Read a Q&A with Briohny Doyle | Echolalia

Briohny Doyle is the author of the novel The Island Will Sink, and the memoir Adult Fantasy. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Monthly, Meanjin, Overland, The Griffith Review, The Good Weekend, The Guardian, and the Sunday Times. She’s performed at the Sydney Festival and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.She is a lecturer in writing and literature at Deakin University and a 2020 Fulbright Scholar. Echolalia is her second novel.

Today, Briohny Doyle is on the blog to answer some of our questions about Echolalia. Read on …

Briohny Doyle

Please tell us about your book, Echolalia!

BD: Echolalia is about a family in the lead up to and aftermath of a tragedy. It’s a literary novel that experiments with the tropes and pacing of a domestic thriller. Set in the fictionalised rural centre of Shorehaven, and focalised through characters at crossroads and thresholds, the story poses complex questions about the roles of women, particularly mothers, about class and status, about environmental degradation, responsibility, and legacy.

Can you share what inspired you to write this book?

BD: It was a few things — I read a news story about an infanticide committed in my home town by a woman who seemed so clearly in need of more support. I’d also become fascinated by how the latest batch of domestic thrillers seemed to always provide a way for ‘normality’ to be restored. I wanted to look at the ways that communities and families produce and perpetuate various kinds of violence and exploitation. There’s no monster under the bed – we are feeding and grooming the monstrosity.

You’ve explored climate change and catastrophe in your previous novel, The Island Will Sink, and there are elements of it again in Echolalia. Do you think there is power in writing and reading ‘cli-fi’?

BD: Definitely. Climate crisis is hard to conceptualise from an infographic or a pile of terrible statistics. Imagining the various ways we produce and are produced by our environments is an important task for the present moment. Novels and films are ideal forms for doing this imagining, I think. If people can relate to characters and situations, they can more clearly see the implications of our present moment, both for ourselves, and the future.

Your main character, Emma Cormac, is a woman who married into what seems to be the perfect life but who does something unthinkable. What appeals to you about writing a character like that?

BD: I love that you used the phrase ‘perfect life’ because that’s one of the ideas I’m trying to trouble in this novel. What is the good life? At whose expense is it acquired and lived? Emma marries young. She’s swept away by the attention of her first boyfriend; the easy luxury of the life he appears to be offering. She’s immature though, she hasn’t worked herself out yet. Getting married and starting a family looks like a way to counter the pressure and anxiety she feels. It doesn’t work of course. But our cultural conception of what constitutes a good life suggests that it should, and this fact worsens Emma’s mental state. She’s constantly feeling guilty for not being happy. Everyone is telling her that life is perfect, so why does she feel like everything is falling apart? How can she speak up or ask for the help she needs? I wanted to show how easily the accruals of your own choices and the choices of your community can pile on and become suffocating.

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey towards becoming a writer?

BD: I wrote from a really young age. I published my first short story in Voiceworks magazine at 17. It’s so great to see that magazine is still around, and to read all the amazing new voices it provides a platform for. I studied creative writing in my early twenties, and looked for opportunities to publish work and participate in writing communities. I worked on my first novel The Island Will Sink off and on for ten years before it was published in 2016. My book of essays/memoir/criticism Adult Fantasy came next. Echolalia is my second novel.

Who do you most admire in the writing world?

BD: The whole writing world?! Lots of people for so many reasons. I could list a whole bunch of local writers who support emerging voices like Maria Tumarkin and Toni Jordan. Or novelists I really love for their craft like Rachel Kushner and Samanta Schweblin. I suppose if we need one name it’s Chris Kraus. Her blend of fiction, memoir and criticism is wonderful. I love that she writes insightfully about failure, and sits cross legged on the floor at events.

What is the last book you read and loved?

BD: I loved Rick Morton’s My Year of Living Vulnerably and in fiction I’m on the bandwagon for Luster by Raven Leilani.

What do you hope readers will discover in Echolalia?

BD: I hope that they can sit with some of the more uncomfortable aspects of what it is to live in Australia. And that they can find at least one moment of empathy, and one moment of complete disgust with each of the characters.

And finally, what’s up next for you?

BD: Another novel *checks notes* it might be something to do with endangered rhinoceros but I’ll get back to you!

Thanks Briohny!

—Echolalia by Briohny Doyle (Penguin Books Australia) is out now.

Echolalia

Limited Signed Copies Available!

by Briohny Doyle

What could drive a mother to do the unthinkable?

Before: Emma Cormac married into a perfect life but now she's barely coping. Inside a brand new, palatial home, her three young children need more than she can give. Clem, a wilful four year old, is intent on mimicking her grandmother; the formidable matriarch Pat Cormac. Arthur is almost three and still won't speak. At least baby Robbie is perfect. He's the future of the family. So why can't Emma hold him without wanting to scream? Beyond their gleaming windows, a lake vista is evaporating. The birds have mostly disappeared, too...

Order NowRead More

No comments Share:

About the Contributor

Booktopia