To find success as a writer in any given field is a precious rarity; to find success in more than one is a feat of near mythic proportions. Australian writer Geraldine Brooks began her career as a journalist working as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal where she spent six years reporting from conflict areas around Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Israel, Jordan, and elsewhere. This led to her first book, a clear-eyed and compulsively readable piece of narrative journalism called Nine Parts of Desire, which profiles the Muslim women Brooks met while working abroad.
Such a strong debut might have pushed Brooks farther down a path toward journalism as a lifelong career, but she soon began writing fiction instead as “an experiment” because she had a young child and wanted to avoid the kind of writing job that required “long, open-ended, news-driven travel.”
The most difficult part of writing fiction, she discovered, was sustaining a narrative – something she’d already grappled with as a journalist writing Nine Parts of Desire.
“I struggled for months, learning how one sustains a long narrative, how to bring the reader along with me on an extended journey,” says Brooks about her first book. “Once I learned that lesson, the shift to fiction was rather easier.”
That experiment became her celebrated first novel, Year of Wonders, a chronicle of a tiny English village dealing with an outbreak of plague in the 1600s. It’s told in first person, a tactic Brooks has favored in her later novels as well.
“I enjoy finding the right voice to tell a particular story,” she says. “When possible, I do this by diving deeply into letters and journals of the relevant period, listening to the way people of that time and place expressed themselves, their vocabulary, their figures of speech.”
This knack for realistic inner monologue is part of the magic of her second novel, March, a lyrical, sumptuously written chronicle of the Civil War and retelling of the classic novel Little Women from the perspective of March, the girls’ absent father. March won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature; though the Pulitzer is limited to Americans, Brooks gained dual citizenship just a few years prior to publishing the book.
Now at work on her next novel, Brooks will make her way to China for a series of book talks with Australian Writers Week. Her last visit to China was 11 years ago with her son, but she’s well-read in Chinese literature and is a fan of Mo Yan and Ha Jin.
As she prepares for the trip, she’s currently “reading and loving” Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, which has sparked her interest in Chinese sci-fi.
Perhaps because she was originally comfortable drawing on real life to form a narrative as a journalist, Brooks has focused on historical fiction as a novelist, choosing to reanimate characters from the past whose stories speak to her. It was likely her experiences as a journalist that helped convince her reality has enough narrative intrigue to fill an eternity’s worth of novels.
“The past is full of implausible stories – things that if you made them up out of whole cloth, no one would credit as true. And yet, they happened,” Brooks says. “These are the stories that seem to grab hold of my imagination.”
Beijing:
Geraldine Brooks in Conversation with Lu Nei, Fri May 12, 6.30-8.30pm; CITIC Bookstore. See event listing.
Guangzhou:
Geraldine Brooks: At Home in the World, Tue May 16, 7-8pm. UN Bookstore. See event listing.
Writing for the Human Heart: Geraldine Brooks in Conversation with Li Lanni, Dai Fan and Wei Wei, Wed May 17, 9.30-11am. Guangdong Literature and Art Centre. See event listing.
Geraldine Brooks: Hearing the Unheard in Journalism and Historical Fiction, Wed May 17, 7-8.30pm. Sun Yat-sen University, School of Foreign Languages. See event listing.
Foshan:
In Conversation with Geraldine Brooks, Thu May 18, 10-11.30am. Foshan Library. See event listing.
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