Counting down the days

Less than a month to go and Vulture's Gate will be in bookshops across Australia. I have a stack of glossy covers on my desk, though I'm still waiting on my advance copies of the bound book.

This afternoon I had a long chat with the very lovely publicist from Allen and Unwin, Sarah Tran. I probably drove her crazy with questions as I vented my anxieties about the passage of this novel into the world. I poured over the media release and fretted about potential misunderstandings - though it's too late now as both the book and the release have left the warehouse on their way to around a hundred reviewers, radio stations, newspapers and media outlets.

I can't believe how anxious I am about its release. It was a story that ambushed me when I was working on another novel and I still haven't worked out how to discuss its contents. Tomorrow, I'm giving a talk at Glen Waverley Library as part of the Monash Library Literary Festival. I've put together a powerpoint presentation of images related to my books and their covers but, if the last couple of gigs are anything to go by, I'll probably be hit by an almost familiar ripple of fear when the cover of 'Vulture's Gate' flashes onto the screen. There are so many things embedded in this book, I think it will take me a few more weeks to grapple with how to explain its genesis.

As I unwrapped the parcel of covers this morning and read the strap line I was struck again by the strangeness of this story that I have brought into the world: Girls are extinct, Chaos Rules, Welcome to the future...

Misery

Misery memoirs have been around for a long time. They existed long before Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It became a sensation for Pelzer's portrayal of his brutalised and miserable childhood. When I wrote my novel A Prayer for Blue Delaney, which touched upon the fate of Australian child migrants of the 1950s, I received many emails from young readers asking me if I'd read Pelzer's book and I became aware of how many children read misery memoirs as if they are books for children. Just because a book is about a child, doesn't mean it is suitable for younger readers.

Miserable childhoods are classic material for children's books. Richard Davies has posted a list of 20 Classics that document shattered childhoods over at the Abe Books website. But there is a difference between children's book about tough childhoods and misery memoirs. I've researched the lives of many people whose childhoods were fraught with suffering and struggled to make sense of the stories, to sift through the sickening details to find the core truth and integrity of the story. It isn't the misery that makes the stories important but the humanity of the child. When retelling these stories for younger readers, it's inappropriately gratuitous to include every gruesome detail. Sometimes when you 'tell all' you only create a work that is a testament of brutality, of the depths of human despair.

Misery memoirs no doubt have an important place alongside adult biographies but it's more than a little disturbing when you spot one on the shelves of a primary school library.



Last Christmas, I walked into a Borders bookshops and was confronted by a wall of misery memoirs in the foyer. A pair of young girls who were no older than ten years of age were browsing the titles on display, presumably making their Christmas selection. And it struck me that the way these memoirs are marketed is almost more disturbing than their content. I am not an advocate of censoring the reading of children as I believe child readers are generally very good at self censorship but the covers of these books are both compelling and misleading from a child's perspective. I chose to display in this post only a fraction of the covers that I stumbled across. There are dozens more in a similar vein. A doe-eyed child viewed through the soft focus lens has become a hallmark of childhood abuse. It's no wonder child readers are drawn to them.

The titles alone give you a sense of the parallel themes: Ugly, Abandoned, Sickened, Broken, Cut and Scarred. Then there are the titles that reference society's abandonment and failure to protect the children: Suffer the Little Children, Deliver me from Evil, Touched by Evil, Nobody Heard Me Cry, Nobody Came.

Perhaps the most disturbing titles are the ones that reference 'Daddy'. Many of these books detail explicit and grotesque acts of sexual abuse. There are dozens of them, each detailing the betrayal daughters have suffered at their hands of their fathers. When I was running a search for related titles on the internet, the online bookseller threw up a list of titles about sexual abuse along with a very sweet picture book about a bear and his cub entitled 'Kisses for Daddy'.



I've long suspected that Tolstoy was wrong when he wrote "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." There is something depressingly repetitious about human misery.

Good Girls, Bad Girls

It's school holidays here in Victoria. I used to love the winter term break - especially as the cold weather provided a perfect excuse to spend all day watching television. (Yes, I was a TV addict as well as a book addict.) So though I usually blog about books, I've been thinking about the other pleasures of childhood holidays.

I especially loved it when daytime television featured 'festivals' of 1930s child stars. As much as I admired Shirley Temple, it was the 'Jane Withers Festivals' that provoked special excitement. What was it about Jane? She's largely forgotten now, except for her role as the very bad rich girl who bullies Shirley in the film Bright Eyes. But I think what I liked about her was that, even though she wasn't as pretty as Shirley, she was bursting with energy. And even when she was bad, you couldn't help but admire her. She was never a wimp.

It's decades since I've seen a Jane Withers films but she is fixed in my memory as the tough but good-natured working-class kid who saves the day, not necessarily through cheesy personal charm but through sheer grit and determination. She was a real girl. The sort of girl that everybody knew and had probably had a really big fight with at some stage. I loved her for that. Sometimes it feels as if the only girls left in the movie world are impossibly pretty and dauntingly unreal. Perhaps Abigail Breslin's success rests on the fact she gets a little closer to real girldom than many of her contemporaries. But Jane could do wicked in a way that I've never seen Abigail B. tackle.

Despite my best intentions, I haven't been able to embed the only decent clip of Jane Withers in action that I could find but if you follow the link, you'll get an idea of the sort of girl Jane could capture so well. You may not like her, but you have to admit, she's got spunk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltsEms2SkGI

The Good Blog

I am ashamed to admit that I have been seduced away from blogging by Twitter - that's my feeble excuse for not having written a blog for nearly a month. I've felt annoyed when some of my favourite bloggers (Lili Wilkinson and Penni Russon of Eglantine's Cake to name and shame a couple) slowed their output in favour of the 140 character hit but now I understand the attraction. Yet Twitter can't replace the solid ideas that you can embed in a good blog.

What constitutes a good blog and what are the justifications for keeping one? There are a surfeit of dull ones out there and I don't want to add to the effluence in the blogsphere. But still I'm not sure of the form. Anyone who has read this blog regularly will notice that I've shifted away from regular book reviews and started posting my own news and ideas about books in general. I've fiddled with the design and layout, I've added boxes and reworded my profile. But I still don't think I've hit upon what exactly makes a good blog - the sort of blog I really enjoy reading.

So here's my short list of what are the most important elements of a good blog:

• Regular postings (but not so often that the reader feels despair at keeping up)
  
• Informative
  
• Provocative
• No more than 500 words in length
  
• A dash of intimacy

I don't think I'm scoring very well. I certainly aim for the first four but I'm not good at self-revelation, even though I admire it in other people and their blogs. I write because I like to think about 'the other' but I love to read blogs where the author references their life and family, the little intimacies that make them accessible and human. I struggle to pepper my blogs with references to my life outside books, worry that my kids would be deeply irritated to find themselves mentioned, and feel my family is too complex and unwieldy to reference.

Yet some days, blogging can feel like sheer self-indulgence. It's the sort writing you do when you're not really writing. The article you write without certainty of a readership, without financial reward, without higher purpose. Which is probably what most writing is like for most of us - but this morning I read Margo Lanagan's blog and loved her comment about the process of judging the Vogel prize : "...the idea that if you fill 200 pages with words, that must be a novel. Oh ho, but it's not, people."

The idea that if you fill a page of cyberspace with a few thousand characters, you have written a blog is valid - but it's not a good blog.

What we are remembered for

It's not uncommon for children's authors to have a little chip on their shoulder. We're often asked 'but when are you going to write a book for adults?' as if the work we're sweating over isn't of much importance and the only readers that count are over eighteen. I doubt that authors of adult fiction, especially those with a literary bent, are ever asked when they are going to write a book for children. I don't find this question insulting any more. Just misguided. Those who ask it show little understanding of children's literature.
Reading Gretchen Gerzina's biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett is a good reminder of the enduring quality of children's literature. In her lifetime, FBH was compared with Charlotte Bronte and Henry James as one of the great novelists of the late 19th Century. She was a prolific author of adult fiction and yet the three books she is remembered for are only a fraction of her spectacular output: The Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. Ironically, The Secret Garden, which was written when FBH was in her sixties, was not considered one of her stand-out novels and yet in the course of the last hundred years it has become a timeless classic.
Perhaps every author of adult fiction should be asked "But when are you going to write a book for children?"

Missing Mothers - A Mother's Day Thought

When I was a young mother, I used to resent how invisible mothers were in children's fiction. Think about it: Both Mary and Colin in the Secret Garden were motherless along with Sarah from The Little Princess, Pippi Longstocking, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Bastian from Never Ending Story, and Ann of Green Gables, The Bastables in E. Nesbits books - to name but a few. The roll call of children in classic fiction whose mothers have died on them is long and venerable. Some of the afore named characters had also carelessly lost their fathers too but absent mothers probably outnumber absent fathers by two to one.

Recently, I read a review by Ruth Starke where she lamented the number of children's and YA books currently being published where the mothers were dead. But it strikes me the authors are only continuing a very old tradition of matricide in children's fiction. Why are mother's so often dead, disabled or totally absent from so much children's fiction?

It wasn't until I had written a few novels that I started to understand why 'getting rid of the mother' is such a key motif of books for younger readers. Mothers risk their lives to keep their children safe (which, essentially, makes them the heroes of the stories). Mothers discourage risk taking, try and prevent nasty situations from arising and generally thwart the possibility of children experiencing any heart-wrenching drama or action. C.S. Lewis could never have made the Narnia Chronicles work if he hadn't got the mothers out of the story as soon as possible. Lily Potter stood between Harry and Voldemort. If she had survived, Harry would have had to put up with her protecting him for the rest of his life and there would have only been one short book, not seven. Mothers simply take up too much space. Their heroism completely undermines the possibility of a child protagonist have a truly big adventure. Mothers stand between the child and the wider world ensuring their offspring reach adulthood safely. And wrecking millions of exciting stories, for which, in the real world, we are endlessly grateful.

In removing mothers from stories for children authors allow young readers to safely explore the world through fiction, to take risks in their imagination, to understand courage and fortitude without personally experiencing suffering. The absent mother in fiction is a reflection of how mothers are towering figures in reality.

The perfect author bio

Clunes is an eccentric town in Victoria - in the heart of the goldfields. I spent Saturday wandering around their leafy streets, enjoying their annual 'Back To Booktown' event. I loved the quiet intensity of a town full of books and readers. There were serious bookworms everywhere, lugging around shopping bags full of book booty. There were even those who cleverly came equipped with trolleys so they could manage their weighty hauls.

I was very modest in my purchases and mostly enjoyed browsing. But I couldn't resist buying a biography of the poet Alexander Pope by Edith Sitwell. (The image is of its back cover).

Both Pope and Sitwell were very eccentric characters so she is definitely the appropriate person to write his biography. As much as I've enjoyed (and puzzled over) both Pope and Sitwell's poetry, I'm ashamed to admit that what really inspired me to buy the book was its cover - specifically Sitwell's author bio. In case you find the print too small, it reads "She was educated privately and her principal recreation are reading and thinking about poetry, listening to music and silence."

Authors are often asked to submit short bios for book covers, festivals and public appearances. I always find it a cringeworthy exercise. It is so hard to summarise yourself, your life, your history, your interests and ideas in less than 150 words (try it and discover the cringe factor). I love Sitwell's neat encapsulation of her passions and their straightforward simplicity. I'd love to plagarise it: "Murray was educated in government schools and her principal recreation are reading and thinking about fiction, listening to music and silence... How beautifully simple and to the point!