Words by Kylie Mirmohamadi
When I began writing my novel Diving, Falling I had two guiding images in my mind: a modernist house in an Australian landscape, and a woman writing the obituary of her famous artist husband. This woman is Leila Whittaker.
Leila revealed herself to me in the course of my writing and thinking and imagining. Over weeks and months, the woman at her desk in a landmark home on the river at Kew gathered her life details around her. She carries the legacy of her marriage to Ken Black, she has two sons, Sebastian and Otis, each in their own way struggling with their legacies too. She has some core close friendships, which are inflected with betrayal and silences along with love and treasured shared experiences. She has a creative life as a novelist, a rich inner life, memories of a cramped childhood, a sister, and a dead brother. Leila has privilege and wealth and a store of cultural capital. She also has sadnesses, grief, humiliations, despair.
Language is Leila’s thing, and Diving, Falling is her story, and her side of the story. It’s an important element of the book that Leila is a novelist, a storyteller in general as well as the teller of this particular tale. Hers is a world of book launches, and bookshops, and fitting writing in around her other responsibilities. And she has a habit of referencing her favourite writers and novels, filtering her impressions through a literary lens. She also pays close attention to language, and to its capacity to obscure and obstruct as well as illuminate. Leila knows, as all writers know, that stories can be damaging, dangerous, contested, and exposing.
Leila’s story shows that life in middle age, when women are often becoming increasingly invisible to the outside world, is as full of complexity, and challenges, and forward momentum as at any other time. In the novel, she seeks new landscapes, new waterscapes – the sea calls her, from the river – and new relationships too. She responds to desire. She claims her autonomy and authority. There is something very powerful, I believe, in a character who speaks from maturity and experience. A woman who has lived life, and has living still to do.
While I absolutely love to read writing from people of all ages, and some of my favourite novels have been written by young writers, I know that I could not have created Leila, or written this novel, when I was younger. I started writing fiction later in life, following an academic career, but it also seems to me that in a way my whole life was leading up to it. Isn’t that how it often goes? Perhaps Leila was the character that I was meant to write, from my accumulated understanding, at this stage of my life.
One of the great joys of writing fiction is creating characters who have a very specific set of experiences, personality traits, and relationships, and then showing how these things are brought to bear as they move around an imagined world (which, in realist fiction, closely resembles and draws upon the real world). In Diving, Falling I felt a responsibility to write Leila in such a way that she might seem a whole and complex person. I wanted readers to understand all of her; her baffling decisions and shortcomings and blindspots, as well as her lightness and word play, her meaning seeking, and her capacity for life. I hoped that I’ve lived up to this responsibility.
Diving, Falling is available for purchase on scribepublications.com.au or any good bookshop.
