We chat to Jessie Tu about her new book, The Honeyeater.
A&U: Tell us a little about what to expect from The Honeyeater.
JT: The Honeyeater follows the tale of a young literary translator named Fay, who is struggling under the intense love from her mother and the overwhelming influence from her powerful academic supervisor and mentor.
It begins in Paris, where Fay and her mother have escaped to unwind and celebrate her mother’s birthday. Fay has also just been assigned her biggest translation project yet. It’s the job that may finally turn things around for her career.
In France, she finds out that her ex-boyfriend has died under mysterious circumstances. When she returns to Sydney, Fay is embroiled in a police investigation that does nothing to improve her relationship with her mentor.
The book questions what it means to love — a vocation, a person, a fantasy of a person. I’m interested in the ways we can easily lie in order to get what we want, in the grey-ness of betrayal and honesty. I wanted to examine the different degrees of lying and truth, and expose how we all, in some ways, lie to each other in small, seemingly insignificant ways.
A&U: Why did you want to write something different to your first book?
JT: My interests and values in the last few years have shifted so much, hence I wanted to write something very different to my first book. I wrote my first book in my 20s and moving into my thirties, I felt a huge shift in the way I approached things, and saw things, and just generally in the way I moved through the world. One’s perspective shifts so dramatically when they hit their third decade. You start to prioritize different things, and begin to understand things on a deeper level. You are less reactive, you choose your fights better and your people, you move slower through the world and realise there’s a limit to your attention. I became very intentional about where I placed my attention. Attention is the purest form of love, and the most obvious expression of love: where you put your attention, your hours, what you decide to focus on, whose words you decide to listen to and consider deeply, indicates what and who you love.
Around this time, I had a conversation with a translator who told me that in the East, sharing your emotional burdens is considered selfish. I had grown up in the West, believing that sharing one’s emotional landscape was the only means of developing closeness and sustaining love with another human. I started to see that translation is this great metaphor for the love that I realised was the greatest love of all — a completely ego-less love — a love that more women than men are taught to practise. I wanted to explore what it means to love in this way — how the practice of love is branded by ideas of ‘romance’, and what ‘romance’ looks like between women who aren't interested in having sex with each other.
The Honeyeater
by Jessie Tu
A wildly inventive follow up to the acclaimed bestseller A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, winner of the ABIA for Literary Fiction Book of the Year.