The Stella Interview: Michelle de Kretser
In this interview, we chat with Michelle de Kretser about her new novel, Theory & Practice, which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize.
Much like the narrator of Theory & Practice, did you frequent the Galleon? If so, what was your go-to order? (For the record mine is the BLAT!)
Spanakopita: the vegetarian go-to.
Speaking of the Galleon: older readers might remember that in the 1980s, when the now-iconic café opened, it was in upstairs in Acland Street. Theory & Practice is set in 1986, so I had a reference to that location. An editor queried it, saying that the Galleon was in Carlisle Street. It wasn’t back then, but since it’s been in its ‘new’ location for about thirty-five years, the reference to Acland Street looked like a mistake and I deleted it.
A different editor queried a reference to St Kilda station, pointing out that there’s no train station there. But there used to be. Until the end of 80s, a train ran along what’s now the light rail track: four stops and twelve minutes to Flinders Street in a red rattler. I let that reference stand, in memory of the many, many trips I took on that train.
What inspired you to write Theory & Practice?
I’ve long been interested in the gap between our theory and our practice: between the way we know we should live and act, and the way we actually do. That gap is a place of contradiction, conflict, drama, mess…things on which fiction feeds because novels are drawn to investigate character.
Virginia Woolf plays a very important role in the protagonist’s life – what is your relationship with Woolf?
A Room Of One’s Own, which I read when I was still at school, was a foundational feminist text for me, as it was for so many women of my generation. I didn’t do English at university so I never studied Woolf, and she didn’t loom large in my psyche – she’s my narrator’s Woolfmother, not mine. But I read her for pleasure over the years: the fiction, the essays, the letters, the diary. She was an extraordinary novelist, tremendously important for women writers who came after her, and she was a significant theorist of women’s lives as well. And for all the flaws it reveals – or because of them? – her diary is one of the great human documents of the twentieth century.
Now that I’m a writer, the aspect of her work that resonates most with me her is her determination not to get stuck in a writerly rut: to go on ‘adventuring, changing,’ as she puts it, with each new work.
“I’ve long been interested in the gap between our theory and our practice: between the way we know we should live and act, and the way we actually do.”
Theory & Practice opens with a seemingly conventional narrative before it abruptly shifts. It blends various forms and deconstructs traditional fiction. Was this always your intention or did it evolve as you wrote?
It was entirely intentional. I set out very deliberately to write ‘a novel that doesn’t read like a novel’, as the narrator puts it. In order to show the reader what I meant by that, I began Theory & Practice with a novel that does read like a novel: it’s partly the contrast with that conventional, realist fiction which makes what follows seem hyperreal. And in order to achieve that hyperreal effect, I decided from the start to mimic nonfictional forms: diaries, essays, letters, memoirs.
In blending fiction and nonfiction, I was inspired by Woolf, who set out to alternate fictional chapters with essays in her novel The Years (which the narrator of Theory & Practice is writing about). After working on a draft for about a year and writing tens of thousands of words, Woolf abandoned that idea and wrote The Years as straight fiction. I decided to carry out her original plan, with the crucial difference that instead of alternating strictly between fiction and nonfiction, I’d aim for a tangle of the two.
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