Dying of exposure

Horrible things famous literary men have said about me

Featured in

  • Published 20240806
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-98-6 
  • Extent: 216pp
  • Paperback, ePUB, PDF

IN 2009 MY sixth novel, The Mistress of Nothing, a historical fiction set in Egypt in the 1860s, came out to good reviews. It began to do well. It made it onto one very long longlist, then a shorter longlist, and then onto the shortlist of a prize that, confusingly, doesn’t have a longlist. That shortlist, for the Governor General’s Award for English-language Fiction, one of Canada’s major literary honours, also contained a book of short stories by Alice Munro, who was, as Jennifer Lawrence said of Meryl Streep, a GOAT. As well as that, another master of the short story, Alistair MacLeod, one of my all-time favourite writers, was on the jury. There was no chance I would win but knowing that MacLeod had read my book was its own special reward. 

Prior to that, I’d managed to sustain a twenty-year career writing fiction without ever wasting a single moment pondering the winning – and the much more common not-winning – of prizes. The prize cycle, with its longlists and shortlists, its outrages and debates, was not on my radar. I thought, Oh, that happens over there; it doesn’t concern me. This seems odd now, living as I do in London, the city where literary hype and scandal originated (at least in the English language; I’m sure there’s been plenty of bitchiness elsewhere in the world over the centuries). Margaret Atwood once told me that she liked coming to London because the gossip and malice is better here than elsewhere. Like Atwood – and Munro – I’m Canadian (this is where the comparisons stop), though I’ve lived in London the whole of my adult life. But I’m an immigrant here, a foreigner as the current government likes to call us, which means that I’m an outsider, and this is part of what enables me to think, Oh, that doesn’t apply to me

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

No secret passageway

Non-fictionIn 2001 I read an article in The Guardian newspaper about a man who fell from the sky, landing in a superstore car park not far from where I live in London. The article, by journalists Esther Addley and Rory McCarthy, detailed how the Metropolitan Police discovered the dead man’s identity through a combination of luck, Interpol and British-Pakistani community workers. Muhammad Ayaz had managed to slip through security at Bahrain airport, run across the tarmac and, according to witnesses on the plane, disappear beneath the wing of the British Airways Boeing 777. The article quotes a spokesman from the International Air Transport Association: a myth circulates that there is a ‘secret hatch from the wheel bay into the cargo bay, and then into the passenger cabin, as if it were a castle with a dungeon and a series of secret passageways’. No such passageway exists and Muhammad would have found himself trapped in the wheel bay with no oxygen, no heating and no air pressure as well as no way out. If he wasn’t crushed or burned by the retracting wheels, he may have frozen to death once the flight reached 30,000 feet, finally falling out hours later when the plane lowered its landing gear as it prepared to touch down at Heathrow.

More from this edition

Finding the right phenotype

Non-fictionAs a recently diagnosed transgender person, I was already part of a highly online, over-educated and underemployed cohort, routinely blamed for stifling free speech as well as both maintaining the gender binary and destroying it. The alt-right discourse was already aflame, decrying the social scourge of everyone wanting to be seen as a ‘special snowflake’ and the creeping ‘politics of victimhood’. Did I really need to inhabit a second suspect identity? Did I need another personal attribute I felt deeply ambivalent about to become a public part of my persona?

Conferral

Non-fictionBeneath my fantasy of a regular wage is the puerile hunch that if I stay in academia, I can regain some of the nervy possibility I held as an undergraduate student. It was at university that I first met people whose days were preoccupied with thinking, reading and writing, revelatory mostly because they were compensated for these activities with bourgeois trappings and validation. With hindsight, I can recognise that my straining so doggedly to become the kind of person who succeeded according to the university’s metrics mainly taught me what bell hooks says is the primary lesson of college – namely, ‘obedience to authority’.

the road of ghosts

FictionGraeme works with me almost every day of each school holidays. He conducts sessions that stretch from an hour into two. He teaches me how to shoot; he splinters my form down into nothing and then restructures it until it is exact. Fingertips: the ball slides through the air into the ring. He shuffles after each rebound, his returning pass precise. Graeme pours himself into me. He is patient. He is generous. He is firm, like a grandfather.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.