The other day, when I was being interviewed by the local paper covering the Summer Read event I will participate in at the Botanical Gardens in Cranbourne, the reporter asked me how I became interested in writing about the people I write about.

“You mean ordinary people?” I asked.

“Well, yes,” she said not having read either Cups with No Handles or Jackson’s Track.

“Because ordinary people often live extraordinary lives,” I said.

“Oh, that’s good. I’ll use that,” she said.

As a writer, I work with real people who tell me their stories. Usually, they are people I know, country people, far from the madding crowd. I consider the work I do collaboration and both my subject and I are always listed on the cover of our books. The people I work with tell me as much of their story as they think is important and then I draw them out. For instance, Daryl Tonkin, who was the storyteller in Jackson’s Track, only wanted to tell campfire yarns about the feats and skills of men at work in the bush falling trees. He didn’t think he was important enough to be part of any story. His daughter and I convinced him otherwise and I set to work asking questions that allowed him to delve deeply into his own life with the Kurnai people of Gippsland. In Cups with No Handles, the book that is one of the Summer Read books this year, the subject, Bette Boyanton, wanted to tell me a linear tale of how she became a political activist and what she achieved. The only stories she was ready to tell were those that lent themselves to her political education. But her family wanted me to find out more than just that. Her niece said to me, “She needs to say something about our grandmother. We don’t know about her. We need to find out.” Her daughter said to me in a fit of anger over a confrontation she had just had with her mother, “She’ll never talk about us [her kids]; you have no idea.” I thought, there is a story in the personal here that will make this woman’s memoirs dynamic. Feminist that I am, I thought, the personal is political. Bette didn’t really believe that, but I felt that to be true to the emerging character, she would have to learn. As she began to respond to my questions, she learned.

So, it’s my job as a writer to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. Maybe by extraordinary, I mean the truth. It is my job to find the truth in people’s lives. But, truth is a tricky business. Many people believe that memoirs are like a biography or a meticulously researched kind of history. Many people mistook Jackson’s Track for history. Bette herself in Cups… thought that it would be good if we included historical accounts of World War Two or the Great Depression or the Menzies Referendum against Communism. I told her history books were for that; ‘we will only tell the parts that you experienced, the thoughts you had about your experience, and how historical events moved your life along’. Because they are about experience and are narrative constructions based on memory, Memoirs are closer to Fiction that they are to the Record, to History. How, then, can it be that I think I am finding the Truth?  (I could go on forever about Memoirs, Biography, History, The Record, Oral Testimony, Truth. In fact, I have written a thesis about it. It’s called Jackson’s Track Revisited and can be accessed for free and downloaded in Pdf version from Monash University ePress.)

In one of John Barth’s books – I think it might have been End of the Road – there is a scene where a fellow is sitting on a park bench reading Dostoyevsky. Another fellow comes up to him and asks him what he is reading.

“Crime and Punishment.”

“What kind of a book is that?”

“It’s a novel; fiction.”

“Oh, I don’t like fiction. I only ever read the truth.”

“This is the Truth.”

It’s that kind of truth I am looking for. I am looking for a true character, the complexity and intricacy of a human being and the way she/he live her life.  It’s a universal thing. A Universal Truth. And it is endlessly fascinating.

I reckon I have finally found the key to the truth when my subject experiences a kind of epiphany, the kind of thing that happens when they see how history played upon their lives and made them do the things they did or see the things they saw, when they say, ‘I never knew that about myself!’ In Daryl’s case, it came when he realised how his brother’s behaviour made him think things that weren’t true; or in Bette’s case, it came when she saw how her grandmother’s rejection of her mother’s choices in life was even more of a motivator for Bette than her political beliefs. Once the storyteller gains insight, the story comes pouring out. It is my job to listen and listen well. Then everything falls into place.

What I look for is that core truth that lets the character emerge. It’s Literature. It’s Truth in the Dostoyeskian sense. That’s why my books read like novels.