Kim Kelly's Blog

Ten years of gratitude

Ten years of gratitude

Anniversaries aren’t really my thing. I often forget the date Deano and I were married or the precise year my mother died. If it wasn’t branded into my identity, I’d forget my birthday too. But the marking of a decade of post-kidney transplantation life is significant, a weight of remembrance, a constant chart of loss and gain. A small unextinguishable light.

Ten years ago, at dawn on 3 December 2014, I pushed my way through the hydraulic-door hiss of the surgical unit at Westmead Hospital, all my anxieties, hopes and friendly ghosts channelling one prayer to the universe: please, let this work, let us have ten years. Just ten years. Deano and I hadn’t shared enough life yet. We’d only been married a couple of years, and it had taken me forty to find him. To know this kind of love. A love that embraced all of me, kissed my wounds, recognised my strangeness, daily celebrated the fact of my existence. I wasn’t giving that up without a fight.

Compared to what I stood to lose, giving him one of my kidneys seemed a small price. Yes, I wanted him to be well. I wanted him to live without the ever-dying light of kidney failure. I wanted the brightness to return to his blue-blue eyes. And I won.

Forget him for a second; forget the superlative skill and care of Westmead’s renal team. I won life’s lottery. For the past ten years, I have been loved. Absolutely loved. This love has fuelled everything I have done. Every word I have written, the new path of research I’m carving, the spaces of peace required to learn how to love others more clearly and fully: my children, my grandchild, my brother, my friends, random strangers, myself. None of this would have happened without Deano. My muse de bloke. My lover. My every-day, engine-stoking friend.

And now our ten years are done. Because the universe has a sense of humour, a couple of weeks ago a new threat emerged in the form of a bug, just an ordinary bug. But anyone who knows anything about immune-system suppression, which all transplant recipients live with, knows that ordinary bugs can turn into mortal enemies. These weeks have been stressful and scary. It didn’t help that the first sign of it manifested as splattered spots in his lungs that looked suspiciously like a malignant cancer. The body is a fun park, a garden of pleasure and pain.

All will be well, whatever happens next, and there is every reason to believe the bug will be vanquished. But a lesson has been learned: it’s time to simply live, to live more simply and in deeper gratitude.

When Deano first woke from the surgery with our new life coursing through him and the true-blueness of his eyes returned, he said he’d called our kidney Lucy, because the name means ‘light’. Now, Lucy is under siege, because the drugs used to treat the bug unironically attack kidney function. But she’s always been a tough little fist of flesh. And I will choose and choose to live more brightly in her light too, inside the privilege of everything she’s gifted us so far.

Image: creative commons collage

on the right side of history

on the right side of history

Most people want to be good, not because it’s a virtue but because it makes sense to behave in ways that keep the peace, so we can get on with life and loving the people we love. I believe most people are inherently good.

We become angry when children are harmed. We defend those without power.

If we’re functioning humans, we are emotional beings. Arguably what sets us apart from all other beings is the way our emotions create and respond to narrative – to the stories we tell each other and ourselves. And stories can be as powerful as bombs and guns.

I’ve spent a lot time over the past few years studying the way stories about Jews move through history. Now, I’m researching a PhD on the subject. My interest in this area began with an editorial query: why do almost all stories we read about Jews focus exclusively on the Holocaust?

I knew there was more to Jewish history than the Holocaust, because my own family history tells me so. I’m not Jewish, but my great grandmother was, and she died in Bondi in 1940, probably knowing very little about what was happening in Europe. How did her story fit into the fabric of Jewish history?

My next question was trickier. If Holocaust fiction is one of the most popular genres, selling millions and millions of copies for decades, from Schindler’s List to The Tattooist of Auschwitz, how come synagogues and Jewish schools in Sydney have to employ security guards to keep Jews safe from attack today, in the twenty-first century?  

The answer, I’m finding, entails at least two thousand years of history – much bigger than my little PhD will be able to tackle.

There are lots of different opinions on where and how stories about Jews being bad people began. But the seeds of these stories can be found during the Roman Empire and the refusal of the Jews to accept conquest. They are troublemakers, upsetting the proto-fascist order of Roman-controlled Judea. “Look at how these people stick together,” said the famous legal scholar Cicero. “Don’t they know they’re supposed to be slaves?” (Or words to that effect.) From the century before the Roman crucifixion of Jesus, until the Emperor Hadrian expelled the unruly Jews from their homeland a hundred years later, massacring a million, this group of people became labelled as the enemies of civilisation.

One writer at the time, Apion, said that Jews are a bloodthirsty people who sacrifice humans (specifically Greeks) in their temples. This is the origin of the “blood libel” against Jews, and it’s an outright lie, no doubt told to reflect public sentiment and to increase his author profile. While many ancient peoples all over the world, probably including early Israelites, did perform human sacrifice, Judaism explicitly forbids the practice. Jews do not kidnap enemies, strangers or children in order to murder them for ritual purposes.

I can’t believe I’m spelling that out in 2024, but the re-emergence of this blood libel means that I must. Today, placards showing Jews as baby killers with dripping fangs, and the drenching of coffee shops and politicians’ offices in red paint by anti-Israel protestors can all appear to be reasonable, albeit dramatic, statements against the Israeli government’s bombardment of Gaza. But whether the protesters intend it or not, this bloody imagery is an echo of ideas that have been used to justify the massacre of Jews time and time again in the past.

To be clear, I think the present Israeli military bombardments of Gaza are outrageous and unconscionable. I think that the instigators of this crime against humanity – both from Israel and Hamas – should go to prison. Palestinian people deserve peace, dignity and freedom from all forms of oppression. Israeli hostages deserve to go home.

In faraway Australia, I am in no position to make moral judgements upon the distress of Palestinians or Israelis, and how that distress might manifest in narrative. I do not have a solution for conflict in the Middle East, either. But I can say with confidence that Jews do not murder or maim others for ritual purposes.

It’s a very dangerous lie to suggest that they do.

Throughout those two thousand years of history, this lie has been used to justify countless massacres of innocent, ordinary Jewish people. Both Christians and Muslims have burned Jews at the stake simply for being Jews. Millions of Jews have been tortured, beheaded, stabbed to death, hung, shot and gassed for being “evil”. When you look at the long view of history, the Holocaust appears as the culmination of many, many acts of violence against Jews.

All based on lies that have been told so often and for so long that they seem like truth.

But surely the Jews must have done something to upset so many people across such a long span of time, mustn’t they? No. Women have been told they are stupid for a lot longer than Jews have been told they are evil.

Stories can seep into our thoughts like poison. All racism, all prejudice, operates this way: with stereotypes, tropes and slogans that reinforce simplistic binaries of “good” and “evil”. Short, sharp words that can make us feel right, and righteous in saying them.

At least one Australian writer that I know of has recently stated that Jews “ritually” harm children (no, I’m not going to name them). And this week, after weeks of vandalisation of other politicians’ offices, the office of Jewish MP Josh Burns was trashed in a way that has chilled my own blood. The windows were smashed and fires lit beneath them, reminiscent of Kristalnacht. Across the glass is written in red paint “ZIONISM IS FASCISM”. Zionism means different things to different people, but as I understand it, for most Jews, at its most basic it means the right to exist in a homeland in peace. On the picture of Josh Burns in the window, red devil horns have been drawn on his head. The oldest symbol accusing Jews of murderous evil is to draw them as the devil. Such depictions appear in both medieval imagery of Jews and in Nazi imagery of Jews, across a period of a thousand years.   

It is not a protest symbol. It looks like a call for violence against Jewish people in Australia. The protesters who did this might well be naïve, they might think concerns such as mine are pointless, obscure. But where are their calls for peace? Their blood-soaked images are frightening. And they have finally made me speak.  

Image: Engin Akyurt, Unsplash, cropped

No goddess in this machine

No goddess in this machine

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about how artificial intelligence is going to mimic the essence of the human behind the words of a story. Our voices, even in text, are kind of like fingerprints. They’re unique. Not only in the ways we place one word after another, but in the ideas and energy that drive those words and seek to communicate their meaning to others.

I wondered, can ChatGPT mimic some essence of me? So, I asked it to write a story ‘in the style of Kim Kelly’. And this is what it came up with…

Sunlight and Shadows

 

In the sleepy town of Gundaroo, nestled amidst the rolling hills of New South Wales, there existed a world of stories waiting to be told. It was a place where time moved slowly, where the whispers of the past lingered in the air like the scent of eucalyptus after a summer rain. And in the heart of this picturesque landscape, there lived a woman named Matilda Evans.

 

Matilda was a woman of quiet strength and unwavering determination, her spirit as resilient as the ironbark trees that lined the road leading to her farmhouse. Widowed at a young age, she had carved out a life for herself amidst the sun-drenched fields and the endless blue skies, her days spent tending to her land with a tenderness born of love.

 

But beneath her stoic exterior lay a heart that longed for something more – a connection, a purpose, a reason to believe that life held more than just the mundane routines of day-to-day existence. And so it was that one fateful day, as the sun dipped below the horizon and the stars began to twinkle in the vast expanse of the night sky, Matilda found herself drawn to the town’s local bookstore.

 

The shop was a quaint little establishment, its shelves filled with dusty tomes and well-worn classics, its windows adorned with lace curtains that fluttered gently in the evening breeze. And there, amidst the musty scent of old paper and ink, Matilda discovered a world of wonder waiting to be explored.

 

It was in the dimly lit aisles of that bookstore that Matilda met a woman named Lily, a kindred spirit whose passion for literature mirrored her own. Together, they would spend hours lost in the pages of novels and poetry, their minds transported to distant lands and bygone eras, their hearts touched by the power of words.

 

But amidst the solace of their newfound friendship, shadows lurked on the periphery, threatening to engulf them in darkness. For Gundaroo was a town haunted by its past, its streets echoing with the whispers of secrets long buried beneath the red earth.

 

As the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months, Matilda and Lily found themselves embroiled in a mystery that would test the limits of their courage and their resolve. For Gundaroo held secrets that some would kill to protect, and the truth, once uncovered, threatened to tear the fabric of their small community apart.

 

But amidst the turmoil and the chaos, Matilda and Lily discovered something precious – a bond forged in the crucible of adversity, a friendship that transcended the boundaries of time and space. And as they stood together beneath the harsh Australian sun, their hands clasped in silent solidarity, they knew that no matter what the future held, they would face it together, sunlight and shadows alike.

Ha! Gundaroo – who knew? And what a random tiny-town pick.

This ‘Kim Kelly’ story reads like a mash of book blurbs, crammed with Australiana cliches. I’m kind of impressed that it recognised my name as Australian at all and picked up the themes of friendship and words that are important to me. But the rest is so generic it could have been written by, well, a machine.

Will readers come to love this machine writing? I can’t imagine how – at least when it comes to stories that are meant to touch or transport us.

Being told a story is a creative experience, where teller and receiver meet to make something together, something new and like no other. A soul-to-soul connection. And what is a soul? What is the tangle of electricity that makes you, you, and me, me? It’s a mystery.   

Maybe one day artificial intelligence will solve all mysteries of the universe in a mind-blowing quantum crunch that no-one’s yet imagined. Maybe the machine will finally introduce us to God, or Gaia, or the Great Whoever. Until then, I hope the magic of our stories is safe – with us.

What do you think?

Image: Christopher Campbell, Unsplash, (manipulated)

Christmas kidneys and other unpopular ideas

Christmas kidneys and other unpopular ideas

(CW: war, offal, questions)

Christmas is forever entwined with kidneys, for me. Nine years ago today, on 3 December 2014, at about 6.30 am, I walked from the on-site accommodation block of Westmead Hospital into the fluorescent-glare of pre-surgical prep, to don the appropriate cap and gown, so that I could give one of my kidneys away.

For love: where love is desperate for a future, and angry that it has been threatened by death – specifically Deano’s, via an ambush of end-stage renal failure. I’d really only just found his love, a love that was good for me – a nurturing and accepting love that said all of me was just great, especially the bits that don’t always make sense. I wasn’t giving this up without a fight.   

I was alone as I strode into this ring. Deliberately alone. Courage doesn’t always enjoy company. Like a boxer, my future lay in the strength of my body and my mind – and I was ferociously fit that day. At the same time, like a suicide bomber, I had to be prepared to die. Unlike a suicide bomber, there’d be no pay-off, no heaven in exchange for martyrdom, but while I’m not religious, I certainly needed to walk through a very narrow tunnel of irrationality to do this thing, to be prepared to obliterate myself.

Love or death.

Love and death.

A woman entering the business end of giving birth knows this dance intimately, in the flex and quiver of every muscle, cervix fully dilated: there’s no backing out of this thing now, love; death whispering in her ear all the while, ‘Are you sure you’re up to this?’

I didn’t want anyone holding my hand, asking the stupid questions: ‘Are you okay?’ and ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’

Deano made a last attempt to show me the exit sign the night before, ‘You can still change your mind,’ and I told him to shut up. This was my fight. Cheer from the stands or keep your thoughts to yourself.

And I won that day. I won our lives back. I’d prayed hard into the cold, slow  pulse of the universe that my half a pound of flesh might buy an extra ten years of love. Just ten years, a tiny, tiny drop of nothing in fate’s ocean of foreverness. We’ve had nine. Near enough to unbelievably awesome.

But as the poet Cohen said, love is not a victory march.

Love, when it does win, can bloom into more sensible forms of itself: gratitude and humility. At least it has for me, bringing a daily recalibration of my anxieties around the question: Why did I get a happy ending when so many don’t?

Choose your own Socratic rabbit hole from there, but as one question leads to another, mine inevitably land on Wiradjuri Country with: Why are First Nations people’s rates of kidney disease so high, and organ donation so low? What does my great white luck do for them?

And more recently: Why did Australia say ‘No’ in the referendum just past, which might have given First Nations people a louder voice on these kinds of questions in our parliament?

And: How could it be that we said ‘No’ when every good and tender heart plastered ‘Yes’ stickers all over social media?

Because we’re not as good and tender as we think we are?

Because humanity is fucked?

Yes, probably.

And no.

Like many people of good and tender conscience, this Christmas I’m thinking a lot about the Holy Land, about Israel and Palestine, and a war, a tangle of love and death, that seems never ending. Unwinnable. The price of failure is too great for both sides; the price of victory seems equally devastating.

There is pressure on those outside of this conflict – especially on writers, performers and artists – to pick a side. To chant the slogans, design a new set of stickers. But why does this particular humanitarian crisis and crime bring thousands and thousands of Australians into the streets to march in protest, when decades of Aboriginal deaths in custody and a new stolen generation of Aboriginal children don’t?

What victory is being demanded? A victory for destruction of one side over the other? Or are the protestors calling only for a ceasefire? And then what? What shape will ‘freedom’ take?

Can people outside of this conflict possibly understand what it means for all the millions of good and tender hearts living inside it, physically or emotionally, right now? Can we understand what it means to carry so much history: not only the past seventy-five years of it, but several millennia of love and death, of life, invested in a land that spiritually and culturally belongs to both sides? It’s literally in their DNA; it’s in their music, their languages, the poetic souls of both peoples, one echoing the other across time and distance. The trace of Canaan is in me too.

Humility says if we proclaim that we are all Palestinians, then we must face the fact that we are also all Israelis.

Just as all non-Indigenous Australians of good and tender conscience must admit that they are colonisers as well: people who have profited from the violent dispossession of others; people who have prospered at the expense of others. This is not a slate that can ever be wiped clean. It is history, and history is now.

Winning always brings some kind of loss. I lost a kidney; I took a hospital bed while others continued to suffer.

Humility brings understanding that loss and gain, and right and wrong, are a bit like love and death – often collaborators.

But inside that contest of confusions is the small, unrelenting voice of hope. 

While death shrugs, ‘Just give up, loser,’ and love fights back, ‘Fuck you!’ hope sighs and tells them both to be quiet.

Like a transplant surgeon, carefully shutting out the noise, getting on with the job, finding minute paths through the maze of loss and gain, preserving and improving the most blessed terrain we all share: life.  

Merry Christmas, then, to the doctors. To those who grapple with complexity, determined to find answers there.

Image: martialred vector, manipulated.

huge news for a little book

huge news for a little book

I am stoked to bursting to announce that my novella, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room, is a winner of the inaugural Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize.

This prize is awarded to prose works of between 20,000 and 40,000 words in length, and for writing that is ‘imaginative and challenging’.

Set in Sydney in the wake of World War I, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room is the story of two young women – Dotty and Clarinda – who have each suffered devastating losses. When their paths cross unexpectedly in a busy city department store, recognition flares and with it a chance of new life and a new understanding of love.

I will be forever pinching myself that the judges said of this piece of my heart: ‘It’s rare to come across a work of deep psychological insight conveyed with such verve and lightness of touch.’  And that, ‘Kelly sweeps the reader into the lives and passions of her two central characters and into the bustling city streets of Sydney in the 1920s. A powerfully moving book that sparkles with vitality.’

The award is wonderfully designed for two winners, because books are meant for sharing, and my novella sits proudly and admiringly beside Rebecca Burton’s exquisite Ravenous Girls – a story of two sisters growing up and growing apart in 1980s Adelaide. It’s a soulful, utterly original exploration of adolescence and anorexia – and it involves ABBA, as so many of our tender hearts did once upon a time.

I am grateful to the judges that they have chosen these particular stories: two books that mirror and contrast the vulnerabilities and complexities of young women across time, and across Australia.

As much as I’m thrilled that my novella has won a prize, I’m also thrilled that there is a new novella prize on the Australian literary calendar. So, here’s a hearty hooray for Finlay Lloyd, and a big-as-the-sky thank you to publisher Julian Davies, who devotes so much time and care to the books in his realm, the beauty of their printed form, and the ideas that bloom inside them.

Book-loving friends, please throw your support behind the 20/40 Prize. Writers, get your novellas ready for next year’s call!

And if you’d like to purchase copies of either or both of this year’s winning books, you can do that here.

Kim x

Image background: Pawel Czerwinski, Unsplash.

Storytelling Ethics

To Write, or Not to Write (Ethically)?

Like most writers, the idea of not writing fills me with more anxiety than the act of writing itself. Storytelling is so hardwired in me – as a tool of expression, learning and mental okayness – without it, I wouldn’t know how to get along in this life.

But is every story worth telling? What are the ethical boundaries that decide who can tell which stories and why? What are our responsibilities as writers to those we write about? And if literature – of all genres – is inherently political, what are our broader social responsibilities as writers?

These are the questions I’ve been exploring lately in my university research, which focuses specifically on Holocaust stories and the way Jewish people and history are represented in historical fiction. It’s heavy-going stuff, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Reading novel after novel depicting vicious and unimaginable cruelty is sobering to say the least. Contemplating the idea that, depending on the weather, the Nazis might have decided my own trace of Jewish blood was enough to condemn me, has been cumulatively shocking. Confronting the fact that anti-Semitism is becoming increasingly vocal and visible is chilling, and makes this work feel urgent.

I’ve cried a lot, overwhelmed, ill-equipped, standing at the foot of the mountain called anti-Semitism. Arguably, it’s the oldest from of bigotry in the book, and a study in conspiracy theorising. As humans, we’ve had thousands of years to work this one out but, like a deadly weed, it keeps coming back. The lies told about Jews shift around a bit, but the basic hatred has remained constant, and it’s always violent. Some of the libelling against Jews is so ingrained – and I won’t repeat the slurs here – it can even seem like cultural truth.

It’s forced me to ask: what am I doing to write against anti-Semitism myself? Superficially, it’s easy for me to answer that I have always tried to write interesting, non-tropey Jewish characters in my fiction; it’s easy for me to say, too, that I could never write a story that exploits the Holocaust – setting it in a concentration camp or ghetto – and call that an ethical decision. But is it? Or am I a coward, shying away from this worst crime against Jews?

What I have been discovering is that even the most cliched Holocaust romance can have some important ethical value, particularly where the author is making a clear stand against hatred, and is trying to honour the murdered and traumatised, however clumsy that attempt might be. At the same time, a few more highly regarded novels I’ve encountered, in their voyeuristic and inexplicable lingering in horror, seem far more problematic.

Most of my research has entailed wading neck-deep into all the scholarly debate over whether it’s ethical to write about the Holocaust at all. And it’s thrown a stark light on something I’ve known for a while: this is a conversation we’re not really having in publishing. The popularity of Holocaust novels seems to far outweigh any potential damage that might be done to our understanding of the Holocaust through its commercialisation, and to any inadvertent harm done to Jewish people in the process.

All of this seems to be urging me to more deeply engage with anti-Semitism and my own Jewish heritage in my writing. And I will be taking up precisely this challenge over the next few years, in my research and the fiction that will emerge from it. I’m determined to try to use my own voice, however small, to speak against this hatred however I can.

But in the meantime – and all the time – I’d appreciate hearing from any readers who have thoughts or questions about ethics in fiction generally, especially if you’ve been troubled by particular problems in this respect. I’d appreciate hearing any critical comment you might have about the ethics in my own work to date too. And I’d love to hear how you think we might all raise the bar of ethical responsibility higher.

All the good things to everyone,

Kim x

Photo by Eli Francis on Unsplash

Rats, Lovely Rats

Rats, Lovely Rats

I can’t think of the Irish diaspora without thinking of rats – rats scurrying onto ships, scurrying over each other to get away from the places and people that had rendered their lives worthless.

Economic migrants, to be sure. Colonists, undoubtedly. But economic migration can be as much a matter of life and death as war, can’t it? Although, it’s usually less dramatic. Death by starvation or preventable illness shames us all, and there’s no noble or romantic trope to be taken from it.

Imagine a life lived barred from opportunity, education, meaningful employment. A life lived as an outsider in your own home, barred from your own land and language. Colonists do this to others the world over – they’re doing it in Australia right now – just as some colonists have had it done to them.

And I am a child of them both: the colonised and the colonists, people who’ve moved from one dot on the earth to another, escaping poverty and oppression, searching for something better than a slum and, in the case of my Irish ancestors, ending up in another slum in Sydney. Rats. The rats of Surry Hills and Chippendale who made me.

I have inherited all their sharp edges: suspicion of authority and wealth, and a gnawing sense of inferiority that I will never shake. I’ve realised only recently, here in middle-age and from a place of comfort and privilege, that I still shop very warily, as if I might not be able to pay the electricity bill if I indulge in that two-for-one special on loo paper. I know, deep in my DNA, that my sweet comfort and privilege could be gone in a blink.

Best to value more important things than money and materialities, then. Family and friends, to be sure, are our most priceless treasures. But just as essential as these are the stories we share.

Stories of survival, hope, encouragement, wisdom, love, laughter – and taking the literary mickey out of those who tell you: ‘No. You’re no good.’    

I could never be the sort of writer who, godlike, imagines the lives of others unconnected to their own – or who looks at disadvantage as if it’s a foreign state to be examined or popped into a novel to tick a diversity box. I can only write about what I know: rats. My rats – the German and Jewish and Whitechapel-slum ones too. They fill the sails of all my stories in one way or another.  

And so they’ve inspired my latest tale, too: The Rat Catcher: A Love Story.

It all started at the end of 2020, in the thick of pandemic pandemonium, as I was looking about at so many people losing their shit, inexplicably stockpiling loo paper, and I wondered, how did people cope in such crises past?

Whispers from my Irish grandmother, Nin, came to me – as they often do when I’m in need of a story. I was struck by a memory of me as a small child, maybe looking at a book or museum exhibition, peering at a photograph of men holding up what looked like braces of rabbits. But they were rats, and as we chatted, Nin told me that her brothers had caught rats in Sydney, for the Health Department, once upon a time.

At that moment, a young Irish labourer, Patrick O’Reilly, shambled into my imagination. Down on his luck and homesick for Tralee, he scores a job as a rat catcher for the City Council when the bubonic plague visits Sydney in 1900. Worst Irish joke ever: problem is, O’Reilly finds he’s too fond of rats to be much good at the job. Of course, he falls in love with one rat called Old Scratch in particular, and one girl by the name of Rosie Hughes too, as well as all the books in the Public Lending Library in the Queen Victoria Building across the road from Town Hall. And, of course, things work out all right in the end – no spoilers there.

Things work out like my grandfather’s homemade bookshelf: good enough. A small but sturdy monument to the power of learning, my grandfather, who never owned a car or a house or a flash suit, taught himself the carpentry to make that bookshelf – taught himself from a book, no less – and he filled it with self-educating history texts and adventure novels. One of those books contained a brief encyclopedia of Classical mythology that would, a few decades later, lead his granddaughter to discover Empedocles’ pre-Socratic philosophy that the world is in fact made of love. But that’s another story.

What you’ll find in all my stories, over and over again, is a shameless exaltation of the rat. Our tenacity, our charm, our drive to win at the thing that none of us can truly live without: love. A sense of belonging where there was none. A sense of home, not here or there, but in the world.

A cherishing of this poor, beautiful world, all its creatures, all its gifts. Perhaps the lowly, lovely rat has the best free-ticket view of all of it?

The Rat Catcher: A Love Story is out 5 April from Brio Books.

Buy from Booktopia Amazon Kobo iBooks or ask your local bookshop or library to get a copy in for you.

Good Kidney Friend

Good Kidney Friend

It’s almost seven years since the Kidney Magicians at Westmead Hospital in Sydney took one of my kidneys and transplanted it into my beloved Deano, a plump little bean-shaped bloom. The morning after the deed was done, I was able to shuffle into his room and even through the blear of pain killers I could see the light had returned to his eyes in a way that made their bright-blueness startle me. I hadn’t been so awestruck since I met my babies for the first time.

Life – here it was. Real life, after more than a year of trudging off to dialysis three times a week for him, and a year of nerve-wracked testing for me. We weren’t a perfect match, as it turned out, but we were able to have what’s called an ABO incompatible transplant, which meant he needed some high-tech blood therapy before the operation, so that his body wouldn’t reject that little bit of mine.

It was all endlessly terrifying. It was all an act of faith and love and surrender and saving up for that six-week rainy day it was going to cost us in wages. But it was hardly altruistic. At the bottom of it, I didn’t want to lose my husband.

And I never stop being grateful that I have him to hold and hold me back today. I never stop being grateful to the renal nurses, physicians and surgeons who made it possible. I never stop letting others know about the experience either, because I want to demystify the process for those who might be thinking of it themselves. If I can encourage one other potential donor, if I can make one other potential donor a tiny bit less scared, then it’s a small repayment for the gift of life and love that was given to me.

I’ve had a few odd reactions here and there. Some people don’t want to know – and that’s more than fair enough. Kidney failure is hardly sexy or fun, and the organs themselves are a bit eww, isn’t that offal? There’s also something genuinely weird about voluntarily undergoing major surgery not for your own health benefit. There’s something unsettling about acts of selflessness generally. Any tale of courage can tacitly whisper to the listener: would you ever do such a thing?

That question can be confronting; it can feel like an accusation itself: why haven’t you donated a kidney to someone? Come on, lift your game! Not many can donate, though: there are a whole load of circumstantial green lights you need to be able to gift a kidney. It’s a big deal – in so many ways – for the recipient, for the health professionals involved, and for the donor.

And all this is rambling preamble to how unsettling it’s been for me lately to watch the whole ‘Bad Art Friend’ kidney-donor hate unfold in the GrubStreet writers group in the US. If you haven’t heard of it, you can read all about it here. Basically, a white writer in the group decided to altruistically donate a kidney to a stranger; she set up a private Facebook support group for her kidney donation experience; she talked a lot about kidney donation (wow, really?); one of her ‘friends’ in the group stole one of her Facebook posts, verbatim, and put it in a story that was subsequently published (that’s called plagiarism, at least in Australia); arguably, that story paints the white kidney donor as a clueless white supremacist who expected adoration from her non-white kidney recipient (I know – what the actual fuck?).

Multiple implausibilities and unknowables aside, the internet erupted tribally, as it tends to do, setting up opposing camps. At first, it was hard to take the spat seriously. But when some punters started responding with comments suggesting that merely talking about kidney donation is a form of bragging and attention-seeking, I felt slapped with shame. I should have laughed at the ignorance, but the level of contempt from some commenters was scorching – especially those comments that came from other writers. Aren’t we the ones that are supposed to be trading in truth and compassion? I’m not talking about Pollyanna-ing here. Just giving a bit of credit where credit’s due. For example, when you borrow the work of another writer, you credit them; and when a colleague does something good, you can credit them with that good thing, even if you don’t much like them. You can say, ‘Yeah, well done,’ and move on.

The Grubstreet kidney donor might not be everyone’s cup of tea. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea either. We’re humans, all the many billions of us. We annoy each other and do things that not everyone is going to understand. I’m a white woman who talks about kidney donation occasionally – I’ve also included it as a glancing gag in my author bio. So what? Let me have my five minutes of blather if it’s not hurting anyone.

But if anyone does seriously think I should be ashamed of myself, here are some medical facts sourced from Transplant Australia on all transplants in 2020:

1,650 people were waiting for a transplant463 deceased organ donors gave part of themselves to another after death1,452 people received a transplant of some sort182 organ donors were living donors – like me

Now, I know writers can be notoriously bad at maths, but surely this equation is simple. Almost 200 people missed out on a transplant in 2020. Ergo, we need more donors. We will always need more donors. And donors, even if they are the worst pains in the arse that ever walked the earth, should not be shamed for their donation.

What’s most disappointing in all this, is that some of the writers who’ve attacked the Grubstreet kidney donor are big, big literary names, who really, really should know better. To those writers: please, educate yourselves. And if you are the decent people you otherwise seem to be, you should probably apologise for casting any doubt whatsoever on the act of giving life to someone who is dying.

Here are a couple more facts:

Altruistic donation doesn’t usually involve an overprivileged wanker waking up one sunny morning and declaring, ‘I’m going to donate one of my kidneys today in a grand act of white supremacy! Look at me go!’ It takes at least six months, if not a year or more, and in Australia you are required to undergo psychological testing as well as physical testing. It takes about three days to recover from the surgery, about a month to recuperate properly, and your body is scarred forever – not unlike a caesarian scar, oddly enough.It must not be forgotten in all this that People of Colour, especially and First Nations Australians, suffer among the highest rates of kidney failure. Surely these patients and their families need support and accurate, truthful information, as well as investigation into the systemic racism in our hospitals, more than they need stories about irritating white people?

When my Deano was still recovering in the hospital, I kept company in the dormitory-style patient accommodation with a woman who’d just flown in from a South Asian country to care for one of her grown kids who was just about to have the same operation my husband had just survived. She was wracked with worry and maternal guilt at the distance between her and her child. When we talked, I’m sure she didn’t care too much that I was white. She just wanted to know that everything was going to be all right. She wanted to share her story, her feelings, in a time of frightening stress. And so did I. We shared some precious moments together talking about kidneys. And then we went on with our lives – lives repaired by those Westmead Kidney Magicians.

If you would like more information on kidney and other transplantation in Australia, go here.

Image: R. Runhold, 1871

True Story

True Story

Dedicated authors of fiction are story whores. We’re all questing fools who search for truths like gold-hunters scanning tracts of sand with make-believe metal-detectors.

Once a truth is glimpsed, we pounce on it, pocket it and then shape it to fit into our dreams and schemes. It’s this kind of fossicking and finding that keeps most of us addicted to storytelling. It’s also what makes us all incidental thieves.

No story is ours to tell, and yet the courage it takes to tell a story that doesn’t belong to us is a superpower that can change the world, or at least touch the soul of a reader or two. But it’s a power that comes with some heavy responsibilities.

Authors should perhaps, like doctors, take some kind of oath to help and do no harm – unless it’s necessary to, for example, slaughter a few sacred cows in the telling of truth to power. Of course, we’re going to make all sorts of mistakes in the process of suturing facts into fiction. Storytelling is a skill learned on the job, and we never stop learning. There’s a line in my first novel that clangs in my head as gutless and naïve, and will for all time, but I wrote it fifteen years ago, when I was rather more gutless and naïve, so I let it stand as it is, to remind me of my own unflattering truths.

I understand, deeply, viscerally, that authors’ first works are tender creatures; and as editor, over the last twenty-odd years, I’ve touched and prodded the rawness and soreness of all kinds of virgin-storytelling bravery with great care, learning all the time there, too.

These understandings have made me very cautious about openly criticising the work of others. My taste, my preferences, and my reactions to a text are small beans and largely irrelevant in the face of whatever it is the author is attempting to achieve with their own longings and leanings.

But there’s one recent debut that has challenged my resolve to keep my opinions to myself, and that is The Tattooist of Auschwitz, the blockbusting sales juggernaut that tells of a Holocaust survival and concentration camp romance. I’m not about to review the book here – there are literally thousands of reviews out there in bookchatting land, and most of them are effusively in favour of the work. If you’ve enjoyed the story, and been inspired to higher thoughts because of it, good for you – and let no-one take that from you.

My problem with the novel stems from what I see as an abuse of the power of storytelling, a betrayal of truthy trust. I have no way of knowing how this has come about: whether it lie in decisions made by author or publisher or sales maven. But come about it certainly has.

Emblazoned across every copy of the Tattooist are the words, ‘Based on an incredible true story’, and in speaking about it, the author has presented the work as ’95 percent fact’, a story recorded word for word from the real-life protagonist, declaring her own research to have been thorough and extensive, such that many readers believe that what they are reading is a true story in virtually every sense. Indeed, in one Australian readers’ forum, the review categories on the book were spilt between ‘historical fiction’ and ‘history’, illustrating the confusion starkly.

It would be reasonable to say that readers respond to ‘true stories’ in a slightly different way than they do fiction. When we know something is fictional, we understand that facts are being craftily assembled to lead us to deeper truths; we let the story play with our emotions and imaginations. When we believe we’re being told a true story, we tend to let that story go straight to the heart – we let the facts hit us unfiltered. In this way, true stories are often going to move us more profoundly, where we embrace the chance to walk with a real person as they endure their experiences, sympathising with them every step of the way.

It doesn’t matter who the writer is. I’ve ghostwritten a not wholly dissimilar true story of war, imprisonment and escape myself (from a combatant’s point of view), disappearing behind the real person as I helped him tell his extraordinary tale on the page. I’ve felt the dread of getting it wrong, the weight of care in trying to get it just right, picking over each word, checking each fact, in the knowledge that memory, decades on, is faulty. This can be especially true where great trauma has been experienced in the original storyteller: to protect ourselves, to cope, we meld some recollections into manageable clumps and scatter others. Some things can’t be spoken about at all, no matter how robust the teller might seem: there will be no-go zones, areas so painful they will remain in a locked box in the furthest corner of the brain forever. For my soldier, that area tended to be the experiences of his comrades, and of his wife when he returned: he was so protective of them, even sixty years later, he would give me only the barest and most benign sketches. The author of the Tattooist has been said to have been a social worker in real life herself, so she might then know these quirks of the mind more keenly than I would, but she has not, to my knowledge, outlined how she has addressed them in her book, only repeating that the story came straight from the mouth of her subject.

Despite the author’s and publishers’ claims, however, the Tattooist is not very exactly a true story. It is riddled with errors: from the pernickety oops of placing a town in Slovakia near the border of Romania, forgetting that Hungary sits between the two countries; to a growing objection over multiple discrepancies of fact and implausibilities from venerable sources, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and relatives of the real people named in the Tattooist (as well as the just-released sequel, Cilka’s Journey).

But rather than stepping away from their claims of high truth, the author and at least one of the publishers have dug in with the bizarre defence that the story is both 95 percent true to the real lives involved and fiction at the same time. How can this nonsense be conscionable?

If the author had wanted to take some licence with the trauma of others (and haven’t we all), why use the real names of survivors? It’s particularly disturbing that this author’s most stunning and affecting confections appear to involve the rape of women in the camps. Maybe my moral compass is wobbly but it’s probably disrespectful to make shit up about another person’s experience of sexual torture – even a little bit. And when the victim of that torture is dead and therefore unable to object or defend her privacy, it makes the twisting of the truth even worse. No matter how much research you’ve done (which the silly old Holocaust museums and historians just happen to have overlooked), you can’t buy a ticket to do that. Not in my book, anyway.

There are other problems with this book, or books (a third is reportedly planned), not least of which is the perversity of using the Holocaust as so much fodder for romance – and so successfully it appears to have spawned its own sub-genre if the present rush to publish Holocaust romance is anything to go by. Yes, there are many amazing stories of survival to be plundered from such a vast crime against humanity, but it’s those who did not survive who must sit at the forever-wounded centre of any true story of the Holocaust. Survival did not depend on pluckiness or prettiness; it was luck. Cruel, stupid luck.

My last word on this, though, is to my fellows in the storytelling business. If the Tattooist series had been set, say, in an African slave community in the American South, there’d be an outcry of concern and even anger at the appropriation and distortions of others’ pain – never mind the profits ka-chinged from this one. Yet, from the publishing industry and writing community generally, at least in Australia, I have only heard an unnerving silence. And, personally, I feel more than a little bit ashamed about that.

On a brighter note, readers searching for more authentic stories of the Holocaust can find a great selection here at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum bookstore.

Photograph of KZ Auschwitz: Bundesarchiv, B 285 Bild-04413 / Stanislaw Mucha / CC-BY-SA 3.0