This month Stella celebrates Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down, shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize.
Since Bodies of Light was first published in 2021, how has your relationship with the novel changed? Does it still play a significant role in your life?
It’s certainly the novel that’s had the biggest impact on my life—I suspect it may always be. It’s the novel that was the most awarded, and for that reason, reached the greatest number of readers; sold the most copies and so on. And it gave me a leg up in terms of cultural capital or whatever, I guess. People do take me a bit more seriously. But when any book is published, you hand it over to readers and takes on a life of its own. You have to relinquish control as an author at that point. So I don’t think about Bodies of Light in the creative sense. The work is done, now. It’s like a fly in amber.
Do you remember how you felt when you found out you’d been shortlisted for the Stella Prize 2022?
I fear this is not the chic writerly answer I’d like to give, but in the spirit of honesty, I was sick with gastro at the time. It was summer, and I was housesitting for my sister and her flatmate and their cat, who hated me; and all I did for days was lie on the couch watching the Anna Delvey miniseries. So, in summary, I felt like a corpse. But it was thrilling to receive news of the shortlisting. It was a killer year for the Stella in terms of plurality of form and strength of storytelling. I was honoured to be in the company of Evelyn Araluen, Chelsea Watego, Anwen Crawford, and Randel Abdel-Fattah, among others. Plus, one of my fiction teachers at TAFE, Carrie Tiffany, had been the prize’s inaugural winner years earlier. She’s someone I’d always looked up to enormously, and from whom I learned a great deal, so it felt cool to be tracing a similar path.
A daring and compelling work, suffused with pathos and an impressive degree of empathic vulnerability.
The vivid descriptions of Maggie’s numerous homes in suburban Melbourne evoke clear images and smells. Did you grow up in any of the places described in your writing? I’m particularly curious about the poignant moment Maggie and Ned swim in the town’s water tank.
The water tower is very much a haunted psychic object of my childhood, although I’ve never swum in it! It’s a huge concrete cylinder in Upper Beaconsfield, where my grandparents lived for years. Growing up we used to go for bushwalks that passed right by the site. It was completely drained during the Ash Wednesday bushfires of ’83, when my Nan and Pa lost several neighbours and part of their house. It’s still unfathomable to me that a structure that large could be emptied. I always found the tower frightening; I think for its unnatural size and materiality in what is otherwise a bushy, largely undeveloped area. Anyway, the early parts of Bodies of Light—the wonky triangle of Dandenong, Frankston and Mordialloc—was very familiar to me because it’s where I grew up. Much of the novel is set a few decades before I was born, though, so I asked my Mum, who grew up and later worked in Dandy, to drive around with me to tell me what she remembered, what had changed, and so on. She was a prolific reader, and she knew how my brain worked. She always seemed to be able to feed me the kind of detail I needed.
Bodies of Light takes readers on a captivating and painful journey. What was it like to write such a deeply emotional story? Do you have any routines or practices to support your mental health while working on something like this?
It was hard! But I always say: no one had a gun to my temple making me do it. Plenty of jobs are more taxing and difficult. I’m always at pains to point out that I’m not a care-experienced person, and I’m not even working in a role where I’m professionally supporting or treating ‘care’ leavers or other trauma survivors. But over time I had to concede that vicarious trauma is perhaps not just limited to paramedics or social workers or whoever. I spent four or five years reading and researching some of the most horrific stories and circumstances imaginable, and speaking with survivors who’d experienced some of these. It’s not my story, but if you stand close enough to it for a while, it starts to eat at you. I’m not sure what the answer is, though, because in order to create a faithful and thorough representation of the experience of state ‘care’, I felt as though I needed to know as much as I possibly could—otherwise what’s the point? I went to therapy (still do); I tried to be disciplined about making time for exercise and friends and being goofy; I volunteered; but I don’t know. Frankly, I think the best thing one can do to minimise burnout or vicarious trauma is take a break for a little while, but the reality is that’s not really an option for most working Australian writers. You just have to do as much as you can whenever you can in between your rent-paying job and whatever other responsibilities you have: it’s a luxury to be able to step back when you need it. Sorry! That sounds very bleak! But it’s true.
About the Author
Jennifer Down is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Age, Saturday Paper, Australian Book Review and Literary Hub. She was named a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year consecutively in 2017 and 2018. Our Magic Hour, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Her second book, Pulse Points, was the winner of the 2018 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and the 2018 Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection in the Queensland Literary Awards, and was shortlisted for a 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Award. Her third book is Bodies of Light.
About the Book
Told with a kind of conversational intimacy – inviting the reader in, rationalising, second-guessing, accounting, defending, justifying – Jennifer Down inhabits the voice of a woman who has experienced a great deal of trauma, while evoking a history of south-east Melbourne from the 1970s into the present.
Judges Report
Told with a kind of conversational intimacy – inviting the reader in, rationalising, second-guessing, accounting, defending, justifying – Jennifer Down inhabits the voice of a woman who has experienced a great deal of trauma, while evoking a history of south-east Melbourne from the 1970s into the present.
Down shows restraint in detailing the traumatic circumstances of her protagonist Maggie Sullivan’s history – including foster homes, child sexual abuse and drug addiction – employing a language that moves between forensic accounting and a more lyrical, authorial register (“Picture me in that summer slick, newly fifteen and in search of a hollow to fall through”).
Down’s portrayal of Maggie’s joys and pains evinces an impressive degree of verisimilitude and sensitivity, and many of the other characters – Judith, a middle-aged carer, and Ned, Maggie’s one-time boyfriend – are memorably drawn.
This is an ambitious novel, spanning decades and locales, that sees Down demonstrate her imaginative range and take risks following the success of her previous two books. The result is a daring and compelling work, suffused with pathos and an impressive degree of empathic vulnerability.
Further Reading
Reviews
“Reading this book is like getting sucked up into a blanket, and when you emerge out of the cocoon, the world around you looks a bit different.” – Madeleine Gray, Sydney Review of Books
“It’s rare an author who can turn trauma into beauty.” – James Blackwell, Overland Literary Journal
Links
Watch Jennifer Down discuss Bodies of Light on ‘Writers on Film’ via Melbourne Writers Festival
Listen to ‘At Home with Jennifer Down’ via The Garret: Writers on Writing
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