We chat with Charlotte Wood about her book Stone Yard Devotional making The Booker Prize shortlist.
A&U: Hey Charlotte! Thanks so much for chatting with us. Congratulations on Stone Yard Devotional being shortlisted for the Booker Prize! How do you feel?
CW: Struck dumb with joy and excitement. And thrilled not only for myself but for all the clever, energetic, dedicated and delightful people I work with in the publishing world at A&U and at Sceptre in the UK. It feels like a thunderclap of joy for all of us working together, and I love that.
A&U: This is a very personal book to you. How would you describe it?
CW: Stone Yard Devotional grew from elements of my own life and childhood merging with an entirely invented story about an atheist living in an enclosed religious community of nuns, set on the Monaro plains in NSW where I grew up. It’s a spacious, quiet book that I hope nonetheless hums with power. It’s concerned with some of my recurrent preoccupations, like friendships and rivalries between women, and the question of how to live harmoniously with others despite prickly relations. It also touches on forgiveness and atonement, on the moral challenge of despair, and on the way we as societies decide some people deserve to be outcasts - and the cost of that to them and to us.
From the start I wanted to experiment with this book, with allowing more space for the reader, trusting them and inviting them to contemplate aspects of their own life while joining my narrator in hers.
The most personal thread of the book is to do with my mother, who died young and whom I loved so much. In large part it’s a tribute to her. We hear a lot about bad mothers in contemporary fiction but not so much about good ones, possibly because they’re harder to make interesting on the page. So I enjoyed the challenge of that, and of weaving some autobiographical material with a completely invented larger story. I also wanted to try to master what Saul Bellow called ‘stillness in the midst of chaos’, risking a tonal restraint and depth that at the same time, I hope, shimmers with energy.
A&U: What do you hope readers will take from reading Stone Yard Devotional?
CW: Many readers have told me they felt immensely calmed by the book, and that it has stayed with them long after they finished it. I think it’s a book that doesn’t go fast but hopefully goes deep, so if readers experience that I’m very gratified. I also hope it does something I heard Anne Enright say – that she loves a book that makes you stop reading every now and then and look into the middle distance, considering. In this frenzied world of shouting and aggression and chaos, I think stillness is becoming more and more valuable. So I hope my book allows readers to feel a welcome stillness inside themselves for a short time.
A&U: What book have you read lately that you've loved?
CW: I’ve been rereading Emily Perkins’s novel The Forrests, which I think everyone should read. She honours the smallest moment with great depth and humour and richness. It is an absolute joy. And in another style altogether, I have been astonished and dazzled by Emily Maguire’s Rapture, coming in October – an incredible wild vision of a book about a medieval female pope. It is breathtaking.
Stone Yard Devotional
by Charlotte Wood
A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good'.
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