This month Stella celebrates West Girls, longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize.
What book are you currently reading?
I’ve been inspired by Kill Your Darlings’ Queer Critics Series to pick up some LGBTQIA+ Australian classics, starting with Beverley Farmer’s Alone. Set in 1950s Melbourne, it follows an eighteen-year-old waitress, Shirley, living in a dodgy rooming house and contemplating suicide after being jilted by her girlfriend. This grim, sinister little book is unsparing in its depictions of Australian parochialism and masculinity. Yet – just as Romeo and Juliet and The Sorrows of Young Werther aren’t pure tragedy – it’s sensuous and funny too, with much of the humour coming from Shirley’s outsized teenaged emotions. Madeleine Gray’s ‘Lesbians and Palimpsests’ essay is an essential companion read.
It’s rare that I miss a book after reading it, so when I began having pangs after finishing Solvej Balle’s On The Calculation of Volume I (the first instalment of the reclusive Danish author’s seven-volume Groundhog Day-esque spec-fic epic), I was quick to pick up Volume II. Being reunited with Tara Selter, as she embarks on her second year of living November 18 over and over, feels like spending time with an incredibly cursed yet well-meaning old friend – which is to say, I want her to be okay and am enthralled by her misfortune.
I’ve also been enjoying new work from Glaswegian writer Daisy LaFarge (author of the skin-crawlingly creepy Paul and Lovebug), in the form of her illness-focused Substack Desiderata, conceived of as a ‘fantasy of the sanatorium’, and this new story in Mousse. Her next novel won’t be out until 2027 so I’m grateful for these briefer pieces.
In West Girls, the setting of Perth feels like a character itself, from the outer suburbs to the mansions of Peppermint Grove. What inspired you to set your book in the richest state of Australia? How much of the stories are drawn from your own experience growing up in Perth, and what brought you back to writing there after moving to Melbourne?
I left Perth for Melbourne when I was eighteen, so my entire adult life (and writing career) has occurred at a remove from my hometown. For a long time, I had a lot of cultural cringe about Perth, assuming that it wasn’t interesting enough to be material. But there’s also an element of escapism to all my fiction writing, which has made me generally disinclined to dwell on overly familiar settings; I’ve still never written anything set in Melbourne, and doubt that I’ll want to, as long as I live here.
During the pandemic, when WA secured its reputation as the ‘Fortress State’, I began to see my hometown not just as a wasteland, but as a microcosm of the global west.
Fellow WA author Patrick Marlborough had this great tweet a few years ago along the lines of ‘Australia is the Perth of the world’. Everything that’s uneasy about Australia – from the isolation to the ill-gotten wealth to the cultural inferiority complex to the smug refusal to truly reckon with the ongoing effects of colonisation to the persistent natural beauty – is heightened in WA. Our botanic gardens have a section sponsored by Rio Tinto. It’s an outrageous place, considered from a distance.
Being in Melbourne lockdown for two years enforced this distance. I remember scrolling on Instagram and seeing my family and schoolmates just living their lives, throwing baby showers, going clubbing, while we were stuck inside for months. When I was eventually able to visit WA in 2022, there was a lustre to everything. I remember drifting around listening to the Once Upon A Time in the West soundtrack, like, ‘Ah, another Döme.’ I don’t think I could’ve written West Girls without that blend of exile’s resentment and sentimentality.
The structure of this book interweaves many stories, with multiple character voices. Did you enjoy writing from this multi-perspective form? Was it easy or challenging for you to craft, inhabit and immerse yourself into multiple characters?
The thought of writing a whole novel from the perspective of a single character is way more daunting, to me. Polyphony is something I’ve gravitated towards, from my first short story collection, The Love of a Bad Man – which explores the perspectives of the wives and girlfriends of notorious evil men of the twentieth century – onwards.
Part of the fun of fiction for me is playing with subjectivity, introducing readers to a character or world then looking at that same person or place from another angle.
With West Girls, I also wanted to mimic the experience of living in a small, isolated city like Perth – how everyone has someone in common. Some characters, like Luna and Caitlyn, are intimately entangled. But there are a lot more tangential connections: this girl and that girl go to the same injectables clinic, or that girl’s mother is this girl’s co-worker, or this girl married that girl’s hook-up. Each character’s voice felt like part of the same chorus.
What inspired your exploration of women’s relationships and the power dynamics within?
Though all my fiction has featured explorations of women’s relationships and internalised misogyny, until West Girls, male-perpetrated violence and abuses of power often took centre stage. This time, I wanted to push the men into the background and confront readers with the violence of heteronormative girlhood in the west.
I think a lot of writers, when representing characters who are somehow marginalised (queer women, for example), reflexively imbue those characters with virtuous qualities and progressive politics. I’m not all that interested in writing about enlightened, principled feminists fighting against the patriarchy. I’m more compelled by the confusion of being caught within it: how a woman can be attracted to other women and still have uncharitable thoughts about cellulite; how a mother might teach her daughter to hate her body; how a daughter might judge her mother for being resolutely single. Norms about womanhood wouldn’t be nearly so powerful, if men were the only people pedalling them.
What Feminist conversations do you hope this book sparks amongst readers, particularly in the context of Australian society?
I’ve been pleased to see West Girls sparking a lot of conversations about beauty, race, and class, among other things. But I often wish that these conversations would go deeper. With regards to beauty, most readers will readily acknowledge that obsession with thinness, youth, and Eurocentric beauty ideals is harmful for women, and stalls social progress. The conversation often stops there, though, which is a shame – not least because it implies that girls and women just need to grow up and stop being so superficial. I’d like to see more people talking about what we might be giving up, in moving away from these obsessions. The pursuit of beauty can be oppressive, for sure, but it can also bring social capital, intimacy, belonging, even a sense of transcendence. It’s no accident that Luna’s lust for Caitlyn is awakened while one is measuring the other’s waist.
I’d like to see more nuanced conversations about race and class in West Girls, too. I’ve seen some readers refer to my characters in this binary way – ‘privileged, rich, white blondes’ versus ‘poor, disadvantaged Asian girls’ – which doesn’t reflect the reality of the book (or Perth). The conflation of not being white with poverty feels especially patronising, and ignores the fact that rich people immigrate as well, and that beauty, talent, and education can be tools for social mobility across racial lines. I liked the judges’ description of West Girls’ WA as a ‘structurally violent world’ where ‘everyone is implicated’. Even the most disadvantaged of the west girls, who deal with issues like sexual violence, addiction, and workplace exploitation, are to some extent beneficiaries of colonisation. Luna’s ambition to conquer the international modelling industry in yellowface is predicated on her being a settler with cultural cringe.
About the Book
Luna Lewis is white. But her friends aren’t, nor are her brothers, nor her one-time Princess of Indonesia–finalist stepmother. After transforming from pudgy preteen to “exotic beauty”, Luna reinvents herself as “Luna Lu” and takes her ticket out of the most isolated city on earth. However, as her international modelling career approaches its expiry date, Luna must grapple with what she’s sacrificed – and who she’s become – in her mission to conquer the world.
Featuring an intersecting cast of glamour-hungry public schoolgirls, WAGs, mining heiresses, backpacker-barmaids, and cosmetic nurses, West Girls examines beauty, race, class divisions and social mobility in Australia’s richest state. It’s also a devastating catalogue of the myriad, inventive ways in which women love and hurt one another.
Judges Report
Smart, salty and vicious.
In her fourth book, Laura Elizabeth Woollett gives us a Western Australia rarely seen before in fiction – a structurally violent world of girlhood ambition and desire, peopled by vivid characters jostling to stay afloat amid cutthroat hierarchies of race, class and beauty. Darkly funny, this is a formally ambitious and original tale of interconnected female lives – part novel, part story collection.
In unflinching prose as sharp as a teenage tongue, Woollett captures the parochial cruelty festering beneath Perth’s mining wealth and cloudless skies. Everyone is bruised, everyone is implicated. Moving from suburban malls to modelling catwalks, empty highways to crowded Instagram feeds, West Girls is as real as it is painful. Woollett has written a novel of sad girls that is the refreshing antithesis of the sad girl novel.
Further Reading
Reviews
“Female bullying is central to Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s fourth book, West Girls, which aligns the misery of girlhood with the tyranny of conventional beauty.” Liz Evans, The Conversation
“The shopping centres, secondary schools and backyards of Perth’s western and southern suburbs form the backdrop to tales of the cruelties of female adolescence and adulthood in West Girls, the darkly compelling third novel by WA-raised, Melbourne-based author Laura Elizabeth Woollett.” Gemma Nisbet, The West Australian
Links
Explore the latest from Stella
This month Stella celebrates West Girls, longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize. What book are you currently reading? I’ve been inspired by …
This month Stella celebrates big beautiful female theory, shortlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize. What book are you currently reading? And what …
This month Stella celebrates Iris, longlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize. To start with the most important question — what are you …
Help change the story
As a not-for-profit organisation with ambitious goals, Stella relies on the generous support of donors to help fund our work.
Every donation is important to us and allows Stella to continue its role as the leading voice for gender equality and cultural change in Australian literature.
Stella is a not-for-profit organisation with DGR status. All donations of $2 or more are tax-deductible.
