Julia's Book Club - Theory & Practice
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Hey, I'm Elise Hu, host of the podcast TED Talks Daily. For more than 20 years, Paylocity has been leading the way with cutting-edge work solutions like on-demand payment, which offers employees access to wages prior to payday, flexible time tracking features, which enable staff to clock in and out through their mobile device, and numerous other cutting-edge solutions that simplify collaboration across HR, finance, and IT.

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There is, unfortunately, this cycle where a woman comes to the forefront and everybody is, you know, particularly feminists, are like, she's fantastic, I absolutely love her, she's perfect. And then that role model does something not even necessarily very wrong, just something very human, and somehow then they're off the pedestal, smashed on the ground. MUSIC

Hello and welcome to this month's Book Club episode and hello to Sarah Holland-Batt, my co-host. Now we are in a wonderfully professional studio, I think the best one we've ever had at the Australian National University. So we're here together in Canberra in person and of course this university is home to the Global Institute for Women's Leadership in Australia. So great to see you. Great to see you, Julia. Lovely to see you back in the country. Very good to be here. And what have you been up to?

Just, you know, it's been busy work time. It's like peak kind of academia, lots and lots of reading, none of it very fun. This was a real treat. So I feel like you've probably had much more exciting adventures in the last few months since we last chatted than I have. What have you been up to?

Well, I've been back in Australia for a few weeks now, so I did get to go to the ALP campaign launch, which was terrific to see Albo and the team. And I did get Easter at home with my family. So there was lots of Easter egg hunting, way too much chocolate, kids dancing, all of that kind of carry on. And a bit of reading between here and there. I'm trying to concentrate on the...

Women's Prize for Literature in the UK shortlist and the Stella Prize shortlist. And the book we're discussing today is definitely on that shortlist. But of course, even though I've set myself all of these goals, I diverted onto a recommendation from my friend Josephine Linden, who was on the podcast late last year. And she was desperate for me to read a book called Great Expectations. Not that Great Expectations, but a relatively new one that's out

by an American author called Vincent Cunningham. And it's around the Obama, even though he's never named, it's around the Obama run for the presidency. So it's a fiction, but with that as the sort of through line. So I'm about quarter of the way through. I'm not sure President Obama would particularly like the portrayal. So I feel a little bit disloyal, but, you know...

Hopefully he doesn't listen to the podcast and work out I'm reading it. Josephine really wanted me to read it, so that's what I'm doing now. Yeah, terrific. And we've got a great book to discuss by a friend of yours, an Australian author, Michelle de Kretzer, and the book is Theory and Practice. It's her seventh book.

novel. Now, she is a much acclaimed, much awarded, exceptional writer. She's twice been recognised with the Miles Franklin Literary Award. And as I said before, she's on the shortlist for the Stella Prize. But you know her personally. I think you interviewed her relatively recently. So can you tell us a bit about Michelle? Yeah, look, I think Michelle is...

she's one of our best writers and she's one of those writers that writers love. You know, she's a writer's writer. She's ferociously clever. Her novels, I think the thing I like about her as a writer, she doesn't just have one subject. Her novels always weave in, you know, a really sophisticated bunch of themes. She's really interested in migration. She was born in Sri Lanka and migrated to Australia herself. So she's interested in

the experience of people travelling. You know, that's very fundamental to her work. She has a novel called Questions of Travel. You know, her work kind of looks outward at the world and often to France, which is also a little feature, micro feature in this novel as well. And she writes really exquisitely, I think, these characters who have moments where you just feel you love them and moments where they have permission to kind of

behave in spiky and interesting ways. And we see this in this novel too, but I always love her portrayal of women. I think she's one of the finest writers of the complexities of what it means to be a woman, what it means to grow up. And that's sort of quite central in this book as well. So she's an amazing writer, very formally inventive, and we see this in this book as well. And in her last one, which was a novel called Scary Monsters,

and you could choose to read it from one half or the other. So it had two different covers, and depending on which one you decided to start with, you'd read the novel in a different order, and they sort of converged in the centre of the book. So she's a really kind of clever sort of –

structural writer and, yeah, I obviously just adore her. She's also very generous to other writers and a really, really strong mentor to young female writers as well. So she's much sort of loved and admired and I think a very clever writer. Her novels leave you with lots of questions. I think that's the sort of sensation finishing a Michelle de Creta novel. You sort of feel you take away questions that you want to turn over a little more in your head and I love that sort of feeling at the end of a book.

Yeah, this would be a fantastic book club book. You know, it would certainly prime a big discussion. It's interesting to hear what you say about her being someone who does novel things with the structure because this is a deconstructed novel about a deconstructed love affair in large part.

And she deliberately said that she wanted to set out and deconstruct the form of a novel. There's a quote in it about art and, you know, wanting to move away from how art should be seen or people think it should be seen to something very different. And so this structure, the novel is largely about...

a young woman who is an academic, so right on your patch...

She's living a life in St Kilda in the 1980s and it's a very, you know, bohemian student kind of life. And in the context of that life, she has a love affair with a man who is involved in a relationship. He refers to his relationship as deconstructed. But the novel is not just that story in a linear fashion. It actually starts with a whole different book and

and then cuts to this story. Can you talk about how you found the structure? Did you find it frustrating? You know, when you started, did you have that headspin moment of where are we now, when the novel that you think you're reading suddenly cuts to something incredibly different? Yeah, so it's a fascinating kind of opening. It opens in Switzerland with a male character is the protagonist, and he's sort of on a bus moving from village to village and

and kind of thinking about a woman back in Australia. And it's sort of, the opening is quite novelistic. You know, there's lots of sort of description of what he can see out the window of the bus. And you get this sort of slightly romantic sense of a male character being away from home, thinking about a woman. And then all of a sudden, it's almost like there's a record scratch and it's like, actually, no. And we have the

entrance of the narrator, the sort of central protagonist of the book. And we realise that she is a writer, she is a novelist, and this is a novel she has decided to abandon. And she wants to return to her kind of youth and to the moment where she, it sort of almost returns to her origins as a writer. She's at uni, she's having these experiences, she's having this

sort of quite electric intellectual life of ideas. And she's writing a thesis on Virginia Woolf, and she's kind of in the process of becoming this novelist who eventually will abandon the book that we start reading. So it's sort of, it's quite a strange structure, and it does sort of pull you up. And I think some readers will be sort of interested in that moment of going, oh, I was just getting kind of involved in those characters. And then all of a sudden,

you know, we might not see them again. But I think that kind of moment for me, it opened up the idea that this was going to be a novel that's kind of in a way about the ways in which writers can surprise you and sometimes let you down. You know, the novel picks up this idea with, we'll get to this, you know, I think probably in more detail in a bit, but

that the protagonist is writing a thesis on Virginia Woolf. She's writing about this writer who she admires, but as she reads her diary, she discovers certain things that

that sort of let her down. And so she sort of is in a process of unpicking what it means to be a writer, what kind of writer she wants to be. So I think it's an important moment where she sort of abandons the usual structures of fictions, the comforts of fictions, and kind of turns inward to the more autobiographical. But it is a strange novel. It's sort of got a bunch of genres going on all at once. It's a sort of campus novel.

It's a sort of novel within a novel. It's got this sort of frame of the fictional novel and then the real novel sits inside it. So it's a really interesting beast, I think, unusual and very, very innovative in its kind of structure. How did you kind of go with that moment of shifting from Switzerland to, you know, St Kilda? Yes, Switzerland to St Kilda. I think we should say with all of that, it's actually not a long book. No, it's...

way less than 200 pages. You know, I read it in two nights. I mean, it's for someone who's looking for a weekend read. If you've got one of those weekends where you can curl up a bit in a chair, you'll definitely finish it. I...

was a bit shocked but also pleased that there was that record scratch moment from the novel set in Switzerland which was starting to feel impossibly cute. And there is a line in it which I really laughed out loud. I had the wonderful privilege of going to Switzerland and there's a line where she says about the scenery in Switzerland,

it was just everything that you expected from Switzerland except more so. It's like you know everything's going to be impossibly pretty and then when you get there it's even more jaw-droppingly chocolate box pretty. So I did laugh at that. But I thought that novel...

sounded like it was going to end up a little bit sort of chocolate box itself, a bit formulaic. And so there is this sort of head turn and then you're in St Kilda. And then we don't really know, are we in St Kilda with Michelle writing an autobiography or are we in St Kilda in the 1980s with a character Michelle has created? And that...

you know, sort of conundrum is made worse by the fact that it's only very late in the novel do we get the name of the character that we're reading avidly about her life and her emotions and her feelings, but we don't know her name. And her name is revealed late in the novel. And so, and the name is not Michelle.

So you're a little bit discomforted by that too. I mean, are we reading her autobiography? Are we reading something else? And that's never entirely resolved for you. I mean, the fact the character is ultimately revealed as having a different name presumably means it's not as literal autobiographical as it might first appear. But we really don't know how many elements of her own life she's drawing on.

on? I think certainly there's definitely some echoes, right? So the protagonist who we eventually learn her name is Cindy, you know, is born in Sri Lanka, as Michelle was, migrates to Australia, as Michelle did, has a kind of interest in French and the French language, as Michelle did, studied literature, as Michelle did. So, and I think in a really fascinating way, the novel even invites it with its cover, which has this

Has Michelle on the front. Fantastic, spunky, you know, young Michelle de Creta on the front with a bandana in her hair and, you know, a kind of ambiguous look to the camera. It's a beautiful photo. And I loved that it sort of invited that kind of reading because you can't believe at times how frank the narrator is being. You know, it's searingly kind of frank and the kinds of confessions that she makes. I think it invites that ambiguity in really interesting ways. But I think...

certainly, you know, knowing Michelle's biography, that this is a fictional character. But I think the book is kind of playing with that idea of that a woman's writing in a way draws from a woman's life. And certain of these experiences certainly are universal, you know, and some of them are very particular to Cindy. But I loved that it invited that kind of ambiguity of,

is this part of this biography, is part of this fiction, is it both, is it kind of a hybrid? Yeah.

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It does plunge you into a different world, which is a very intriguing world. Some of her life's experiences, potentially the character Cindy, she pulls you back out again because towards the end of the book, we're taken to very different places. There's a story about a pedophile in Bali, and then we come to what is the end of this

1980s story where much later in life on the streets of Paris, she meets a character who was a good friend of hers in this time in St Kilda. And we get to sort of reflect on what's happened in her life and what's happened in his life since.

But the story we're most deeply in, her story as a student, a master's student, there is the love affair that is driving so much of what she thinks about the world and feels about the world. And it's

In many ways, you know, a love story, as we know, love stories, a man in a relationship, she is having the affair, I guess you would style it as, but, you know, she thinks the woman in the relationship knows about her and she's trying to be cool.

You know, in that sort of social set where there's fluidity around relationships and apparently everybody's fine with it. But underneath, she's got this seething jealousy towards the woman who's in the more formal relationship. And there are many plots and plans to get this woman back.

and then she is disgusted with her own lack of feminist solidarity. And I thought all of that was in some ways excruciatingly done because you could feel it in your body as you were reading it, but incredibly well done too. Yeah, I mean, I think I just loved the way this novel unpicked some of those hypocrisies. You know, we've all come across that sort of that type of bloke

who talks about Marxism and socialism and deconstructed relationships and talks a really good game, but then the women around him suffer. And I think it's just a fantastic kind of portrait of that

That longing to kind of be a feminist and not quite knowing what that means. And there's a beautiful kind of quote where she talks about how feminism is sort of landing these body blows on the patriarchy, but female solidarity is yet to be fully born and realised. And so in spite of these young women who she absolutely despises, this other woman, Olivia,

And Olivia kind of occupies this large real estate in her head. She's constantly thinking of ways she might get back at her. She even contemplates breaking into her apartment. She has this sort of wild kind of spinning off moments of thinking, how can I kind of get back at her and how can I kind of make myself known? She doesn't quite...

She doesn't quite kind of know what to do with the connection that she could have with Olivia. They're things that connect them. They're interested in the same man. They both suffered the loss of a parent early in life. There's actually kind of echoes between them, but they're completely sort of cut off from finding any feminine solidarity because of this presence of this, I mean, ultimately quite gormless bloke. You know, that's the great joke of it all is these two kind of fantastic women who

And at the centre, there's this guy who probably is not all that impressive. And we kind of, you know, it's often the way, isn't it? You know, there's, you sort of think, how on earth did he manage to attract these two amazing women? And so is the case here, but they don't quite manage to connect.

in spite of these little echoes between them. There's a very different class dynamic, isn't there? Yes. So the character, Cindy, a migrant, she's got a troubled relationship with her mother. Her mother is, you know, come to Australia. Her mother's sought to make good in Australia, but making good in Australia is impossible.

accepting a whole lot of norms and customs and then taking them to absolute pretty cutesy extremes. And so she talks at one point about being dressed in these ridiculous petticoated party dresses when she was a child and absolutely hating it.

And so she's from, you know, if you were to use the parlance, a lower socioeconomic background, she's been in that sense moved into a different world by obviously being smart and getting to go to university and then on to a master's degree. Whereas Olivia is clearly from a bourgeois family and has got a lot of economic advantages.

And in Cindy, that reflects a duality too. There's a line in it where she literally says, you know, I hate the bourgeoisie. She's obviously surrounded by a lot of Marxist left intellectuals. I hate the bourgeoisie. I want to be part of the bourgeoisie. Like, why can't I be at home in this much more privileged life too? Yeah, I loved that. I love that portrait of her relationship with her mother. I think so much of...

you know, the big ideas of the novel are actually held in that relationship. The mother, you know, wants to in so many ways kind of assimilate and become invisible. And the daughter, of course, wants to rebel against that and wants to be cool and young and have, you know, interesting clothes that she gets from an op shop and she's embarrassed by her mother's kind of embrace of femininity and sort of social norms. And, you know, she...

Cindy has such big ideas as a young person and she wants to express herself. But

But the thing that cracked me up was how much both mother and daughter embarrass one another. They're both equally mortified by each other's kind of refusal to adhere to what they consider to be the norm, which is very, very funny. And then you have these layers of class and race that sit on top of that for Cindy, where she wants to be cool. She wants to be feminist. She has these radical kind of politics. She wants to be part of this intellectual world.

Yet there are sort of barriers to fully experiencing that world. I mean, her partner, this drip, you know, lives in a kind of squat but doesn't have to and refers to the fact that he has a shared bathroom as bohemian, but you can tell it's almost in inverted commas. You know, he's a tourist in this world and this is really what she can afford. And so there's kind of these moments where...

She gets brought up against the realities of class and that, you know, her boyfriend is basically cosplaying as poor and she herself actually is really trying to make something of her life and has limited kind of means, you know, in the moment of the novel to do that. And her mother has clearly had to scrimp and save her.

to support her daughter. So I think there's these kind of complexities that come up against one another and it's not just one thing or another. Cindy's grappling with a lot of things at once and I loved that, the sophistication of all these sort of factors. But at heart, she's still just a young person who wants to

wants to be seen to be the cool one. She has these phrases that she repeats to herself and one of them is, "Always be the cool one." And she's trying really hard, but there are these factors that make it more difficult for her as a sort of migrant with a single parent who doesn't have many means. So it's a complex kind of world she's trying to navigate.

And full of quirky characters, but ones that you can, I can certainly recognise. You know, I was in university in the 1980s and there's the, you know, feminist who's in a jazz band and there's the visual artist and there's the, you know, people talking very earnestly about sort of Marxist philosophy.

There is a gay man and of course this is as the AIDS crisis is starting to impact and lives are being lost. But we should note, particularly on a podcast of one's own, that there's another mother figure in this book and that is Virginia Woolf herself.

because Cindy's studies are into Virginia Woolf and she refers to Virginia Woolf having introduced her into the book as the wolf mother, which I absolutely love. And she is...

trying to reconcile in her own mind how much she loves the wolf mother with the wolf mother's failings. And I was particularly drawn to this sentence or a few sentences. She asks a character, a woman character in the novel, if she'd read, and I quote Virginia Woolf's, a room of one's own. And the reply was, that book explained my life.

That's what I thought when I read it. It explains the life of every woman on the planet.

And then she then goes and asks her gay friend Lenny if he'd read A Room of One's Own. And he says, Virginia Woolf was a product of the British upper middle class and that her book was addressed to women like her. She knew nothing about working class lives. And then she asks another female friend and the female friend says, it changed her life. Virginia Woolf was like my mother if my mother had been like I wanted. LAUGHTER

So we've got laid out before us the difference in the male and female gaze on Virginia Woolf. But in the course of her research on Virginia Woolf for her thesis, she discovers times when Virginia Woolf has been anti-Semitic, when she's been racist, and particularly when she's used a dismissive racist description of a man who is actually venerated in the

then Salon, now Sri Lanka, as one of the heroes of the struggle against colonial oppression and colonial mistreatment. And Virginia Woolf refers to him very dismissively. And so she's got to come to grips

with this and there's a beautiful description at one point where she's leveraging off the fairy tale about the princess and the pea, you know, no matter how many mattresses and how high it's stacked, this very upper class, delicate woman can still feel this small pea. And she says even though she's on this sort of billowy, pillowy Virginia Woolf, she can still feel irritating her, this racist moment of

towards someone that she venerated as a hero of the colonial struggle. I mean, it is beautifully done and requires you to think a lot about how we think about Virginia Woolf, given she did have these huge failings. She was a snob. She, you know...

replicated the racism of the time. Her husband was Jewish, but she referred to him and his Jewishness in a dismissive, often anti-Semitic way. She was by no means perfect. No, and I loved that Cindy was so sort of strung between those two poles. You know, she adores Virginia Woolf. She's writing her thesis on Woolf. Woolf is the intellectual mother that she needed to

sort of to supplement the mother that she has. And there's a beautiful kind of moment where she says, you know, between the two of them I learnt much of what I needed to know between her actual mother and Virginia Woolf. But, you know, I think Virginia Woolf's sort of fate in the novel is interesting

is sort of tracked in a way by this poster that she has in her apartment of Virginia Woolf, which sort of starts to peel away and she keeps sort of tacking it back up. And then one night she comes back drunk and she tramples all over it. So then there's a boot print on Virginia Woolf and then she puts it up in a different room. And sort of, you know, as her relationship with Woolf and as her understanding of the fullness of Woolf's kind of thinking, including these moments that make her quite uncomfortable and unsettled and upset, you know, the poster sort of

moves its way through the house. But I really loved the way that the novel, I think, showed the way we circle around these discomforts with writers and artists that we kind of admire, but we have these questions about or when we learn that, you know, there's certain

ideas that they've held or behaviours that they've exhibited that we're not comfortable with. And the novel sort of keeps circling back to it. It's something that the character's really trying to work through because Wolf has given her so many intellectual gifts. She's a great

admirer of her writing and presumably she becomes a role model for Cindy who goes on to become a novelist too. So these sort of writers that get under your skin early in your life, they're impossible to fully shake off. But at the same time, you want to be intellectually honest about what you've read and she reads these things in the diary that are racist and that are really, really upsetting. And I thought the novel sort of handled that

complexity really beautifully but this idea that we can't deny what what artists um say that discomfort us but nor should we necessarily tear them down completely that there has to be some kind of reckoning and I kind of read the book as a sort of form of reckoning um in a way

Hey, I'm Elise Hu, host of the podcast TED Talks Daily. For more than 20 years, Paylocity has been leading the way with cutting-edge work solutions like on-demand payment, which offers employees access to wages prior to payday, flexible time tracking features, which enable staff to clock in and out through their mobile device, and numerous other cutting-edge solutions that simplify collaboration across HR, finance, and IT.

Learn more about how Paylocity can help streamline work and enhance business outcomes for your organization at paylocity.com slash simplified.

Did you know that foreign investors are quietly funding lawsuits in American courts through a practice called third-party litigation funding? Shadowy overseas funders are paying to sue American companies in our courts, and they don't pay a dime in U.S. taxes if there is an award or settlement. They profit tax-free from our legal system, while U.S. companies are tied up in court and American families pay the price to the tune of $5,000 a year. But

But there is a solution. A new proposal before Congress would close this loophole and ensure these foreign investors pay taxes, just like the actual plaintiffs have to. It's a common sense move that discourages frivolous and abusive lawsuits and redirects resources back into American jobs in

innovation, and growth. Only President Trump and congressional Republicans can deliver this win for America and hold these foreign investors accountable. Contact your lawmakers today and demand they take a stand to end foreign-funded litigation abuse.

She does come to a settling point, the settling point that you've referred to on Woolf. But reading her, reasoning her way there, I found that, you know, one of the strongest bits of it overall. There's this particular sentence that I've read and reread and it is...

And as you say, in the end, she rejects both. But I thought that was such a penetrating way of getting us to think.

about how we in the contemporary world, in the present tense, go back and forth on women role models. And there is unfortunately this cycle where a woman comes to the forefront and everybody is, you know, particularly feminists are like, she's fantastic. I absolutely love her. She's perfect. And

And then that role model does something not even necessarily very wrong, just something very human. And somehow then they're off the pedestal, smashed on the ground. And we still don't give women the space to be role models, leaders, but humans in 3D with all of the strengths and weaknesses that can come with that.

Yeah, I think that's so profound, isn't it? And she's got this line when she's thinking through those ideas of how do younger generations grapple with those figures that come before them, where she says, our imaginations were larger than theirs, that we have these four mothers, we have these four figures, but that with every generation, the imagination becomes bigger, the aspirations become bigger. And I think

That really struck me, that idea. She says that about her own mother as well, you know, my imagination was larger than hers, meaning that not necessarily that she's brighter or cleverer but that the horizons that her mother created for her through her mother's work

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flexible time tracking features, which enable staff to clock in and out through their mobile device, and numerous other cutting-edge solutions that simplify collaboration across HR, finance, and IT. Learn more about how Paylocity can help streamline work and enhance business outcomes for your organization at paylocity.com slash simplified.

enabled her to imagine something even bigger. And those horizons will enable the next generation to imagine something bigger. And I thought that was a very beautiful kind of metaphor to explain that conundrum, I suppose, of how we relate to women who we admire inside literature and outside it, how we relate to those foremothers who disappoint us in various ways, but who are so central to our making. Yeah.

Now, we have not done one thing that I think we really should, which is explain the title. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's Theory and Practice. And you'll be the best person to explain this. Why is it called Theory and Practice?

So, I mean, I loved this component of it, but, you know, full disclaimer, I was an English literature student. So this is really my wheelhouse. But the narrator kind of tells us that she's interested in the breakdown between theory and practice. And she's interested in that

in an array of contexts, between feminist theory, between these ideals we hold up of feminism, you know, how a good feminist should be, how women should feel about themselves, how we should feel about our bodies, how we should feel no shame, how we should feel sexually free, all these kind of imperatives that we're given. And then in practice, how we

fail to fulfill those or how life goes a different way or how in reality we don't always adhere to the theory that we might like the idea of and like the sound of. But the reality is always so much messier and so much more difficult than the sort of theory that we might like to sort of say explains our life. And then there's an added layer in this book, of course, because it's set in an English department.

English departments in the 80s, particularly when this novel is set, were completely besieged by this really complex French theory, French deconstructionist theory. And that was sort of applied to all novels, that the theory explained everything. It almost didn't matter what

what the book was saying, the theory became the primal thing. And this character kind of has these questions about it. She's actually not that interested in theory. She thinks it's poorly written. She thinks it's hard to understand. She's more interested in women's lives and women's writing. And so she's sort of interested in the break between theory and practice in that respect too. So there's kind of a few layers to it, but there's also just a searing satire of English departments at universities and

which will be pleasurable maybe to a proportion of readers rather than everyone because, you know, it does help to have been in that environment, I think, to find it very funny. And there's hilarious scenes where the blokes in the department are intent on, you know, destroying anyone who gives a seminar paper and the seminars, the Friday seminars are referred to the Christians and the lions, you know. It's just hilarious.

It sort of speaks to a very masculine version of academia, a very masculine kind of version that was really predominant in the 80s and the 90s and still has a vestiges, I think, today. And so the novel's also sort of interested in

you know, feminism coming and blowing the cobwebs out of all of that. And, you know, so I really enjoyed that component of it. It really made me laugh. Yeah, there are some very funny things in it. Who is going to get the next permanent position? And the woman who's supervising her thesis, who really is trying to get her away from Virginia Woolf's diaries and looking at

the racism and any other flaws of Virginia Woolf and back strictly onto the novels so that this theory can be the sieve through which she sort of pushes the wording of her thesis. And if she does that, then she'll get a good mark. If she doesn't, then she won't. And yet this female academic, Paula, has in part made her name by doing reviews where she rips apart other women's books. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

because that's how you're going to get some cute off. No, it's kind of a little bit to the side, that kind of subplot about the English department, but it's very winning when you're reading it. It's so good. And my favourite part of that is the sort of chief antagonist is the bloke who's been brought in to run the department and he's a Marxist and someone asks, you know,

you know, what kind of Marxist is he? And the answer is, oh, he's the kind with an E-type jag. It's just great. It's kind of, you know, the hypocrisy of that kind of intellectual pretension, particularly, and competitiveness and kind of aggro among male academics. It's delicious, but, you know, maybe not for every reader, but certainly for me. And there's lots of scenes that will take people back, you know, to their, to their

Parties in small rooms, eccentric catering, cheap pasta, even cheaper red wine, all of that. So plenty to savour. Having said that, I really would have to say I loved this book in bits.

I think I would have liked the constructed novel, that I didn't really need the start in Switzerland. I would have been completely intrigued by it and loved it if it had been a

linear telling of this story about this young woman, complete with all of the reflections around Virginia Woolf and the Woolf mother. But the time novel deconstruction in it, starting with a different novel, then starting this story, going out to these troubling vignettes like the one about the pedophile in Bali. I structurally didn't need that to love it.

Having said that, I would still completely recommend it as a read to people. I mean, it'll hold you. It's an easy read. You will devour it. And for people who listen to this podcast, the reflections on Virginia Woolf alone make it worth reading. And there is so much more than that. Yeah, it's just it's also just wickedly funny. I mean, that's

That's what I come back to when I think of Michelle's writing. You know, there's just these lines that just stay with me, like the E-type Jag. You know, she's just got such a brilliant observational kind of humour, so sharp, so cutting. And, you know, it's turned inward as well. So it's a very sort of, it's a novel that sees, holds so much in its gaze and it's just a joy. Yeah.

And it's certainly given me a taste for reading more of her work. I must admit I haven't been a reader of her work, but I definitely will be. I'll challenge myself by reading the one that you can start either side. Scary Monsters. Scary Monsters. It's brilliant. Yeah, I'll challenge myself with that. And we will see whoever is the winner of the Stella Prize, but of course Michelle on the short list and it's always terrific to see Michelle

great celebrations of writing by women and the Stella Prize is certainly one of those. And what lies ahead for you now beyond the podcast as the months roll by? Oh, look, you know, it remains a really busy time. I've got lots of work ahead, lots of reading ahead. I'm judging a few literary awards. So the stack, you know, kind of is always piling up and

But looking forward to our next book and such a joy to discuss this brilliant novel together. Yep, we've got plenty more podcasts to come. I'm returning to London back to the work at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership there and my work at the Wellcome Trust. Hopefully the weather will be warming up for summer. But I do

have to say there are times when I'm in London and I look down at the weather on my phone and the daytime temperature in London in mid-summer and the daytime temperature in Adelaide in mid-winter aren't that far apart so we will see it's criminal

So always good to be with you and a particular delight to be able to do it in person. Thank you to everyone listening. Please keep your book recommendations coming. We love to hear about what you're reading and what you think we should discuss on the podcast and any reflections on this book, Theory and Practice. Very, very welcome. Thank you.

A podcast of one's own is created by the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at the Australian National University, Canberra, with support from our sister institute at King's College, London. Earnings from the podcast go back into funding for the institute, which was founded by our host, Julia Gillard, and brings together rigorous research, practice and advocacy as a powerful force to advance gender equality and promote fair and equal access to leadership.

Research and production for this podcast is by Becca Shepard, Alice Higgins and Alina Ecott, with editing by Liz Kean from Headline Productions. If you have feedback or ideas, please email us at giwl at anu.edu.au.

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