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Elisabeth Holdsworth
Picador
Elisabeth Holdsworth came to Australia as a child, and worked most of her life in the public service. In 2007, her essay, “For Those Who Come After”, won the ABR-Calibre Prize. In that essay, she described the difficulty she had turning her family memoir into a book, until she decided to fictionalise the story. That story, which mirrors much of the author’s life, has now been published by Picador.
Those Who Come After is about Australian Juliana Stolburg, the last of an aristocratic Dutch family whose castle in the Netherlands was commandeered by the Nazis during the war. Following a tragic accident in which her mother dies, Juliana must confront her own rebellion against the strictures of family history – a rebellion which involved a remarkable man.
Elisabeth Holdsworth answered the following questions about her new novel, Those Who Come After:
Bendigo Weekly Book Club: Your essay describes the process of hide-and-seek you encountered when you tried to write a memoir. How much did writing that essay help you discover the way to write your novel?
Elisabeth Holdsworth: I had already written the all important first draft, where you put in everything bar the kitchen sink, writing the essay crystallised my thoughts, but it was also a credo about my doubts about the memoir process. I suppose though when that essay was published the course was set – no going back.
BWBC: You were going to call the novel, The Last Hundred Years, which became the epigraph attributed to Lady Katarina: how did the decision to change come about?
EH: This was a publishing decision. One I was quite happy with.
BWBC: All storytellers who borrow from real life have to confront their conscience. Although most of the key characters in your story no longer have living parallels, did you have to change some things to avoid offence?
EH: Storytelling is real life. That’s how we negotiate life. The novelist’s task is to create a world that is as real to the reader as the world they live in. Of course I changed things, a novel gives you the freedom to do that. This wasn’t so much about the wish to avoid giving offence, rather to allow the characters to speak for themselves, to not saddle them with authorial judgments. The narrator, Juliana Stolburg, is as morally compromised as any of the characters. There are no heroes in this book. Just people who are shaped by their childhoods, by world events and by the random fall of the dice.
BWBC: When you decided not to narrate the story chronologically, did that free you up to include or leave episodes out?
EH: No. This was more a reaction against that adage – the past won’t let us go. The past is elapsed time. We are the ones who can’t unshackle ourselves from the past. I find chronology misleading, often you don’t understand the meaning of an event until much later. I also feel that while the storyteller weaves her tale things happen outside the telling. Juliana Stolburg decides to make sense of the things that happened in the past but at the same time her world, her career, her marriage, her identity all fall to pieces around her. I think that’s fairly true of anyone’s life.
BWBC: Has writing this novel changed the answer to that question the Irish interviewer asked you: “Is that yourself, Elisabeth?”
EH: No. I think that question is profound, although it wasn’t intended that way. The Irish ask that of each other all the time. Perhaps that’s why they’ve produced such great writers as Yeats, Joyce, Wilde, Beckett and Toibin to name a few.
Those Who Come After by Elisabeth Holdsworth is published by Picador, $29.99.
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