Andrea Goldsmith isn’t yet a national treasure, but it’s hoped she will be. Soon. Goldsmith, the partner of the late Australian poet Dorothy Porter, has successfully carved a name for herself as an accomplished novelist. Her latest work, Reunion, deals with notions of friendship and how we perceive our own pasts.
‘People do sentimentalise and mythologise the past and they also hold so very, very precious their childhood, even if the childhood really doesn’t deserve it,’ Goldsmith explained on the phone from her Melbourne home.
‘A meeting with the past is already, I think, one in which distortions are going to come in. What happens with our past is we remember what we want to remember and we rehearse those same memories over and over again so you get a really distorted view.
Generally, unless you’ve had a really bloody miserable childhood, generally what’s remembered is the very good or the very bad. If you choose to go to a reunion, generally it’s because of the very good stuff that you’re remembering but it is totally, totally a distortion and of course you come away feeling misunderstood, rejected and wish you hadn’t gone. Perhaps we need to bring a little more humour to them and know that we make and remake our own stories as our current lives actually change.’
If there is humour in Goldsmith’s work, it is certainly dark. Not that the story itself is. In fact, it’s a brilliantly crafted work, at once obsessional, sentimental and intelligent, a story where all of the characters are people who make extraordinary contributions, yet are explored in the most ordinary manner. But the story is subversive and, as such, deals with seemingly dark matter.
‘Fiction has got a natural predisposition towards the subversive – it’s, after all, all made up and therefore you can get away with murder in a way that a nonfiction writer can’t. The fact of the matter is, in this novel there is an act of voluntary euthanasia which I can’t write about on the web; there are laws preventing me writing about that on the web, but I can get away with it in a novel.
‘There is also a relationship between an adolescent girl and a 40-something year old man, a sexual relationship and I’ve written it in a way to appear as if it’s mutually beneficial to both – and I mean the 15 year old, too.
‘The fact is, the fiction seduces people into condoning behaviours that otherwise, they wouldn’t. But it is, because there’s that whole wonderful, seductive nature of fiction itself and if you write your characters well then they appear as if real and people have a stake in what they do.’
Goldsmith is quick to point out that the novel itself works as any good novel should: a work of literary fiction, one where the craft of the story and the characters compelling it are paramount. Any notion of sexuality is secondary.
‘This book is like all of my novels, in that there are gay characters and/or gay relationships, but I’ve never been described as the ‘lesbian Jewish Melbourne writer’ – well I probably have, actually – and all of those things, I’ve never been specifically one or the other, it’s the novel that actually matters.
‘There is a second, really quite driven relationship in this book, which is between two women. It’s Fleur and Ava, and it is driven, passionate, it’s red hot and fiery, the sort of relationship that would just burn you up and they did run the risk of that actually happening. It’s there in service to the whole novel, it’s not in service to any ideological program of mine, as a lesbian; I’m first and foremost a novelist.’
And a bloody brilliant one at that.
Andrea Goldsmith appears as part of the Perth Writers Festival which runs from Friday February 26 until Monday March 1 at The University of Western Australia. www.perthfestival.com.au
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
