Interview with Chloe Adams by Freya Bennett
Congratulations on winning the 2024 Penguin Literary Prize! Can you tell us a bit about the journey that led to this novel—where the idea first sparked and how it grew into the story it is now?
Thank you! This novel really began with one image in my mind, seeded by a family story my mother had told me years earlier. It was an image of two young women, my biological grandmother and my adopted grandmother, meeting in a fancy Melbourne hotel lobby. It’s 1949 so they’re all dolled up in their nice dresses and their hair set in curls. One is pregnant and unwed, and the other is married and childless. They both know why they’ve come; the married woman is going to ask the unwed one to give her the child once it’s born.
Apart from the obvious emotional undercurrent, the thing that drew me to this story was the location – such a public place to ask such a profoundly private question – and then as I delved a little deeper and imagined the scene more fully, more realisations came to me. I knew my biological grandmother had been in Japan right before this episode in the hotel lobby. In fact, I had inherited eight letters that she’d written from Kure. And so the job was really to follow the clues, ask questions, do the research, think deeply on that time and place.
I should mention that the novel doesn’t follow precisely my grandmother’s story. I soon realised I did not have enough information to render a faithful retelling of her life, and would instead need to let the imagination intrude. As I progressed with my research into the allied occupation of Japan, I began to see how I could build a story by weaving some aspects of my grandmother’s experience with true events as well as the imaginative.
Your novel spans two vastly different settings—post-war Japan and post-war Melbourne. What drew you to explore this specific moment in Australian and Japanese history, and how did you go about researching it?
As I mentioned, these two settings were really defined for me from the outset via this family story. I was curious enough to explore it as an idea, but honestly I could not have imagined how fascinating this period would prove to be. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I became obsessed really, reading across academic work, personal accounts, memoirs and diaries, works of fiction, and importantly newspaper articles which I felt provided a really instructive sense of the dominant cultural norms that existed within Australia at that time. Finally, after 18 months of research, I travelled to Japan to visit the locations named in the book. That also was an incredibly rich experience.
The emotional core of your novel rests on the complex, intimate decision between Mary and Tess. What inspired this story of motherhood, sacrifice, and moral ambiguity?
This aspect of the work, and this relationship between Mary and Tess, is perhaps most closely drawn and informed by my grandmother’s life. Ultimately, it’s fiction – both women died many years ago, so I had only a vague outline of the events and my imagination to lean on. Still, I like to think that by capturing this episode in their lives, I have sought some justice for them both. Neither woman was a villain. They were simply living within a power structure that was designed by men, that they had very little say in. The consequences may have been devastating but they were also commonplace at that time.
You paint a striking picture of Australians living in occupied Japan—hosting parties amid devastation. How did you navigate writing about this moral contrast without slipping into judgement or sentimentality?
I appreciate you giving me a chance to respond to this aspect of the work. I’ve been writing fiction for about a decade now, and I think the most important thing I’ve learned is that the writer must hold space and empathy for each character, even those whose views they don’t agree with or can’t abide. This is a practise that journalists are encouraged to adopt, so I suppose I already had a little practise with it. But the task was to incorporate it into my fiction in a way that didn’t leave me as the writer feeling complicit with hateful views. Another thing I tried to keep in mind throughout the writing process was an understanding that people are always products of their time. I am a product of this time, my work is a product of this time. I benefit from an education about the world that my grandmother, and many Australians living in the 1940s, did not have. On the other side of the coin, they had just lived through a world war, one of the greatest upheavals and collectively traumatic events in human history, so I felt it was not my place to judge them. I simply sought to understand.
As a journalist and fiction writer, how does your nonfiction background influence your storytelling in fiction? Do you approach character and setting with a reporter’s eye?
For a long time, I wasn’t sure if journalism was really for me. I lived in my head – there was a lot happening on the imaginative level! – so, it’s interesting to reflect now on how much my fiction has been shaped by journalism.
There’s the obvious choice to make my character Sully a reporter. There’s also a strong theme of justice-seeking, which was one of the reasons I was drawn to journalism as a young person. And I think there’s also something there about juxtaposing the grand sweeping themes of the collective with the small stories hidden within people’s lives. Journalism is, in its essence, a melding or bringing together of the big story with the small. When a journalist is covering a significant event – let’s say a flood or a fire or a war – the first thing we ask is how does this affect the individual? And so therein lies the beginning of a story – whether it be a news article or a novel.
Your own life has spanned multiple countries and cultures—how did your personal experiences abroad shape the way you wrote about Mary’s time in Japan?
It’s so interesting you ask this. When I first began thinking about how to write this novel, I really had this naïve worry that I wouldn’t be able to access Mary’s interior world sufficiently. There just seemed to be so much difference between me and a woman living 80 years ago. And in fact it was our common experience of travel, and specifically travel to different cultures, that helped me to really break down those psychological barriers. In particular, the year I lived in East Timor was incredibly informative. I realised that some of the strange things I was noting in my grandmother’s letter – like the parties and dances and flower picking, which seemed so at odds with the misery that was taking place all around her – had a pairing in my own experience in Timor. I don’t want to diminish the incredibly important work that aid workers do, or question the phenomenal commitment I’ve seen from good people, but there was an unsettling number of dress-up parties and dinners and fun events happening in Dili while I was there. And in truth, it is so easy to get swept up in the excitement of a new place, particular in expat communities which are essentially artificial or temporary societies, often somewhat cut-off from the wider local community and conforming to their own established norms, and it was only with time that I started to see with clearer eyes the moral questions and difficulties that existed within this dynamic, particularly when seen through lenses of race and privilege.
Winning the Penguin Literary Prize is no small feat. What was the submission process like, and how has winning the prize changed your writing life?
Well, it’s not an understatement to say winning the Penguin Literary Prize has changed my life – both professionally and personally. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone involved at Penguin, particularly Meredith Curnow who champions the prize, and also the amazing booksellers who volunteer their time to read the many entries each year. The submission process was a straight-forward kind of thing, not particularly onerous, and I strongly recommend unpublished writers consider applying. It’s hard to articulate just how significant this win has been for me.
What stories or authors shaped you most as a writer growing up, especially with a mother who was an actress and bookseller? And what are you reading now?
Looking back, it was absolutely my Mum who inspired my desire to write. Not that she ever suggested writing as a career path – she wanted me to be a doctor! But my childhood was an incredibly lucky one. We grew up with books all around us, piles and piles of books in almost every room. We regularly went to the theatre to watch Mum perform. And she also took us to see quite serious works at the theatre or the cinema. The kinds of stories that were just a little out of our reach, thereby really expanding our worldview. For example, the first memory I have of going to the cinema alone with Mum was to see My Left Foot. I was 11 years old.
Right now, I’m reading Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records, and before that was Josephine Rowe’s Little World. Both strange and surreal in different ways, both utterly beautiful.
