Katherine Brabon is the award-winning author of the novels The Memory Artist, The Shut Ins and Body Friend. Her work has received the Vogel’s Literary Award, a NSW Premier’s Literary Award and the David Harold Tribe Fiction Award. Her third novel, Body Friend, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize, the ALS Gold Medal and the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne.
Why do you tell stories?
I seem to be drawn to tell stories to represent complex experiences that are difficult to communicate with words, but which can be conveyed through the right atmosphere, voice, form. These complex experiences include pain and our experience of the body. Yet I am also drawn to writing about beauty - which can sound so superficial in a simple sentence like this, but I mean this in the sense of what moves us: beauty in writing can be detail, weather, landscape, rhythm, even ideas.
Without talking about plot in any way, what would you say Cure is about?
Cure is about storytelling and belief, and the power of these two elements when it comes to our bodies and our health. It follows a mother and daughter, Vera and Thea, as they both grapple with chronic illness.
The porousness between mother and daughter (their bodies, their experiences, their writing) is elegantly realised, and yet the characters are clearly delineated from each other. How did you go about walking this line (of showing both porousness and separation) narratively speaking.
This was the most interesting part for me to explore through form. I wanted to examine how narrative perspective can shape our experience of a character on the page, but equally how this applies in real life in the sense of identity formation. I love the concepts of porousness and separation you mention, as these fuelled the shaping of the mother and daughter, as well as intentional ambiguity. I see ambiguity as quite powerful in fiction, and very distinct from confusion.
Vera, ‘the mother’, longs for control of her surroundings in the face of her largely uncontrollable, ill body, and later, her daughter Thea’s ill body. Thea arrives at the reality of illness having grown up witnessing her mother’s illness, so attempting to understand her mother’s experience shapes her own.
Their experiences overlap and diverge, and in the novel the narrative point of view stays with both in the third person: this gave a certain level of detached observation, while shifts from present tense to past tense gave each their own sense of the immediacy of present tense and the reflective, curated narrative of past tense. It fascinates me how tense shapes a reading of a character: Vera begins in the past and moves to the present, while Thea begins in the present and moves to the past.
Tell us a little bit about the setting. What was the resonance of choosing a province of Milan to unfold this story about a mother and daughters search for a cure to their shared illness?
This region of Italy is special to me. My Nonno was born at Lake Como and grew up in the suburb of Milan where the book is set. While the events of the book are fictional, I did draw from life in that I travelled to the area when I was sixteen, with my mother and my grandfather. The house where we stayed has always been very vivid in my memories and somewhere I would like to examine in my writing.
There was also the element of history, of sites of healing and pilgrimage in countries like Italy and Greece, that lent itself as a potent setting.
The online world is ripe for taking advantage of people who are unwell, offering cures and absolutions, not based on anything rigorously verified. What did you want to examine about the slippages between truth and constructed reality in this book?
The title Cure very much refers to the pursuit and desire of not only a real cure for illness, but to the story that a cure embodies. There is something so compelling about the idea that a cure - often seen as those pillars of health and happiness - is within reach and control; that there are things we can do, a story we can participate in. The online world interested me for its offerings of cures (I’ve had these targeted to me, offering ways to fix my own chronic illness), but I wanted to bring a compassionate viewpoint to how people engage with it. There is so much beyond just the hoax or bogus health proponents or trends - although of course they exist, too. There is also community and an opportunity for validation of the emotional components of a physical illness.
For the character Vera, seeing herself in others online, and being able to research her and her daughter’s illnesses, does give her comfort. But her preoccupation has the potential to be detrimental in various ways. I didn’t want to show Vera as purely gullible in the face of the internet, nor anti-science. But for her there is also partial truth in that there might be things she can do to help her body, that conventional medicine has not studied sufficiently to offer it as a treatment. I wanted Vera to be complex, to let these competing aspects overlap in her character.
Perhaps a related question, false prophets are a significant thread in the book with the characters lured by a faith healer and internet gurus—what are the dualities, differences between these compelling forces?
The dualities are really fascinating. Even the concept of ‘followers’ - we have those online, as the healing gods did thousands of years ago. In the novel, Vera has heard stories for decades about a particular healer in Umbria who might be able to help her. This figure - the pursuit of him - is a thread through the novel and a constant source of hope for her. In a similar way, there are people online who offer a particular way of being that purports to be the path to wellness. Throughout the writing I wanted to examine these pursuits more than anything - there is something perpetual about them, and so tied to the notion of storytelling. The healing prophets of antiquity and the wellness bloggers of Instagram both offer a story and the chance for participation in it.
There is of course a key difference in physicality: the healing sites and gods called for actual participation, travelling to a place. Whereas the online world lets us attempt this participation from afar. In Cure I was conscious of adding these layers in for consideration, for example offering the image of a daughter lying on her mother’s body when in pain, and then a mother’s endless scrolling for ideas to help her daughter. Again, I did not want to appear critical of certain paths or choices, but to show how they all coexist in our complex lives.
I loved the repeated motif of the lake as site of transformation. How do you understand the figure of the lake in Thea and Vera’s reckoning with adolescence?
I love that there has been so much interpretation of the lake since publishing this book. To me the lake just kept appearing as I wrote - I find writing about the natural environment soothing and those passages all came to me so fluidly, I was not often thinking about metaphor but just enjoying being in that environment. But of course I can see the beautiful mirroring of a lake and how this reflects the form of the book: duality, distortion, reflection and repetition. I also like to think about the landscapes that hold our experience: they are true and solid in contrast to our human whims and curations. I like that the lake can be the stage for Vera’s adolescence and also Thea’s - it offers a moment to consider both similarity and difference.
You write so tenderly and resonantly about chronic illness. What were you under the influence of (books, authors, ideas, art, or anything else) while writing this book?
I tend to read widely and not with any particular topic in mind, so I wasn’t seeking out works on chronic illness in particular. When I first started writing about chronic illness, visual art appealed to me, and still does - like Francesca Woodman and Frida Kahlo. As for writing, Sylvia Plath’s poems and writers who seek to examine the female experience of the body and subjectivity always interest me - Elena Ferrante, Alba de Cespedes, Rachel Cusk, Fleur Jaeggy.
Which adjectives by readers and reviewers used to describe your writing, most please you?
An interesting question to consider! For this book, ideas around being layered or having complex characters feels true to the work to me. I did intend for this book, and do hope for my writing in general, to have layers that might not neatly wrap up, but which nevertheless coalesce with an overall feeling, tone, environment that impacts of the reader.
Tell us about your natural writing habitat.
Writing happens in many different ways for me at the moment, as I have a toddler and little time. My ideal writing routine is a morning swim and then a cafe writing session. I also carry a small notebook in my bag to take advantage of nap times, train trips, rare quiet moments. I also work hard to ensure I’m reading, as this is the foundation for writing. I try to read first thing in the morning, even if it’s for five minutes, and a little in the evening if I have the energy.