The author had just finished her new novel - about a cloistered religious community - when she found her own world stripped back to the basics.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Australian writer Charlotte Wood had just finished her new novel – about a cloistered religious community – when she found her own world stripped back to the basics.
Wood’s oldest sister, who received the diagnosis first after a routine scan, prompting the other siblings to get tested, was the same age as their mother had been when she died of brain cancer when Wood was 28. Their father had died, 10 years before their mother, of stomach cancer when Wood was 19.Henry Simmons
Wood’s novels – including her latest – frequently interrogate relationships between women, and the shared diagnosis brought a new dynamic to hers with her sisters. “The news for me was good. But it was like, I’d walked away from a car accident and my two sisters were still in the wreckage. So until everyone was out the other side ... We were kind of like a little relay team and I got home first, and then I was waiting for them to finish.”
“There may be a word in another language for what brought me to this place; to describe my particular kind of despair at that time,” the narrator writes. “But I’ve never heard a word to express what I felt and what my body knew, which was that I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.”
The novel is also the first time Wood has written directly about her mother, and her grief at her death nearly three decades ago. Her mother was a deeply private and reserved person, whom Wood feels she never really knew. She never talked about approaching death after her brain cancer diagnosis, Wood says, preferring to stick to the practicalities.Wood says she still feels shame about being grief-stricken about the death of her mother.
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