, immensely desirable from the moment he sets eyes on her. And then they've evolved a very comfortable way of living together, very, very intimate. And Annie is intimate with him in a way she isn't with anyone else. He's her confidant. And there's a lot of sort of tolerance back and forth. They each let the other have a lot of room.
Graham has a harder time with that. He sort of has this appetite for people, too, and mostly for Annie. And Annie sometimes feels, as I say about her early in the book, that he's overtaken her, that he's engulfed or lost somehow in him. And actually after he dies, which is not a secret because it's a flap copy on the book after he says it, I think, he dies fairly early on in the book.
And one of the things she feels after that is that she shouldn't have let him engulf her so much. She just feels there's nothing left, nothing left at all. I don't know if that answers your question quite.
Well, it does, because in those early chapters, there's I mean, they seem almost like a golden couple. But what becomes clear is that we're not seeing them. We're not seeing just the two of them. We're seeing the community of people around them. We're seeing the people who both support them and define them as a couple.
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Chapter 3: How does Sue Miller describe the characters Annie and Graham?
all of these people's complicated feelings, both about Graham and then as they begin to interact with each other after the death, about each other and about each other's reactions to the death and so forth. So it just seemed like a fascinating circle of people
After six or so chapters of these complicated lives, Graham has died. But it seems that what's at stake is it's not straightforward. It's not just about grief. It's reassessing all sorts of things. I mean, what do you think is at stake with what you wanted to explore after his death in this novel?
Well, I also complicate things to some degree for Annie in particular. because she discovers, or believes she's discovered, a couple of months after Graham's death, when they're having a kind of memorial party for him, essentially, that he had an affair with someone. And so I wanted to complicate her grief greatly. I mean, she's been just assailed by grief up to this point.
She just really doesn't know how to go on quite, and she's sort of slowly... making her way to a kind of normal life. Going to the dentist seems like an achievement to her at this point when she discovers that he had been unfaithful, which is something just intolerable to her. And she moves from this grief, which she's holding onto because it makes her feel connected to him, to just rage at him.
She says to Frida at one point, you know, yes, I want him back so I can hit him and later so I can kill him. But the other issue is, of course, that she can't tell the children about this. She doesn't want to tell the children about it at all, the adult children. And she discovers also that Frida, she thinks, knew about it before. And she's very angry at Frida, too.
She just feels cornered and furious and also isolated, more isolated, because she feels she can't really talk to anyone anymore. about it. The children, particularly Sarah, who's around a lot more, doesn't really understand what's going on. I wanted to complicate it by having people not being able to be fully open with each other or honest with each other.
Everybody's hiding a little something or other from the other person or someone or two of the other people.
And so you've complicated the idea of grief and of family and betrayal, all of that in this novel. So if we turn away from the details of your novel itself to where you would sort of place it on an imagined bookshelf, I guess, of either traditions or other books that you've read that would sort of shape it. I mean, where would you place this book on a bookshelf? What would you place beside it?
In a way, I sort of feel it's almost a 19th century novel in its concern for character and in its concern for this world that I want to have everybody sort of understand very deeply and be part of. And, you know, I'm very careful about style and about writing in a very clear and open way, but I'm not a stylist in any way, so I wouldn't put it up against those folks. It is a domestic novel that is
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of communication after death in Monogamy?
And that he's embraced completely and thoroughly down to the clothes he wears, which he sort of changed at a certain point too.
And Graham and his best friend, John, both have fathers who've disappeared. And you mentioned earlier that you had written about your own father and that you've been thinking a lot about parents and children. And I wonder if there are other books that you've read that deal, that you think deal with the relationship between parents and children particularly well.
Well, I do think Tessa Hadley did that wonderfully in her, like, The Past, that novel, and The Master Bedroom, where there's the mother, the failing mother, who she's living with, who dies, and, of course, the book.
There are obviously a lot of, again, 19th century books, but I always liked to really explore the relationship with children as they become adults, or even when they're very, very young. My first book had a three-year-old character, a good mother, and I think, And I put a lot of energy into making her feel very real.
I'd actually written it partly in response to, there was a novel by Updike that I read in my relative's youth, in which the character that he's created is a Jewish writer who just is someone who loves to sleep around with people. And at one point he's sleeping with his mistress, and the child, in this case a little boy, comes and gets into bed with him, and Beck, the character,
is sort of affronted because I think his mistress is called Beatrice, turns her back to him, sort of presents her rump side to him. And I was so struck by this, and Beatrice is divorced, I was so struck by the kind of cavalierness of it all and the fact that the child had no reality in the scene.
It was just the child came, the mother turns to him, and there's no sense of Bex perceiving the child as a person or having... that this could in any way affect him or anything that seemed of utmost importance to me in the scene.
And I think that was in part some of the inspiration for The Good Mother, was the sense that I wanted to write a sort of more female version of life, I guess, where there's greater concern for all of the people, even the very tiny people.
Have there been other books like that where you feel you're writing sort of against them or as a counter to them as much as in the tradition of them? Because that Updike example is quite powerful, isn't it?
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