WILD THING DIARY 8: early notices, what I’m reading, and on the road again soon

Well, MY HEART IS A LITTLE WILD THING has now been in the world for 10 weeks. It’s been lovely receiving emails and messages from readers saying how much Patrick and his story are resonating with them. Really all a novelist wants is a close reading; as others have said, the reader brings 50% of the meaning to a book, and there’s little – if anything – the novelist can do about that. But, of course, it is always wonderful hearing about how a piece of fiction has resonated in the mind (and perhaps body) of someone else. That makes it worthwhile.

It has also been energising seeing reviews come in from around Australia.

Here’s a brief summary:

‘I loved this delightful novel and the journey it took me on. Patrick’s character is finely observed, and his growth, sexual liberation and preparedness to come out as he hits 50 are beautifully scrutinised. A remarkable look at Australian masculinity and its meaning’ – Newtown Review of Books

‘MY HEART IS A LITTLE WILD THING is a devastatingly emotional but ultimately hopeful exploration of love, family and place. The natural world takes centre stage, with Jimenbuen, the location of the farm, playing a role almost akin to that of a character. Patrick is transformed by his experiences at Jimenbuen with Lewis, but the land itself – its isolation and wilderness – also provides a place of safety and freedom from the guilt and frustration Patrick experiences stemming from his difficult relationship with his mother. Every location is rendered in precise, attentive detail: the barn in Jimenbuen, the streets of Sydney, and the sleepy country town where Patrick lives. Featherstone interrogates the power of love and the natural world in Patrick’s life, crafting a compelling and moving read’ – ArtsHub

‘Featherstone depicts life in all its complexity and contradiction, capturing the comparative freedom of childhood but also the long shadow it casts when it has taught you to repress your true self. MY HEART IS A LITTLE WILD THING shows that ephemeral connections can be just as meaningful as the grand, enduring relationships our society venerates’ – Canberra Times

‘You can’t help but be changed by reading this beautiful, exquisitely well-wrought and richly poignant novel which dwells in the quiet, pause-filled places of life while fomenting a revolution that sees one wounded, stoically lost man find a new purpose and home, far from the ordinariness of life and off where it is still possible, because MY HEART IS A LITTLE WILD THING is always gently adamant that it is possible to find our true self, realise your hopes and dreams and go to wild and unpredictable where the sun has not yet set on possibility’ – Sparkly Pretty Briiiight

‘Nigel Featherstone weaves a remarkable story of the possibilities of love, the cruelty of duty and the magic of place. Bringing the Monaro to life in prose that quietly sparkles, MY HEART IS A LITTLE WILD THING is a story of self-discovery that sits separate from anything I’ve ever read. Featherstone’s novels are unforgettable gifts’ – Booktopia

‘A contemplative portrait of a man bound by a strong sense of duty to his family as he learns to overcome a lifetime of trying not to rock the boat to allow himself to find pleasure… This is a novel whose charm rests in part in the accumulation of quiet detail and perceptive observation: the fleeting appearances of an elusive tiger quoll; Patrick’s comment that “in the end all buried things have a way of coming to the surface”. Its depictions of landscape are evocative; its sex scenes tender and frank. At one point, Patrick recollects the scent of sunscreen and salt water associated with beach visits, describing it as being “about freedom, and the extraordinary ordinariness of human life”. The same is true of Featherstone’s yearning, intimate novel’ – West Australian

‘The voice of MY HEART IS A LITTLE WILD THING is laconic, grim, masculine, withheld, but through the darkness it also holds a sweetly earnest, genuine hope – Patrick’s desires shine through’ – The Saturday Paper

‘A novel about what it means to yearn. It is a portrait, surely, of many of us – those wondering if this is our place, our lot, our future. We learnt in Featherstone’s first novel, BODIES OF MEN, that he is a writer who understands human fragility. With MY HEART IS A LITTLE WILD THING, he has cemented his talent and allowed us an intimate view into another person’s heart. It is a gift’ – Readings

‘The heart might be a little wild thing, but this novel is a little beautiful thing – and not so little at that’ – Whispering Gums

‘MY HEART IS A LITTLE WILD THING is a beautifully constructed and written book; it cleverly tangles the reader in every aspect of its telling. It moves us with its compassion, its vivid depictions of nature and its complex explorations of the human condition. Here is a truly astute writer utterly in control of his art. Featherstone’s fluid, stream of consciousness narrative style is an immediate hook. There is not a breath of hesitation as the reader plunges into Patrick’s story, into his mind and his world. We feel for him, we wish him well, we wish he’d take something for himself. And we exult when he does’ – Living Arts Canberra

Many thanks to the above writers and editors for their attention and engagement.

While you’re here, some books that I’ve loved recently:

IF YOU’RE HAPPY by Fiona Robertson – a wide-ranging collection of stories that delights, gently provokes, and entertains. Like all good literature, it helped me feel more connected to the world. Absolutely marvelous.

TIME IS A MOTHER by Ocean Vuong – another truly extraordinary collection of poems. I was dazzled and deeply moved. Vuong is a magician.

THE GRASS CASTLE by Craig Sherborne – a mother-and-son story with a heavy dose of dementia; it’s harrowing, sure, but also highly inventive. Sherborne is a poet, and there’s poetry on every page.

SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE by Claire Keegan – the sort of novel I adore: succinct, tight, quiet but psychologically complex, and multi-layered. Exquisite. I’ll be returning to this again and again.

FUGITIVE by Simon Tedeschi – erudite literary fragments written by a professional concert pianist. Exploratory but also most engaging. I loved it.

After a few quiet weeks (much of the time spent on the couch recovering from Covid-19, like so many others), I’m back on the road next month, doing a range of festivals and events – I’ll write a separate post about that at a later date. In the meantime, I hope you’re well and safe.

Illumination and love on the page

The world is sick. It is easy to think that when the COVID-19 death ‘tally’ increases every day and reports suggest that as much as a third of the global population is currently living in some form of lock-down.

Here in Australia we are experiencing unprecedented limitations on how we can move about and who we can see. Some of us are lucky to be in a long-term relationship and intimacy is only a look or a joke away. Others are having a much more challenging time: not being able to see who they want, when they want, how they want, and why they want. Has love become even harder?

This week, while eating a homemade omelette for lunch (packed with mushrooms and feta), I decided to take my mind off the current troubles by watching a short film in which French philosopher Alain Badiou spoke about love being ‘a risky adventure’. Towards the end of the film, Badiou said two things that resonated with me: ‘Love creates a perspective and an existence in the world from the point of view of two, not one’, which he described as a ‘revolutionary act’; and, evidently paraphrasing Spinoza, ‘All that is true and rare are difficult’, which is a statement that reached right into my belly.

All that is true and rare are difficult.

Yes, that is love: wonderful, beautiful, messy, contradictory, infuriating, exciting, banal; and, in this challenging and sometimes unbearably heavy year, necessary.

Love is the domain of philosophy; it is also the domain of novelists and poets. There was a time, during my childhood and adolescence, when instructions on love came from a man in a black frock who was armed with a bible and a hymn book. Thankfully, these days my shelves are packed (ever more chaotically) with much better books.

Although I do not seek it out with any kind of fervour, gay literature is well-represented on my shelves, particularly gay novels. These works have provided me with experience, understanding, solace, antagonism, confusion, and, in the end, profound contentment. I never found profound contentment in nightclubs or tennis clubs or dinner parties, darling. I found profound contentment in novels, where the gay experience could shift and buckle and expand and explode; where it could be both ordinary and wondrous, and spectacularly alive.

The following are some novels that have indeed felt spectacularly alive.

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Keep reading over at The Canberra Times, which published this piece on 18 April 2020.

GOOD READING OF 2019: what makes a bonkers year bearable

This year, which was bonkers (and not in a good way), was one that was both softened and enlarged by reading. Every year there are truly spectacular books, those that genuinely get under your skin and you think about them for weeks, if not months or longer. What follows is not a list of books I consider ‘the best’ (as if I’d know) but ones that have resonated in a way that was surprising, or beautiful, or funny, or shocking, sometimes all at once – and more.

Although I don’t usually break my reading down into genre or geographic categories, I have this time, only because the list is long and some structure might be useful.

Australian novels I enjoyed this year include Melissa Lucashenko’s cheeky but powerful and very necessary TOO MUCH LIP, Charlotte Wood’s moving and piercingly astute THE WEEKEND, RWC McDonald’s wondrously joyful THE NANCYS, and Simon Cleary’s THE WAR ARTIST, which is a timely addition to Australian literature that dares to question our apparently unbounded love of military history. Other novels that packed a necessary punch are Andrew Goldsmith’s intricately drawn INVENTED LIVES, THE BREEDING SEASON by Amanda Niehaus (my review for the Canberra Times here), and THE ORCHARDIST’S DAUGHTER, Karen Viggers’ study of Tasmanian forest ecology and the human lives that depend on it. THE PILLARS by Peter Polites puts a dagger through Sydney’s obsession with real estate; the novel actually does so much more. INVISIBLE BOYS by Holden Sheppard is a no-bullshit exploration of growing up gay in regional Western Australia – the novel and its author are attracting a huge fanbase and it’s not hard to see why. Finally, three novels that deserve to be widely read are Julie Keys’ THE ARTIST’S PORTRAIT, which is such an ambitious and unique historical novel about art and memory, HITCH by Kathryn Hind (my review for the Canberra Times here), and IN WHOM WE TRUST by one of Australia’s greatest living prose writers, John Clanchy.

Novels from overseas that I adored include HAPPINESS by the always wise Aminatta Forna, THE FRIEND by Sigrid Nunez, and Max Porter’s utterly magical – and devastating – LANNY. I finally read works by Rachel Cusk – TRANSIT – and Elizabeth Strout – OLIVE, AGAIN – and, oh my goodness, both were extraordinary and I will be reading more of both. To my mind, the novel of the year, if not the decade, was Ocean Vuong’s ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS, which knocked my socks off, partly because it gently though forcefully reveals the inter-generational impact of war and partly because the language is so poetically exposed.

I read some very moving Australian non-fiction this year, including GROWING UP QUEER (edited by Benjamin Law), Laura Dawes’ FIGHTING FIT, which scientifically and entertainingly explores the many ways Britain kept its home population healthy during the Second World War, Chloe Higgins’ tragic and remarkably vulnerable THE GIRLS, James Halford’s wonderfully drawn essays about his love of Latin American literature as collected in REQUIEM WITH YELLOW BUTTERFLIES, and Patrick Mullins’ impeccably researched and thoughtfully written biography of the much-maligned Australian prime minister Billy McMahon – TIBERIUS WITH A TELEPHONE. I found THE SATURDAY PORTRAITS by Maxine Beneba Clarke incredibly moving and does a lot to reveal the challenges presented by contemporary Australia. I very much enjoyed Peter Papathanasiou’s LITTLE ONE, which is a joyful memoir about determination and crossing boundaries (in many ways). NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS by Behrouz Boochani is an extraordinary – and deeply poetry – chronicle of ‘life’ in this country’s deplorable refugee prisons, and THE ERRATICS by Vicki Laveau-Harvie shows how powerful prose can be, especially when focused on a highly dysfunctional family.

I didn’t read as many poetry collections as I would have liked, though the form is a regular part of my reading. I loved ANOTHER LANGUAGE by Eileen Chong, and I had my own celebration of Mary Oliver, lapping up the Pulitzer Prize-winning AMERICAN PRIMATIVE and LONG LIFE, which is a collection of essays, many playful, interspersed with Oliver’s typically accessible though always moving poetry.