Interview #219 — Jessica Au
Jessica Au has worked as a writer, editor and bookseller. Her novel Cold Enough for Snow (2022) won the inaugural Novel Prize and was published by Giramondo, New Directions and Fitzcarraldo Editions, with translations in nineteen languages.
Jessica has since won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Age Book of the Year Award, and the Queensland Literary Awards, amongst others.
Jessica speaks to Leah Jing McIntosh about digressions, internal weather, and ekphrastic thinking.
Helen Garner describes your work as ‘so calm and clear and deep’. Cold Enough for Snow really does remind me of the flow of a river. How did you come to this form?
Mostly by accident. I feel like half of the challenge with writing is finding the right form, yet once you do, and if you can fill it with enough climate, enough internal weather, then things begin to ‘talk’ to each other in such a way that it sustains its own momentum.
This image of internal weather feels so apt— in the title, but also in the unexpected weather reports for potential typhoons at the beginning. This danger which drapes over the book, reappearing at the end. How did you find the ‘right’ conditions?
I had been trying to write for many years—mostly stories—yet none of it was working. In the end I had this one short story about a mother and a daughter going to Japan, without any of the digressions about the sister or about the narrator’s university days or her time working as a waitress. This story was the only thing that I felt had any life to it, so I decided to try and break it apart and begin from the very start. Somehow though, with this particular consciousness of a young woman, the things that hadn’t worked in the other stories found their way in, albeit much changed. These became the digressions—a way to talk about beauty or art or education or memory—threading back to the central story. And the more I wrote, the more I found I liked this kind of recursion. Each digression allows you to understand a little more about the narrator, why she was the way she was and why she is asking these questions.
In this looping—in this recursion—were you thinking through any particular writer?
This maybe isn’t a direct correlation, but I think that the writers who taught me the most about time and remembrance are say Alice Munro or William Trevor. Munro in particular has these great shifts in time that can be shocking when you first encounter them, but which indicate something about the long line of life, about choice and consequence. And with Trevor and other similar authors, there’s this sense of revealing a consciousness over the course of a story. You are given small fragments of knowledge and each piece changes your perception slightly of the story and who is in it.
I love this image of the book revealing itself to you. The digressions really do feel so natural—a gentle way of building up the character through time, which feels quite a feat—but also seem a necessity for the novella form.
I’m not sure if I ever intend to write to any particular length. Rather, I think a book itself tells you how long it wants or needs to be. That has to do with that internal weather or momentum we were speaking of earlier—you follow all the little eddies and flows until they still themselves, and then you stop.
I am also someone who tends towards minimalism. I like each sentence to work, to say something new. While writing, I was always going back over things and subtracting or reducing, trying perhaps to convey what was needed in the simplest way possible.
But then again, going back to the first point, that was also the logic of the book and the narrator: to be indirect, to leave space. That’s what they mean by finding the right form I think—the thing that dictates or fulfils itself.
Tracing your love of minimalism—do you have any favourite novellas?
I love novellas. I love anything you can fit lightly in a bag or in your pocket, to have something always with you that you can disappear into, that you can pull out and read while waiting or on a commute. Anything by Annie Ernaux, all her little autobiographies, are great in this sense, as is Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy, when split into three books. Others that come to mind: Pond by Clare Louise Bennett, Fair Play by Tove Jansson and Territory of Light by Yūko Tsushima. I also recently enjoyed, and was devasted by, Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik.
When we were taking pictures to go with this interview, you mentioned that you only collect small paintings. Can I ask—what draws you to the smaller scale?
It’s something about their window-like nature, or how they are like an aperture. I was watching a documentary on the Australian architect Richard Leplastrier the other day and he mentioned how he liked to create unexpected points of focus throughout the house, like a little circular window highlighting a bit of garden or similar. Small paintings are a bit like that—they ask you to come up close, to look at their detail. Also, they can be in conversation with a room and its objects in a way larger paintings can’t. Big artworks to me can seem to demand too much attention; they’re almost too loud in a space.
I’m so intrigued when art appears in a story—be it constructed just within the storyworld (I’m thinking of the paintings in Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved) or real, like the Turrell that appears (albeit unnamed) in your own work—I was wondering if you could speak to ‘writing art’.
Art in a storyworld is a lovely way of putting it. I think it’s similar to the reason you might use a real memory or bit of dialogue in writing, because you have something fictive infused with the power of reality. In describing the Turrell or the Tadao Ando church without naming them, I was trying to build the brilliance of a piece or a building that I never could have imagined myself, while still resting in, as you say, a storied world. So again, you have a reader’s idea of a thing, which rests slightly adjacent to the thing itself. Somehow this amounts to more than the original.
Just to return to Munro—you’ve made me think of her short story, ‘Queenie’— that line at the end: ‘It was possible but hardly likely that she was still in the store, and that we kept going up and down the aisles just missing each other.’
This feels so close to a mood in Cold Enough For Snow, particularly in your treatment of the mother. You construct the narrative in a way that its easy to assume the narrator is narrating the recent past, where the narrator’s mother is still alive. But there is a single, striking moment where the narrator drops in a memory of cleaning out her dead mother’s flat years later. This shift felt so striking— just one sentence, before you pull the reader back into the present.
I liked having a sense that the novel could be read on three different levels. First, the literal one, where the trip was taking place in real time. Second, the level of memory, where the daughter was recalling the holiday and perhaps thinking of things she wished she’d said. The third was a more ghostly version: where the mother was not there at all, but had already passed. Neither excludes the other, but rather all three could exist at once.
There’s also, for example, one instance at the hotel, where the man at reception claims that the narrator has only booked a room for one person, and that he has no memory of seeing her mother. A page or so later, the narrator sees her mother coming towards her and is reminded of a ghost.
From the start, there was something regretful about the tone of the writing and I thought I should try and work out why. In a way, the narrator is anticipating the passing of her mother, as we all might do from time to time. That’s one reason why the trip has so much urgency for her, if it takes place at all.
I think I tend to think about time a lot as it relates to narrative and retelling. It’s a kind of relativity, right? What we remember, or the way we narrate things, ironing out the kinks, smoothening, impacts how we are in the present, how people perceive us, and how we will be in the future. On some level, the narrator knows that what she is recalling is only ever her version of events. Her mother or her sister would have a different one. So she adds and subtracts, she goes over again and again, because she knows her version is flawed, yet it is also the only one she can tell.
This gesture of adding and subtracting feels in perfect concert with the shifting locale of the book. The characters are travelling in Japan, yet the travel is interrupted by looping digressions that pull us to Melbourne, to Hong Kong, to Ancient Greece, to northern Queensland—the setting seems to become a kind of engine, almost taking the ‘traditional’ place of plot.
I find it hard to write plot, so as you say I did tend to think of place and movement as a kind of substitute for action. Rather than have change ‘happen to’ the narrator and the mother, I could have the landscape or city change around them, while they remained relatively still.
I also liked the idea of the setting echoing something of the text itself. I’ve spoken a bit before about the idea of a ‘third thing’ that runs throughout the novel, a kind of triangular structure. Japan is one of these. It allows the narrator and her mother to feel both familiar and unmoored. It also allows a certain role-reversal and a tension between them. The daughter has been to Tokyo before. She plans the itinerary, she knows where they will eat and sleep. She has control of the trip because she wants a certain outcome. The mother on the other hand has never been to Japan, and has hardly travelled, so is dependent. At the same time, it had to be somewhere in East Asia—a place close enough to evoke certain memories and questions, yet different enough that the characters were still essentially tourists. This couldn’t have been China or somewhere in the West. I chose Japan because I had been there several times myself, and had experienced similar emotions to what I wanted the characters to feel.
It made me think of Homi Bhabha’s ‘Third Space’, too—that this unknown place becomes capacious enough to hold dissonance, to keep a kind of irresolution. It makes me think of how there are so many things that could be other things—a ceramic glaze that looks like liquid, a milk-glass globe that gives the impression of a candle.
Maybe this has to do with what we were talking about before—circular storytelling, regressions. I suppose I was drawn towards impressionism and ekphrastic thinking more broadly, and wanted to preserve the idea of interpretation, and to make room for the reader. So the objects, as well as the memories, are versions upon versions.
It could be also that I feel a deep unease in general with society’s emphasis on certainty, the value we might place on having a clear and correct opinion. There’s something I think to making more room for humility in our culture, for admitting how little we really know and how much is impossible for us to know.
Would you draw out this idea of ekphrastic thinking a little?
I suppose the root of it begins with what I often feel to be the problem of language. That is, just the difficulty of really conveying a certain experience to another person. So much of what we live is complicated or conflicted, and based in feeling, and not in words. Language allows us to get very close to saying what we mean, but to me it always falls just short. I sometimes feel that to really understand someone, you’d almost have to relive their whole history, which of course is impossible.
So I was thinking more about the idea of talking around and around something, rather than trying to convey it directly. By layering, by speaking in metaphor, by contradicting herself, the narrator is speaking very precisely about many things, yet still leaving this small, blank space, like a tiny circle. Within that lies the thing she cannot really say, which is as close as she can get to the truth. Ekphrasis was another way to add to this attempt. She might be describing a painting, but really she is also indirectly describing how she feels about time, or about her inability to see clearly. I also think that sometimes the idea of a thing, rather than the thing itself, can be powerful, maybe more so than reality. So much of life is lived in metaphor, in imagined things.
The idea of living within imagined things—and your unease with certainty—makes me think immediately of your refusal to name the narrator.
Names have power, and they’re also truth and provenance. I’m thinking for example about all the weight that goes into naming a child. Or when Karl Ove Knausgaard was writing My Struggle, he tried as much as possible to get permission to use real names in the books, because to change them would have reduced the reality of what he was trying to do. Names have qualities—they can invite assumptions about a person, about their character and their origin. I think my instinct was to avoid naming to keep a certain level of abstraction. I wanted the narrator in some ways to be an international sort of figure, with no name, no profession, no country. In not naming her, perhaps I was hoping too that it would be her persona, her thoughts, that would give better clues to who she was.
I feel like this refusal also creates space for the reader to sit within the character, too. The question of audience always feels tricky. Do you think of your reader when you write?
I don’t think about a reader. Or rather, I think about a version of myself—trying to test what I write against my own sense of things. Reading is so subjective I just feel there’s no point trying to imagine anyone else. My publisher at Giramondo, Nick Tapper, once said that editing your own work is really about making yourself your own best critic, and that you do this kind of simultaneously when you write. I’ve just paraphrased him, but I agree.
I agree with Nick too! And it makes me think about this larger process of becoming—of becoming your own best critic, but also simply about the process of becoming a writer. You published Cargo at twenty-five. A decade later, have you found any difference in the writing process?
I think I view it a little like I would my twenty-five year-old self: with fondness, but also as a very youthful book. What changed, I think, between now and then, was simply that I became a better reader. It is sometimes hard when you’re young to find the right books, the ones that will speak to you, orientate you. You are reliant on what’s around you, on school and teachers. But I worked in a wonderful bookshop for several years and at the same time, it seemed like the culture began to open up.
Those two things together meant that I was suddenly reading writers in translation, or from independent presses in Europe or America or Asia, and I was listening to and reading interviews from diverse, international authors. And somehow this slowly seeded the understanding that I could write something closer to my own experience, which I had not comprehended before.
It’s hard to describe but you can exist for a long time without language, without a way to recognise yourself in the world. And yet when you do finally see yourself reflected—even if these experiences are not exactly your own—it can open up a new way of thinking for you. Parallel to that, there’s just the fact of growing older, the material for writing that comes with that, and craft. I would say I didn’t really know how to write a novel the way I wanted to until Cold Enough for Snow.
In a nice parallel, Cold Enough for Snow has recently been translated in eighteen languages. I imagine it must be strange to witness this process.
I’ve actually had very little to do with the translations, even though it’s one of the things that I’m most excited about. I think at the end of the day, a translator is really creating a new work out of another, so it’s for them to make the decisions, word by word, and to try and guide the meaning. I’ve had a few brief exchanges with the German and Chinese translators, and with some of the international publishers, which has been lovely. One thing that I thought was interesting was that apparently the title is quite inelegant in a few languages. So for example, the Italian title is Tempo di neve, which I think comes from the Italian expression ‘c’e tempo di neve’, which means that it is literally cold enough to snow when talking about the weather. Equally, in French it is Pour qu’il neige, which is more like ‘in order to snow’ or ‘in favour of snow’.
I love this image of culture opening up to you. Who were you reading during this time?
I find it hard to recall exact titles beyond a general feeling but I do remember encountering for the first time books from say Europa Editions or Dalkey Archive or Pushkin Press. It’s not that these were all perfect, but rather that they were writing in a way that was different. They were from other literary traditions, and gradually I think I came to realise that there are so many ways, so many sensibilities, with which to tell things beyond the conventional.
Later on, I remember being struck by the writing of Yiyun Li and Jhumpa Lahiri, both of whom write about migration and diaspora, and give these the qualities of literature. Their characters had a complexity and humanity that allowed me to recognise myself and the people I knew. These were followed by works by V. S. Naipaul and Jamaica Kincaid, which grapple with the legacy of colonialism, class, education and exile. I remember also reading Eileen Chang, Banana Yoshimoto, and watching films by Wong Kar-Wai, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, among others.
In 2017, I began this interview series by posing the same final question to all of Liminal’s interview subjects: What does being Asian Australian mean to you? It’s a finicky question, and in the last six years has attracted a mix of earnestness and sarcasm and discomfort and bemusement. Though the question will always feel to me like it is from our earnest beginnings, I do think it’s still worth asking in 2023—if only because it functions as a kind of register for this present moment, a way to gauge this complicated knot of identity.
I’ve seen this question at the end of Liminal interviews and like you, I’m always curious about the response. And yet I’ve never known how I would answer. Thinking of it now, I’d say that sometimes I’m not conscious of this at all, in the sense that I’m never conscious of myself as different. On the other hand, there are many points in life where I feel that my real state of being is that of a constant in-betweenness. I can change who I am on the surface to this situation or that, to talk to this person or another, but really I’m never inhabiting this completely unselfconsciously, which I imagine is the feeling of belonging. So maybe being between Asia and Australia, or being both Asian and Australian, is living at times in a state of contradiction, coalescence and movement. Conversely, I don’t view this as a negative thing. I think there’s incredible freedom and richness in that experience, even if it comes with pings of difficulty. It is generative and complex. It certainly was for Cold Enough for Snow; I think one of the reasons I wanted to write it was to try and work out some of these feelings.
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Interview and Photographs by Leah Jing McIntosh