Charlotte Wood interview: ‘I wanted nothing trivial, nothing insincere in this book’

The author of Stone Yard Devotional, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, talks about finding inspiration in personal upheaval, and the stories that shaped her childhood

Read interviews with all of the longlisted authors here.

Published August 15, 2024

The inspirations behind my Booker-shortlisted book

Stone Yard Devotional grew from elements of my own life and childhood merging with an entirely invented story about an enclosed religious community. Writing it during pandemic lockdowns, followed by a serious illness – and the way these twin upheavals demolished so many of our consoling certainties – gave me an urgent instinct to shed anything inessential in my work. I wanted nothing trivial, nothing insincere in this book. And I 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.

The book that made me fall in love with reading

From birth I was absorbing the stories read aloud to my older sister, and we grew up with books everywhere. I see now I loved the repetitive pleasure of the story series: Paddington Bear and Mary Plain, Enid Blyton of course. I specially adored Mary Norton’s The Borrowers books, about a species of tiny people who live beneath floorboards and between the walls of ordinary human houses, who borrow our unnoticed lost trinkets and scraps for furniture and food. I loved the possibility of other realms of existence, the idea that hidden lives could be busily flourishing all around me.

The book that made me want to become a writer

Most Helen Garner fans begin with Monkey Grip, her first novel, but my own devotion started with her 1985 story collection, Postcards from Surfers. For me, an incipient young writer, reading it was like plunging into a rockpool of fresh, clear water. She showed me that it was possible to write about distinctly local experience, yet have it resonate universally. Her clarity of prose, her humour, her absence of pretension coexisting with serious literary ambition at the sentence level; all of this made me want to try fiction for myself. Those qualities remain when I reread the stories today.

The book I return to time and time again

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. First published in 1987 when the author was in his old age, it’s a semi-autobiographical portrait of several decades of close friendship between two American couples, the Langs and the Morgans. The sometimes-dangerous currents of long friendship are beautifully, unflinchingly portrayed – and the characterisation of charismatic, infuriating Charity Lang is unforgettable. At times I read it as a chronicle of friendship; at others it’s a portrait of two marriages; another time it’s a book about the artist’s life – about talent nourished, fulfilled, or thwarted.

The book I can’t get out of my head

The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright. Enright’s great authority as a writer has always thrilled me. I will go anywhere with her, and The Wren, The Wren is especially deep and alive. Anyone tempted to write a sad-girl novel should first study Enright’s Nell, and see how authorial insight and this novel’s complex, layered structure counterbalance and energise material that in other hands can turn dismally solipsistic. Add Carmel and Phil and a family’s captivity to a particularly Irish generational mythology; add Enright’s dark wit, her poetry and her sheer contemporariness – well, dazzling is the word.

The book that changed the way I think about the world

That Deadman Dance by Noongar (West Australian Aboriginal) novelist Kim Scott, centres on first contact between British invaders and the Noongar people. With a lithely shifting point of view and a playful, optimistic lyricism, Scott’s novel was the first I read to challenge the pernicious myth that settler brutality towards Australia’s first inhabitants was historically inevitable; ‘just the way things were’. Meticulously researched, the novel brings alive the moment when a choice for respect and collaboration between the two cultures was entirely possible – and devastatingly rejected by the settlers. Scott is a literary master, one of Australia’s very best.

The book that changed the way I think about the novel

Too many to choose just one – but recently I’ve been tremendously liberated by Sigrid Nunez’s work, especially The Friend, What are You Going Through and The Vulnerables. The looseness and confidence with which Nunez moves between pure fiction and seeming ‘autobiography’, between adroitly controlled narrative tension and free-floating observation, not to mention her delightfully playful point-of-view shifts (a cat can suddenly narrate a chapter, then disappear!?) is very exciting to me. It reminds me that in fiction, anything is allowed.

I loved the possibility of other realms of existence, the idea that hidden lives could be busily flourishing all around me

— Charlotte Wood on reading The Borrowers as a child

The book that impressed me the most

William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows, first given to me by a beloved editor. A slender masterpiece about a small Midwestern American family facing the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, the novel fictionalises the loss of Maxwell’s own mother, using three perspectives – eight-year-old Bunny, 13-year-old Robert, and their father James. No writer has more precisely rendered the way children observe and feel everything, even – especially – that which they are forbidden to know. There is no sentimentality in this devastating book, which echoes Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse in its delicacy and depth.

The book I’m reading at the moment

I’ve been re-reading New Zealand novelist Emily Perkins’ The Forrests, first published (and first adored by me) in 2012. An ambitious portrait of the Forrest family covering the span of middle child Dorothy’s whole long life, it is stunning in its deftness. I’m in awe of Perkins’ ability to sweep across decades and at the same time maintain a deeply intimate narrative, never once losing her footing. The prose is highly textured, the family precisely characterised, the whole thing bursting at the seams with beauty and with laughter. I can’t understand how she did it. It should be republished at once.

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read

I first came across The Birds on the Trees, Nina Bawden’s 1970 ‘Lost Booker’ shortlisted novel, around a decade ago. A teenage son, mental illness and addiction, and a family wracked by how to respond: anyone who has known such troubles will recognise the terrible poignancy of this story of a family in crisis. At first glance it might appear a conventional novel, but Bawden’s adventurously switching point of view and narrative voice – shifting not only between characters, but also between first- and third-person ‘within’ characters – nicely dislodges reader complacency.