Ceridwen Dovey was born in South Africa and raised between South Africa and Australia. She studied social anthropology at Harvard as an undergraduate and received her Masters in social anthropology from New York University. Her debut novel, Blood Kin, was published in fifteen countries, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and selected for the US National Book Foundation’s prestigious ‘5 Under 35’ honours list. With a couple of acclaimed novels under her belt, Ceridwen’s latest is called Life After Truth – a story about how time has a way of making us strangers to those we love – and to ourselves.
Today, Ceridwen Dovey is on the blog to answer our Ten Terrifying Questions. Read on …
Ceridwen Dovey (Photo by Shannon Smith).
1. To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
I was born in South Africa, moved to Melbourne for the first time aged two, but then moved back and forth between those countries for many years, because of my father’s anti-apartheid political work during the 1980s in South Africa. Eventually I started primary school in Melbourne, then went back to South Africa for a long stretch, before ending up in Sydney in Year 9, where I finished high school at North Sydney Girls.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
I wanted to be a journalist at age 12 (I was obsessed with Jana Wendt), an ethnographic filmmaker at age 18 (I had discovered social anthropology for the first time and loved the idea of doing fieldwork as both participant and observer), and an environmentalist/novelist/mother at age 30 (though I was unsure how I could ever do all three – and sometimes still am!).
3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now?
At 18, I couldn’t imagine ever putting down roots in a single place, and I believed that constantly putting myself into difficult, lonely, challenging situations in new cities, among strangers, was necessary for my own personal growth. Now that my radius has shrunk, I’ve been surprised to discover how good it feels to settle down, and while I feel grateful to my youthful self for being braver than she felt, I also feel a little sorry for her. I’ve lived happily in Sydney for ten years now, and sometimes find it hard to leave my apartment, let alone go anywhere further afield.
4. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say, had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?
I read Patrick White’s The Tree of Man as a sixteen-year-old, on a school exchange program in France, desperately homesick for Sydney. It was pure relief to sink into the private world of a novel (in English) after long days of struggling to understand another language. Yet it was also the first time I began to connect my own reading, and early attempts at writing, with an Australian writing tradition, rather than only a South African one. I’d been raised by a mum who was a literary critic and expert on J.M. Coetzee’s work, so I’d been intrigued and disturbed by Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians at a young age, and later was inspired by it to try my own hand at writing political allegories. In my late teens, I became intrigued by the piano works of the Romantic composer Robert Schumann, when my piano teacher told me a bit about his back story. The effect his compositions had on me was linked to the tragic – some say false – story of Schumann inventing a finger-strengthening device to expand his hand’s reach on the keys, and having to give up performing for composing when he damaged his hand permanently. It was the start of a life-long fascination with the inner worlds and real lives of artists, the daily grind, the domestic rituals, perhaps because I find it comforting to be reminded that such beautiful art never leaps fully formed from the ether: it is made by humans, whose lives are never perfect.
5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?
I value the form of the novel above all others; it’s an immersive experience, an antidote to distraction and soundbites. There’s something so precious about the inter-subjective nature of the creation of a novel – invented in solitude by one mind, absorbed in solitude by another – that allows people (both writers and readers) to lower their defences, turning inwards in order to flex outwards. It allows for symbolic communication that takes place in a gentle, safe place, a kind of private rehearsal for the real world. And when it’s done well, the form of a novel is anathema to didacticism. It is all about raising questions, not answering them. It’s never about being right, it is simply about being curious.
6. Please tell us about your latest novel!
Life After Truth is about a group of old friends and Harvard graduates who return to the hallowed campus for their 15-year reunion, as they’re approaching middle age. There’s this amazing dramatic structure built into the lives of American college graduates who are invited to return to campus every five years: it becomes this ritual, as time passes, to take stock of who they once were, and who they are now. That’s not always only a pleasant experience, of course – it can be really confronting, too. It’s also a very American tradition; it’s not something that my Australian friends who went to uni here, for instance, do in the same way. Maybe because I now live so far away from the U.S. and my undergraduate years there feel like something I dreamed up, but I’ve never felt so many different things, in a condensed amount of time, as I have at my own college reunions. As a writer, you’re always searching for ways to frame your own perceptions of how time passes, and for me, being able to take a peek into other people’s experiences, at regular intervals – to see how they are coping with some of the same milestones and challenges and joys and sadness of life at each age – is a gift, and something I wanted to explore further in this novel.
7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
I hope that readers come away with new compassion for their own foibles and fears and failings as human beings, having spent some time with characters who – on the page – are working through things as best they can, making mistakes, but trying to learn and change and grow. I think all fiction could be put in the ‘self-help’ section of a bookstore: personally, so many of the choices or changes I’ve made in my life are thanks to the deep thinking and reflection that reading fiction enables for me. I’d love to be able to help my readers reflect on their own lives in this same way.
8. Who do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
I really admire women writers who do something very different in each book they write, not just rework the same territory or thematic materials – or who take creative risks and leaps and change direction in their work over time, shifting between genres and voices: like Curtis Sittenfeld, Helen Garner, Hilary Mantel, Rachel Kushner, Rivka Galchen.
9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?
At this stage of my career – after working on the craft of writing for almost twenty years – my only goal is to keep trying to survive by my own creative wits. If I can keep writing fiction and non-fiction and exploring new territory in each book, and find a way to support myself in order to make time and space to do the creative work I love, then I will be happy.
10. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
I know it’s a very difficult time for all of us trying to work within the creative industries, so my advice right now would be to do whatever it takes to keep yourself writing, and also to keep affirming why this kind of creative work is meaningful and important for society. It’s always been hard to survive as a writer/artist, but it’s even harder in a culture that doesn’t always understand the value of what we do (in a political and structural sense).
Thank you for playing!
—Life After Truth by Ceridwen Dovey (Penguin Books Australia) is out now.
This book is part of our 2020 Christmas Gift Guide! You could win 1 Million Qantas Points when you order any product featured in our Christmas Gift Guide between 2 November and 14 December, 2020.*
Life After Truth
At their fifteen-year reunion, a group of Harvard graduates - labouring with early middle age, marriage and children, unrealised aspirations and a depressing political climate - rekindle old loves and old resentments.
Fifteen years after graduating from Harvard, five close friends on the cusp of middle age are still pursuing an elusive happiness and wondering if they've wasted their youthful opportunities. Jules, already a famous actor when she arrived on campus, is changing in mysterious ways but won't share what is haunting her...
Read a QA with the authors of Mothertongues!
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