Show notes
Tessa Lunney’s party girl hero Kiki Button poses for Pablo Picasso in Bohemian Paris in the first book of a mystery series that gently prods at serious questions – like how to be a ‘modern woman.’
Hi there I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Tessa talks about why she’s obsessed with 1920s Paris, how her doctorate on war literature helped shape Kiki’s character, and why Harry Potter saved her in the early days of motherhood.
But before we talk to Tessa, just a reminder that the show notes for this episode can be found on the website, the Joys of Binge Reading.com that’s where you’ll find links to Tessa’s website and work, as well as details about how to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss future episodes.
Where to find Tessa Lunney:
Website: https://tessalunney.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tessa.lunney
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tessawynn
Instagram: @misskikibutton and @tessawynn
Six Things You’ll Find Out
Why she’s obsessed with Anglophone 1920s Paris
Partying with Pablo Picasso and Kiki Button
Aussie nurse and hero Kiki Button’s relevance to Me Too
How Harry Potter saved her sanity as a young Mother
Where to go in Kiki’s Paris
How her doctorate on war trauma informed the story
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
Jenny: But now here’s Tessa. Hello there Tessa and welcome to the show it’s great to have you with us . .
Tessa Lunney: Paris mysteries
Tessa: It’s great to be here.
Jenny: Beginning at the beginning – was there a “Once Upon A Time” moment when you decided you wanted to write fiction? And if there was a catalyst, what was it?
Tessa: There was a moment when I decided to write fiction, and that was about two years after I realized I was never going to be an actress. I wanted to be an actress so much from when I was a very little girl. When I was about 21 or 22, I realized that I didn’t have the success that my friends who were actors had already had, but also it didn’t suit me. It didn’t suit my personality and it didn’t suit me intellectually. I looked at the decisions I’d made in my life, and I realized none of these were pointing towards an acting life.
I told myself “you have to be honest with yourself, you’re not going to do this”. A couple of years later, I finished university and I did an honors year, which is an extra year added on to my three year degree. I was surrounded by highly intelligent, passionate, eloquent book readers. And I thought ‘these are my people!’ I thought, ‘you’re going to have to go with books. It’s you’re first love and you’re true love, so maybe you can tell a story… maybe you should start to try?’
And so I started to try when I enrolled in a graduate diploma of creative writing. I enrolled because my boyfriend at the time was enrolling in his Bachelor of Music, and I was bored and had nothing better to do. I had three or four classes a week, and I thought this is it. This is what I’m going to do. That was like a long moment that ended in a flash of revelation.
Jenny: It’s great that you had such self awareness at such an early age!
Tessa: Well, it was sort of forced upon me because I was quite unhappy trying to do this and trying to do that. It was all failing and not working. It should have worked; it worked in my mind but I just couldn’t perform, I couldn’t do anything. I tried out the drama schools and hadn’t got in and I just thought this is a series of failures. But more than that- I wasn’t even enjoying it. I didn’t even enjoy being up on stage. I didn’t want to do it, so why are you pursuing this if you hate it? So I had to think about it. It took a long time because I went overseas and had affairs and finished my degree. I did a lot of thinking, so the self awareness came slowly.
Jenny: April in Paris 1921 is a mystery set in that period when the expat artists and writers were taking over Montparnasse! Perhaps one point of difference is your heroine Kiki Button is an Australian. What attracted you to the mystery genre, and to this time period?
The photo that inspired Kiki: Terrasse de Cafe, 1925, Maurice-Louis Branger/Roger Viollet.
Tessa: So the time period was because I’ve been obsessed with it for about 10 years since I read Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson, who’s Virginia Hall’s grand niece. My mother gave me that book just as I was starting my Masters in Creative Writing. It was like a template for how to live the artistic life; how to be an artist and an author in a world that seems to push you in the opposite direction.
I’ve read it maybe 12 times. Her book is so meticulously researched that after I read her books, I’d go through her notes and start reading all the books in the back of her notes that I could find, and reading more books about the period. While doing my doctorate, it was like my “get out of jail free card”.
Among the Bohemians, Virginia Nicholson
I could pretend I was researching but not really doing any work because it was set in that interwar period. So when I decided I wanted to write another book, it had to be 1920’s Paris because that’s where I wanted to be myself, and you know 21st century Sydney.
As for the mystery genre itself, I’ve been very slow to get into it. Now that I am into it, I really love it. I love how it’s such a tight framework, but because it’s such a tight framework, it can leave so much room for creativity and imagination and for talking about both the past and the present and the relation between the two but you have a way through You have a way to use all of a the material from the past and present and weave it all into the story.
Jenny: Kiki is the daughter of a wealthy wool baron who enlists as a nurse in WWI while on holiday with relatives in England in 1914. She can’t settle back into the expected life for a young woman “of a certain class” after “the terror and joy of war – ”she can’t just “wait around waiting for a husband. . .” Tell us a little of the genesis for Kiki.
Tessa: The genesis for a lot of this book came from the research I did while doing my doctorate in Australia in Australian war fiction. So Kiki follows a template of many young men, many soldiers who couldn’t settle back into a job and couldn’t settle back into the sweet normality of everyday life. Some of them loved it; it was exactly what they wanted. For others, the adrenaline of the war and having survived, and the grief of having survived but also the pressure was just too much and they couldn’t settle.
So Kiki follows that mould. But other than that, it actually came from my reading that I wanted to hear a particular type of voice. I wanted to have a particular type of narrator. I wanted to have a particular hero or heroine. It could have been hero or heroine, but I was always going to write a heroine who would take me on a journey, and talk to me in a particular way. I searched and I searched, but I couldn’t quite find it. So I thought- well Tessa, you’re a writer. You’re just going to have to write it if this is what you want.
Jenny: There’s probably not many – there probably are memoirs of women who obviously were nurses in the war, but how honest they would have been about their life after the war in that time is probably a question. So a lot of it you would have had to of imagined, rather than relied on memoir for?
Tessa: Yes, I did. The memoirs that I read were of the artists in Montparnasse. So those women that chose the life Kiki chooses to live, rather than the nurses who often if they could leave Australia or England, then went home and had a lot of other things to deal with in terms of grieving families, friends and ordinary life. There weren’t a lot who made the leap from nurse to bohemian shall we say! But I wanted to combine the two, so I decided that she would.
Jenny: That’s great. In April in Paris, there’s a lot of real history in it – that’s one of the real pleasures in it, including a cameo role for Pablo Picasso. That fascinated me!
Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso in front of the Café de la Rotonde in Montparnasse, Paris. Photograph by Jean Cocteau, August, 12th 1916.
Tessa: Well he was the king- he was the king of Montparnasse, he was the king of artists in Paris so I thought, well why not? He’s just going to have to meet him. This is the kind of book that I wanted to read. I’ve read so many histories and it felt like looking through a window at a party, and I couldn’t come in. I want to be in that party. I want to be right in the middle of that party! So I wrote Kiki so that I could be right in the middle of that party. I’ve been reading about it for 10 years, so in some ways it was very straight forward for me to write Picasso in.
I’d actually been reading about Picasso, because his artistic work ethic is so phenomenal. He painted everyday, and nothing interrupted him. So I would read biographies of him to try and work out how he did that, so I could work out how I could have an artistic life. But that just meant a lot of material, and it was fun. It was fun to address some of the things that can sometimes annoy me about reading histories, like how he was not very nice to the women in his life. I wanted to create a woman who could address that a little bit, and maybe take advantage of that in the way that the women he was with couldn’t take advantage of. So it was super fun, and it’s a super fun place to live in your imagination.
Jenny: Have you spent time in Paris – and do you speak French?
Tessa: Not very much time- a bit of time as a tourist, but not as much time as some, and I certainly don’t speak any French. But the 1920’s Paris is very different to contemporary Paris. So I don’t feel like I’m missing out on a lot, except in the way that Paris is set out in terms of the sounds and smells of Paris. But it was 100 years ago, so that’s OK.
The Paris that I’m talking about is really an anglophone Paris. It’s the Paris of the British, Australians and Americans rather than the Paris of working class Parisians who had just come back from the war. So there’s a lot about Montparnasse and Montmartre in the early part of the 20th century. That’s what I’ve been reading.
Ernest Hemingway and first wife Hadley and friends | © John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston/WikiCommons
Jenny: As you’ve alluded to, its not so much about the war any more but about the people who lived through that time. That period has become very popular. What is the appeal do you think?
Tessa: Well I can only speak from my experience as a reader, which I find a war and that interwar period intellectually fascinating. There was so much change; so much political, social and cultural change and we’re still living the effects of those changes. We’re still living the effects of the Russian Revolution, we’re still living the effects of what happened in WW2.
It’s fascinating to go back and read about it, and how individuals in that time could make a decision to do one thing or not, or another- to join the resistance, to join the Communist Party, to become a nurse in WW1 or to become an artist and what motivated those decisions, and how their small story related to the larger one. I’m very interested in that idea.
But also, it’s 100 years since the end of WW1 so there’s a lot in the news and online about looking back a century later. That just keeps going I guess. In terms of WW2, I think it’s been fascinating since it began and I don’t think it has ever gone out of popularity if you know what I mean. People have just extended it back, and extended it back to WW1.
Jenny: I spoke to the mystery Canadian MK Tod who does WW1 mysteries and she felt that Commonwealth readers were more interest in WW! than US readers because their countries were more involved. And that US readers are more interested in WW II. Have you found that to be true?
Tessa: Well this is my first book, and it only came out a few months ago. So I haven’t quite had a time to understand that. But also because it’s set in the 1920’s, America is very interested in the 1920’s, and especially the social and cultural changes of the 1920’s – especially for women.
That’s when those fabulous detectives like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe started to be written and started to come out as that confirmed the American mystery genre. So I can’t say I’ve experienced that myself, but from historic research I would say yes, they’re more interested in WW2 than WW1. As MK Tod said, WW1 becomes a continuum with the interwar period and then in WW2 it starts to become one period rather than discrete wars in discrete time sections.
Jenny: Yes, it is shocking to think it’s now 100 years. You just don’t realize it was that long ago until you’re suddenly bought up short with that anniversary, that centenary.
Tessa: Yes. Well especially just a few years later in the 1920’s, a lot of the literature and the art just feels so contemporary. It still feels so modern and boundary pushing in terms of modernism. But then I would look at photos of WW1, and the technology was so much less than it is today – just in the grainy photos. Or you hear arguments against women being able to vote in the British Parliament from 100 years ago, and you think that is a long time ago! So for me, there’s kind of this disconnect between what some sections of society were doing, and what other sections were doing.
Jenny: That sort of brings up one of your themes- you say that one of your obsessions is how to be a modern woman. That’s one of the things Kiki is exploring, isn’t it? How to be a modern woman.
Tessa: Yes. I think it’s a very pressing issue still, and with things such as the Me Too Movement coming up, with the idea of what does it mean to be a woman in the world and what is femininity? If you can call it that between a continuum with female sexuality and female biology. With transgender identity, all of this “what it means to be a woman” is being debated still.
World War 1: Explosion of ‘Women doing men’s jobs.’
This was a time where it had come up in the 19th century, but it exploded in WW1 with women doing “men’s jobs”. They were on the front line, driving ambulances, they were bus conductors and postmen at home doing all these things.
And then in the 1920’s, the sort of social movement of the flappers going up, wearing makeup and being unchaperoned and then the other sort of cultural movement of women having to work because they were never going to be able to get married – The men weren’t there, and so followed all the changes that had to happen because of what the war did.
So for me, Kiki can address our concerns now by being there at a beginning time, addressing what does it mean to be a women, what does it mean to be unchaperoned and how do you deal with men who have very old fashioned ideas. How do you create a life when there’s no template?
Jenny: Yes – it gives the book a remarkably contemporary feel, and she feels like a woman you could meet today. She hasn’t got any sense of antiqueness about her at all!
Tessa: Yes, I’ve had a couple of people say that- that Kiki is their friend. It’s like they found a new friend in Kiki.
Jenny: Maybe even a heroine or role model!
Tessa: I think she has maybe too many cocktails with famous artists who are now dead to be a true role model, but she’s certainly a friend!
Jenny: Yes, there might be a little bit of over medication with alcohol, that’s right! I’m not sure if you believe in the idea of ‘core story’ – that writers generally have one central idea they return to in their books. If there is such a thing, what would it be for you?
Tessa: I would have said writers have ‘writerly obsessions.’ So a reader can stick with a writer because of their writerly obsessions, which accord with what the reader is interested in in the world. It can be both in terms of form or style, as well as content and I would have said some of my writerly obsessions are to do with the intersection of memory, history and identity around war.
Those ideas I keep coming back to – that’s what I look at in my doctorate and what Kiki is looking at in an oblique but fun way. And then in other books and short stories I’ve written, they look at it in a serious and tragic way in the way that history, memory and identity interact, but particularly through narrative and the way we structure narrative in order to come to terms with identity, in order to structure memory and history and to be able to create an identity.
These are the ideas. I don’t think they have an answer, which is why I can come back to them again and again. I can throw in a character like Kiki, or throw in an old man in Soviet Russia, or throw in a young woman who’s been abducted, who runs away from abduction or some of the other short stories I’ve written. Whether that comes out as a ‘core story’- I’ll have to wait and see. But there’s certainly ideas I cannot get rid of.
Turning from specific books to wider look at your career
Jenny: That segues very nicely into expanding our discussion from talking about the book to looking at your wider career. As you’ve mentioned, you are an academic, a poet, a reviewer and a short story writer. Your doctorate was on “The silence in contemporary Australian war fiction with a basis in trauma therapy.” That has such tantalising links back to Kiki – because underneath all the gaiety you sense the trauma. . . I guess this research played in nicely into your fiction . . Did you find it fascinating to link this all up?
Tessa: Yes. Trauma theory is a way of looking at particular types of narratives and especially contemporary narratives, with the idea that there’s a traumatic event which shapes the way the narrative is. I’d read a lot of the theory, and a lot of the books that seemed to talk to the theory explicitly. But obviously a lot of them are quite dark, and quite tragic. It’s beautifully written, but also sad. I was pregnant, and then I was breastfeeding – I needed to explore these things in a way that didn’t make me quite so sad. It wasn’t quite so tragic to use in April in Paris in 1921 to use some previous generations of coping with war, which was through humor and to try and use some of that to talk about these things.
Coping with the trauma of war: WW1 women
So yes, there’s this underlying sadness, trauma and difficulty. A lot of WW1 books are about loss. About coping with unimaginable, sudden and destructive loss, and how to weave that into a narrative that wasn’t also dark. It was quite a fun challenge.
Jenny: The silence that’s referred to- is that a silence where they found it very difficult to actually address? They didn’t actually talk about it directly.
Tessa: So silences in war fiction- it’s an idea that relates to a lot of trauma theory. It’s the kind of unsayable I guess. So something that you would know, but cannot articulate. The way that I looked at it, it was anywhere from a missing person or a death to a traumatic event, a pregnant pause or a pregnant silence.
But also the way that professional writers would use this silence, use this ultimate incommunicable moment to give the narrative momentum so that we as a reader can understand that there’s an incredibly powerful force that’s pushing these characters along, that can’t be said, and we have to understand what is inside this force, what propels this force through the structure of the narrative and through the language.
Jenny: I think you actually do that very well with Kiki. Is there one thing more than any other that you’ve done in your career that’s helped you progress?
Tessa: Probably my doctorate. It’s a big thing. My masters led into my doctorate, but having the three years and I got a scholarship as well which was almost enough to live on, so I could really sit down and concentrate and read and write and talk to other people who were similarly obsessed with reading and writing and these ideas.
I did it at the Western Sydney University. All supervisor Professor Ivor Indyk and he runs a publishing company, Giramondo Publishing, and my peers are published authors and poets, so I was in this incredibly great environment of people giving me the best feedback I could ever hope to have.
I’m still sort of bringing up those lessons five or six years later, and still bringing up what my supervisor said. I’d be like, that’s what he means! I finally understand! That’s probably the one thing, and it changed the way I thought about my writing. It wasn’t a hobby or something that I did for myself alone – it was a professional thing, and a public thing. I could work on it like work, rather than like play. It changed my life.
Jenny: It sounds like it was a very successful incubator. If you were going to do a “magical mystery literary tour” for Kiki Button’s Paris, where would you recommend people go? Can you still find the places where Kiki lived and danced?
Tessa: How fun! What a fun thing to think about. You can find some – but not a lot, because places like Montparnasse were very poor which means a lot of the places were falling down, and then they had to be rebuilt. So I was actually in Paris this April, and I did my own little tour.
First of all, I went to Montparnasse- I walked around the streets and had a coffee at the Rotonde Cafe, and I had a coffee and walked around all the streets and the cemetery. So that would be the first place I’d say to go.
Hemingway’s favorite cafe: La Rotonde
Secondly, I’d say to walk up to the Seine, because Kiki does a lot of walking, and walk through the gardens and go to the Ritz at Place Vendôme. I had a delicious but very expensive cocktail at Bar Hemingway. So to do that, as if you were with Kiki and Bertie and to go and have a cocktail at the Ritz, and then to just walk along and find a little cafe have a coffee, a croissant and a baguette and listen to the sounds of Paris, the way people speak French around you and what it sounds like. The cafe is tiny, and it’s full of old men playing chess- even better!
A tiny little local place that nobody knows about, it’s away from all the tourist places. That’s what I would say to do. That would take a day, There are other great places to go, like the Picasso Museum which I went to which is nowhere that Picasso actually lived, but has a lot of his work that was related to Paris, and it’s sort of round this lane and round another little lane, in a former school and as you look out, you can look out to these little apartments which are still in the middle of the city.
‘A very expensive cocktail at Bar Hemingway’ Photo Ritz Hotel.
I think that’s one of the things Kiki loves, and I love about Paris through Kiki is that there’s not a separation from where you work and where you live. It’s all together. In the center of town, you can find the local cafe, because people are living four, five or six floors above it in little apartments. So just wandering around and finding little alleyways, 18th century confectionery shops that are still there – you discover your own Paris every time you go. As I’m writing these books, I want Kiki to discover a new Paris every time.
Tessa as Reader
Jenny: The series is called “The Joys of Binge Reading” because I see it as providing inspiration for people who like to read series . . . So – turning to your taste in fiction who – if anyone – do you “binge read” – or have you binge read in the past. . .
Tessa: I’m definitely a binge reader. It’s not only authors, but themes shall we say. So recently in terms of authors, there’s a few that I’ve gone through and some for very particular reasons. I was up about five or six times a night a couple of years ago when my daughter was teething. She wouldn’t sleep, so I read all of Harry Potter- about five or seven in a month, only between 10pm and 5am. So that was a type of binge reading that saved my life. I thank J. K Rowling for being such a brilliant plotter. I think that’s the only book I could have read and would rather have finished the chapter than go back to bed. I thought, well that’s some seriously good suspense writing!
Robert Galbraith, Lethal White
I’ve gone through her Robert Galbraith books as well, and the fourth one has just come out – the Strike and Ellicott novels. They’re great. I’ve also been binge reading things like Maisie Dobbs, because these are in the period. It’s a fun binge reading, because I can pretend it’s work!
So I’m binge reading Maisie Dobbs written by Jacqueline Winspear, and I’m binge reading Sulari Gentill’s Rowland Sinclair series. She’s an Australian author. But otherwise it tends to be that there’s a period or an idea that I get stuck on, and I just want to read about that as much as possible.
Obviusly one period I’ve been stuck on for a very long time is Paris – women in Paris between the wars. So I’ve read a book by Vincent Cronin called City of Light which is non fiction, and another one by Dan Franck called Bohemian Paris, and another by Anne Sebba, Les Parisiennes, How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died During the Nazi Occupation. So that’s kind of one binge reading episode I’m going through.
Then there’s another one which has just started up and it’s Russian Literature of the early 20th century. So I’m currently reading Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. I’ve got Mikhail Bulgakov’s the White Guard next to me and Vasily Grossman, and Boris Akunin, and all these other types like that. So I currently have two types of binge reading- both are character and from an author, as well as ideas.
Kerry Greenwood: Phryne Fisher series
I should obviously mention the one that obviously inspired Kiki first – that was Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher books which was one of the reasons why I started to write Kiki. I’d read them all, and I’d seen the television show so many times and then there just wasn’t anymore Phryne! I had to write my own Phryne if I wanted more!
Circling around from beginning to end
Jenny: At this stage in your career, if you were setting up all over again, what if anything would you change?
Tessa: I wish I had started earlier. That’s probably the only thing I’d say. To change things is to regret what you’ve done, but this kind of life is so serendipitous and you never know whether you’re going to be published at 20 or 60, or what’s going to happen. Are people going to like your books when they’re published or not until you’re dead?
You never really know, you just have to keep going. I wish I’d had more belief in my story telling ability when I was younger. I ignored signs- like for my final year of high school, I did drama obviously because I wanted to be an actress. I couldn’t decide what monologue to pick from Shakespeare or Chekhov, so I wrote my own. It seemed easier to write my own, than to choose something from Shakespeare.
It wasn’t until I was 30 that I realized I’d been writing- I’d been writing for decades! I couldn’t see it, I had no faith in my ability to see that. I wish I saw that earlier and started some of the early training where you have to just write so much bad work to get to an understanding of how writing works. That would be the only thing I’d say.
Jenny: What is next for Tessa the writer – projects under development
Tessa: Two things- I’m writing the second book of Kiki Button. She’s still in Paris, but she has a lot to do with exiled Romanovs from the Russian Revolution, taxi driving Russian princes and British princes and all the things that they get up to.
I’m also writing a book set in WW1- it’s someone who’s like Kiki’s main doppelgänger and looking at the final year of that war. And as I mentioned before, those ideas of loss and redemption from loss.
Jenny: So this is Fox, is it? Is this a kind of development of the Fox character in April?
Tessa: No. Fox is just for that series. Initially when I thought of Kiki, she wasn’t Kiki, she was a different kind of person altogether and the book was set in WW1 that was also funny and a romance, a tragedy, and a series.
The idea was just far too big, and it didn’t fit into one book. So I split it in two- one was the series writing romance which also became humorous, and that was Kiki. The other looked at WW1 and those ideas of loss and history, memory and identity.
I was writing both simultaneously and then it got to a point where Kiki was working so much better, so I finished that and that got published. So I’m continuing on with the other half of the Kiki book, which is the WW1 book.
Jenny: And when are you hoping Kiki Two will be out?
Tessa: I don’t know- hopefully next year! I don’t want people to forget about her in the mean time. We’ll have to see- there are too many people making decisions on that for me to be able to say.
Jenny: Coming to an end where can readers find you online, and do you like to interact with your readers?
Tessa: I very much like to interact with my readers; people can message me anytime. I have a website tessalunney.com. I’m on Twitter as @tessawynn, which is also one of my Instagram accounts. I have another Instagram account just for Kiki called @misskikibutton where you can find me as well. There will be coming a Facebook author page, where you’ll also be able to find me. You can interact with me on any of those platforms, I’d love to hear from you.
Jenny: That’s lovely Tessa, thank you so much. It’s been lovely talking and you really have made that period of Paris in the 1920’s come alive in your books. We’re looking forward to the next one.
Tessa: Wonderful, thank you.
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