On Writing

The tendency to look overseas for great literary works is hardly new. The notion of ‘cultural cringe’ (coined by AA Phillips¹ in 1950) describes an Australian assumption that ‘the domestic cultural product will be worse than the imported article’. We suppose it’s being done better internationally, and look to international markets as arbiters of taste. We measure our own successes against international works – both in terms of sales and reception – and maintain the baseline assumption that international work represents the highest level of achievement.

The distinguished English biographer Richard Holmes once described biography as ‘a handshake across time’. He was trying to draw out the degree to which writing a biography is ‘an act of human solidarity, and in its own way an act of recognition and of love’. This is surely true, but his analogy strikes me as somehow too cool. For me, writing a biography has been more like a big warm bear-hug across time, or maybe a wild, nose-in-the air, nose-to-the-ground fox-hunt across time.

Five bells toll at 4.45am. The world is humid darkness and my mind, a sleep deprived fog. I’m supposed to jump out of bed in fervent prayer but my body shakes from the shock of waking up too early, even after two years practice.

I absolutely love to write. I always have. I first realised this from the enjoyment that I had when writing essays in high school. It resonated with me a great deal, to create a narrative prose on a topic. Then at university, more essays and reports, culminating in a thesis. These early forays led to a job in technical writing – equipment manuals, to be exact. I was writing – I was happy. But then, many things happened in my life at once, and my love of writing was placed to the side.