Wakefield Press, RRP $24.95 (paperback). ISBN: 9781862548237
You could win a signed copy of Exposure: a journey.
Simply, read our interview with Joel Magarey and enter for your chance to win! It’s that easy.
The winner will be notified in early June. Good luck!
Why were you compelled to write Exposure: a journey?
I had been through experiences I felt made for a powerful story which would speak to others: the story of a young man’s journey across the planet and simultaneously through love and mental illness. I thought it would reach people because it’s essentially about the illusions of desire and fear, to which all of us are subject in different degrees, and how they can blind us to what we most need even while shocking us onwards, in a perverse and inexorable march, towards what we most fear.
Meet author Joel Magarey at Mornington Library on Saturday 29 May at 11am. Free, but bookings essential: 5950 1820
Because the most extreme illusions of fear I’d suffered were those of obsessive compulsive disorder, an illness which is still stigmatised and not well understood, I also wanted to enable people to taste that experience, to understand its compelling and terrifying logic and to see it anew, as something not alien but all too human. I also felt the social impulse to take my own small anti-stigma stand of disclosing my experience of OCD publicly.
But above all I’d become vividly invested, as presumably most writers do, with a vision of rendering a set of shared human experiences and perceptions that readers would enthusiastically recognise. And I suspect, to get psychoanalytic for a moment, that underneath that lies a desire for connection with others through the text, through this solitary writing pursuit.
For what it’s worth, though, I wouldn’t say I was ‘compelled’ to write; and I take the increasingly common claim by writers that they are ‘compelled’ – forced – to write with a fat grain of salt. What bothers me is less that I think they really mean ‘impelled’ (‘driven’ rather than forced) but that this trendy notion of writerly compulsion gets flaunted as a sign of true-writer status, which I think is promotional humbug that fools people.
Was it difficult to confront your experience with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder during the writing process or did you find it cathartic?
It was both. It was often painful – if also sometimes blackly funny, once I had the necessary distance – to look my own ill behaviour in the face; to trace its origins in childhood; to map out its tentacular effects and identify all the resultant bad choices, to re-taste the slices of suffering I’d served up to myself and often to others.
On the other hand, writing Exposure did have a side-effect that seems to have been therapeutic in the very broad sense of enabling me to understand and outgrow the self I was writing about – and in a sense writing a memoir can demand you do so. I suspect many memoirists find narrative perspective and depth only once they’ve analysed the patterns of their past rigorously enough to be able to understand and thereby separate from them. Without that ‘splitting off’ from the written self there’ll be only the author’s naïve self-expression.
There is, however, a related countervailing vice in writing memoir: it forces you to stay in a period of your past for longer than you may wish – or even may deem healthy. I struggled with that at various times.
How would you describe your writing practice?
I write at home for most of every weekday, two out of every three weeks. On the third week I head off to a job which, in funding the other two weeks, is a little-known dream-job for writers: sessional Hansard reporter (in the Victorian Parliament).
Wakefield Press, RRP $24.95 (paperback). ISBN: 9781862548237
I often write longhand to begin with, leaving the work a day or so before rereading and editing, a tidal pattern I will carry forward through and beyond the transfer to the computer. Flaubert said ‘I cannot change my eyes’ but insofar as reading one’s own writing goes it’s necessary. I will do anything to distance the text and see it with new eyes so that I can effectively self-edit. I’ll leave it if necessary for weeks or months; I’ll change the font; I’ll use a different printer; I’ll take it into a busy café; I’ll read it lying down, standing up or (on occasion) walking.
Poems are different. They arrive of their own accord, at the still point where images come to rest. Poems are lovely and easy.
Where do you usually write?
At my desk, often with my feet on it, a writing board on my lap.
Which book/s changed your life?
A lot of those were books I read in childhood or my teens, when, I guess, I was naturally open to the most deeply formative reading experiences.
The Bible got to me first. Not always in a good way. For one thing, it had me convinced for my first 12 years that I was Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God – though at 12 I realised I couldn’t be, because I hadn’t matched the Boy Jesus’s feat, performed at the same age, of astounding the Doctors of the Law in the temple. The bible also left me believing I could sense God’s presence permeating the natural world, which explains the parts of Exposure’s journey – such as a solitary climb into Alaskan mountains or a 12-day trek into a Bolivian desert – that constitute a kind of post-religious seeking.
In my teens, James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man deepened these religious and romantic instincts and – along with other works such as George Johnston’s My Brother Jack, David Lodge’s Small World and Thor Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition – convinced me life was an adventure.
In terms of narrative and writing, listening to my father reading Dickens novels to us – he’d do the dialogue in wonderfully odd voices – formed my love of story early, while Andre Brink’s An Instant in the Wind sucked me in for life to the novel’s power and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia inspired me to get my own hands dirty with Exposure.
Outside the literary field, David Burns’s brilliant and seminal cognitive-therapy populariser Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy revolutionised my understanding of the vagaries of thought, anxiety and mood.
Looking back, what advice would you give your 25 year old self?
‘You will be very sceptical about what follows here, Joel, but try to believe me: this is a message from your 40-year-old self. I know it sounds weird, but I’ve been convinced by this strangely influential Victorian woman (you’ll move over here in 2000) to write to you in the past. She works for a library, if that clarifies things any. Probably not much, eh.
‘Anyway, I’d like to be able to think I could advise you to do things a bit differently in the time that lies ahead for you: not to use the journey of your lifetime to escape from Penny; not to put your love in such peril and her through such pain; to be less hung up about getting laid; to realise the world owes you a lot less than you think; not to see OCD as a problem you can wish yourself free of; to ask Troy more questions before you fly into a remote Alaskan river with someone you’ve never met before; and finally to understand that the illustrious visions you still have of your destiny – as well as your obsessive-compulsive nightmares – are all just illusions of desire and fear. One day you’ll learn to see past them.
‘But – I know you’re not listening. I know deafness is the terrible glory of youth, especially yours. I know you’re going to have to learn all that by doing everything.
‘I know you’ll throw yourself into that Alaskan river – literally – and nearly drown. Oh, you total drongo – you’re also going to set your tent on fire in a Bolivian desert! Just when you think you’ve got OCD beat, too, you’ll get stuck in an obsessive search for a wheelchair, of all things. On the other hand, you’ll enjoy the Ecuadorean sexual paradise. Though it will take Penny ever further from you …
‘Look, insofar as it might help change just a few small things, I hope you get this message anyway. The lady librarian I mentioned is going to put it on the internet, so you never know. Technology is amazing in the 2010s.
‘I have to go. Good luck then, young self.
‘You’re gonna need it.’
What are you currently working on?
First, letting go of Exposure – the promotional stage seems almost endless. Then, planning a holiday that’s desperately needed, because the last two years of Exposure nearly killed me. Last, learning how to cope with extremely scary thoughts about writing another book. There’s a part-written book of travel stories, half fiction, half non-fiction. There’s a part-written book of poems. There’s a project X.
But these thoughts are too much for now. After 10 years of Exposure, the letting go and holiday come first.
Find out more about Joel Magarey at:
http://www.joelmagarey.com/
Plus, win a signed copy of Exposure: a journey!:
Enter here…
Join Joel Magarey who will talk about his book, Exposure: a journey, a compelling, scary, delightfully funny and moving memoir of love and adventure with a psychological edge.
Wakefield Press, RRP $24.95 (paperback). ISBN: 9781862548237
Hear Joel speak about his global odyssey, which included perilous, yet comical, adventures in Alaska and Bolivia while suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Copies of Exposure: a journey will be available to purchase and have signed at the end of this event.
You could also win a signed copy of Exposure: a journey! Read our interview with Joel Magarey and enter our competition.
Saturday 29 May, 11am
Mornington Library
Vancouver Street
Bookings essential: 5950 1820 or email
This special event celebrates 2010 Library and Information Week – Access all Areas.
Connect with ideas, hear moving stories, tap into your imagination, learn a new skill and be inspired in Library and Information Week during 24-30 May.
Enjoy a jam-packed program of special events for all ages
This year’s theme, Access All Areas, celebrates libraries as the place to relax, communicate, connect, entertain and inform.
We have a jam-packed program of special events to delight and inspire you. From songwriting workshops, talks by authors Vivienne Ulman and Joel Magarey, a book launch and a journal making workshop to a book sculpting demonstration, a Facebook class, storytimes and the Biggest Morning Tea book chats. We will also be announcing two new initiatives for local writers along with celebrating Reconciliation Week.
Also, be in the running to win a range of prizes, including a signed copy of Vivienne Ulman’s memoir, a signed copy of Joel Magarey’s book and a gorgeous handmade prize pack from Hammer & Daisy worth $120!
We look forward to seeing you at Our Library for these special events.
