5 Questions with Jessica Au
Jessica Au is a writer based in Melbourne. She has worked as deputy editor at the quarterly journal Meanjin and as a fact-checker for Aeon magazine.
Her novel, Cold Enough for Snow (2022), is the inaugural winner of The Novel Prize and was published by Giramondo, New Directions and Fitzcarraldo Editions, with translation in fifteen languages.
No.1
What inspired Cold Enough For Snow? What was on your mind when you were writing the novel?
It’s often difficult to say directly how any work begins. It’s almost more of a backwards process—trying to be aware of the things that continue to circle, the things you can’t quite get past, and then working out their significance on the page. I knew in part I wanted to pin down that which was most hard to articulate in life, the moments that we find hard to describe to others and even to ourselves, which maybe only literature can really capture.
Some of these things were, for instance, the relationship between life and art, particularly from the perspective of someone who might be a little in love with the art world, but who feels that she herself is unable to produce anything of worth; the problem of language and of knowing another’s inner world; and the relationship between femininity, perception and performance—the double-edged nature of, say, kindness or politeness. Another was the nature of migration across generations: how this can sometimes be an ongoing process of fragmentation, forgetting, rediscovery and nostalgia, in which strong memories can exist alongside gaps of knowledge.
Put another way, one of the questions in the novel is ‘what happens when time and history move very fast?’ When, within the space of a generation, a parent and child can experience differences in class, education, culture, language and geography, as well as in character? At the same time, while I say ‘gaps’ and ‘fragmentation’, I wanted to write in such a way where this wasn’t seen completely as a lack, but a source of richness as well. I feel literature still has the power to elevate, to honour, and I wanted to give weight to these feelings by writing about them in a way that felt true.
No.2
Cold Enough For Snow is your second novel, more than ten years since your debut, Cargo (2011). Do you want to talk about what you were up to in between books? How do you think Cold Enough For Snow differs from Cargo?
In between, simply: living. I went to Europe and lived for a time in Sarajevo and Portugal, something that seems all the more precious now. I worked at a wonderful longform nonfiction magazine, mainly doing editorial work and fact-checking. They published a lot on philosophy and history and art, which I think informed a lot of my reading and sensibility over those years. I was also, of course, trying to write, but nothing really came.
I think Cargo is a very different work. I suppose I feel towards it rather like I do towards my twenty-one-year-old self—it’s more imitatory and less sure. However, I also don’t want to disown the experience entirely. When you are younger, it can be difficult to discover what really guides you. It’s not that it’s not out there, but it can take a while to get the know-how to find it for yourself. Finding voice, finding form, can also just take time.
No.3
You were deputy editor at Meanjin in the early 2010s. I’m wondering if you’ve noticed many changes (political, stylistic, etc) in the Australian literary landscape since then?
I can’t say that I keep my finger on the pulse of the literary landscape the way I used to, but as a reader, it feels like access has opened up to a much wider array of work, particularly from writers of colour and writers in translation. Again, it’s not that this wasn’t there before, but it’s more easily sighted, perhaps helped by the shift towards online culture as the default, paired with the rise of podcasting.
I think there is power and catharsis in being reflected, rather than defined. Even if the experience is not directly your own, but something recognisable, this can open up the language to imagine or think of yourself in a way you did not before. This can be a small but profound thing.
No.4
When I was reading Cold Enough For Snow, I was taken by the way you manage to evoke silences throughout the book; the way the main character interacts with her mother or her partner, much of which goes unspoken. There is a certain passivity to the main character, yet she is always in control as a witness, which I found rather Cuskian. Place informs much of her reality. Can you speak more to this?
I think this indirectness is probably attached to both my personality, family and cultural background. I’m used to a kind of speaking where much is left to be inferred from context; where a certain politeness means that one does not say a hard ‘no’, but declines carefully; where protective withholding or not always taking centre-stage are sometimes seen as necessary acts of kindness. (Of course, all this varies, within families, within cultures.) Maybe, as a result, I feel especially attuned to the unspoken that occurs in the everyday—both in myself, and seeking it in others, and how meagre language is to really convey all of this.
I often think that to answer a single question in any real way, you would need an entire novel. Mirroring this, I sometimes thought about Cold Enough for Snow as really trying to say only one thing but being unable to do so with words. Rather, it would simply need to carve the space, via digressions, memory and history, in which this ‘one thing’ could rest. That’s not exactly true of what a novel is, but it was a useful image or striving-towards in my mind.
Another aspect to this is perhaps in the work of some 19th and 20th century writers such as Natsume Sōseki, Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki. There is an indirectness to their novels. Daily conversation, house calls and errands take up much of the page, yet much is left unsaid as well and behind these polite exchanges or even careful disputes, there are wells of deep feeling, longing and reproach. As a result, while reading, you become quite attuned and sensitive to expression and pauses and word choices.
No.5
What, to you, makes a good sentence? What authors or artists have influenced your own writing?
I think it’s more about a sensibility, an ear. Perhaps that which doesn’t break the spell of belief, that which holds authority. I feel good sentences can often appear effortless, but they are in fact the result of a great amount of work. I suppose I gravitate towards a certain plainness, or even classical quality, and try—though this is hard—to deploy poetry carefully, or not to hide too much behind poetry.
I have loved the work of writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, V. S. Naipaul, Sigrid Nunez, Rachel Cusk, Annie Ernaux, Deborah Levy, Édouard Louis, Natalia Ginzburg and Mavis Gallant. Recently, I’ve very much enjoyed reading ECHOES by Shu-Ling Chua and The Magical Language of Others by EJ Koh.
Find out more
A young woman has arranged a holiday with her mother in Japan. They travel by train, visit galleries and churches chosen for their art and architecture, eat together in small cafés and restaurants and walk along the canals at night, on guard against the autumn rain and the prospect of snow. All the while, they talk, or seem to talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes and objects; about the mother’s family in Hong Kong, and the daughter’s own formative experiences. But uncertainties abound. How much is spoken between them, how much is thought but unspoken? Cold Enough for Snow is a reckoning and an elegy: with extraordinary skill, Au creates an enveloping atmosphere that expresses both the tenderness between mother and daughter, and the distance between them.
Get it from Giramondo here or at all good bookstores.