Five minutes with novelist Alice Robinson
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When Esther wakes with a breathing tube down her throat, she has no idea where she is or how she got there.
In terrible physical condition, Esther is tended to by Grace, the only other person in the building. In the half-consciousness of her recovery, there are certain facts about the reality of her situation – her place in time, her history, and her life – that Esther will need to uncover.
If You Go is a moving, captivating, and unforgettable novel about hope, grief, and family, which explores what we inherit and what we pass down. We spoke with novelist Alice Robinson about this speculative delight.
Your novels have taken on very topical themes. Is your writing guided by topics that are preoccupying you?
You’re right, my books are topical in that they have dealt with issues like climate change, the cost-of-living crisis, technological advances, and so on. It’s weird because I don’t tend to think of myself as a very ‘current affairs’ person. I’ve always seen myself as existing down the poetic end of the spectrum from politics to poetry. Some part of my brain must be tuned in, though. I think I’m good at making connections between disparate pieces of information. Connecting the dots. Maybe that’s what novel writing is all about really, paying attention and making connections between big issues and ordinary lives.
The slow reveal of certain elements of the story in If You Go (no spoilers!) is artfully done. How much do you have to work at the narrative pace?
It takes a shocking amount of work, unfortunately. Wouldn’t it be lovely if important things came naturally and easily so we didn’t have to strain and grind away at everything? Sadly, this has not been my experience with writing, but that’s okay. At this point, I’ve come to accept that the labour itself is a part of the reward.
The book was quite fragmented in its early drafts. The narrative covers a huge amount of time – the protagonist Esther’s whole life, plus another hundred years – so there was a lot of detail to manage. I knew early on that the narrative tension in the book would come from withholding information. I hope that readers care enough about Esther and her predicament to want to find out what’s going on.
Hope and grief are at the heart of the book, as is the struggle of our protagonist Esther to find her family – both in a literal sense when we meet her ‘in the future’, metaphoric as in creating family, as well as finding her place within the family of her fractured and vulnerable parents. How do you respond to hope and grief in your own life, and likewise what has parenting revealed to you about how you were parented?
I had never really experienced serious grief until my marriage ended in 2019. This personal event soon collided with the global grief brought by the pandemic. Wowsers. That whole cascading situation did a number on me. I’m happy to report that everyone in my family came through the turmoil in pretty good shape. We were lucky. From the other side, I have a lot more compassion for people’s frailties – and for my own as well. Once you’ve been brought to your knees a bit, it’s a lot easier to notice and appreciate all the ways you and other people stagger up and keep going.
The only thing I really understand about parenting is that we may strive to protect our children, but in doing so, we often usher in our kids’ greatest difficulties. That is the real horror inherent in being a parent. We do everything we can and, consequently, we are also the harbingers of trouble. That’s just a fancy way of saying what Larkin said best: parents fuck up without meaning to. Then again, I don’t believe that stuffing up is necessarily a problem. It’s not like the goal is to orchestrate a life for our kids whereby they never encounter any issues. My writing looks at what we inherit and what we pass on. I find reflecting on intergenerational throughlines a useful antidote to freaking out.
Futurism is a feature of your writing – is that something you have always been interested in? Were there books you loved as a kid perhaps? Is it something you’ve come to as the best way to tell the stories you want to write?
As a child, one of my favourite books was John Marsden’s Tomorrow When the War Began, a speculative Australian novel that completely captured my imagination. I loved that the main character was a young woman and that the heroes of the story were Australian teenagers like me. I was also obsessed with Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. In retrospect, I see that these books were important to me because they depicted weird bookish girls who grew up to be writers. Perhaps my novels are the distant love children of these three books.
The focus on the future in my work is probably more connected to my personality than anything else: I like the freedom that comes with writing speculatively. There are no facts to stick to because you’re off in unchartered territory. While writing If You Go, I often wondered if I should do more research on this or that piece of technology. But to be honest, that type of exacting approach makes me want to stick a fork in my eye. Some writers love it. But I just like making stuff up.
How tricky is it to make the future seem authentic and palpable to readers, and not far-fetched?
I try to stay focused on the emotional authenticity. Readers will follow the story into strange contexts if what the characters are thinking and feeling rings true. My books have all been anchored in our present to some extent – this also gives me a huge leg up with readers. I think most readers will accept speculative details if they’re grounded alongside known and relatable places and events. I enjoy layering the real and the imagined in my books. It’s the relationship between the two modes that makes the work interesting, I think.
What books, podcasts, shows, music, etc. accompanied you as you wrote If You Go?
A number of books acted as little stepping stones towards the finished draft of If You Go. Some first-person works helped me think through the narrative voice: Helen Garner’s diaries; memoirs by Annie Ernaux and Deborah Levy; the narrator in Elizabeth Strout’s novels My Name is Lucy Barton and Oh, William. Novels like Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason; First Love by Gwendoline Riley; Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Acker; and Divorcing by Susan Taubes provided routes to writing about marriage. Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro always constitute inspirations for how literary works can also incorporate speculative elements without sacrificing style and lyricism.
I listened to a really embarrassing Spotify playlist called Sad Classical while writing If You Go. The book took about five years to complete, which is a long time to continuously listen to one 58-minute soundtrack on repeat, but you become superstitious about these things. The right music can really help the work, but the wrong music is just diabolical. I’ve saved my Sad Classical set under the title Soundtrack for Writing If You Go on Spotify if anyone is in the market for thirteen heartbreaking tunes.
What’s on your TBR?
Right now, I’m reading Rachel Cusk’s new novel Parade for my book club of friends. That group is full of wonderful, clever women, but I’m lukewarm on our chosen reading material for the month. My writer’s book club is reading Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus. We meet every few months to discuss books from a craft perspective and I always look forward
to our conversations (but don’t tell them that I haven’t started the book yet). I’m also listening to Judith Butler read her new work, Who’s Afraid of Gender? I didn’t pay a lot of attention to my creative arts degree when I first encountered Butler. I’m taking the opportunity to rectify the situation now that I’m older and wiser and spend a lot less time at the pub.
If You Go is available in all good bookstores.
Feature image: Jax G.O.B
