I like to bring what I love about poetry into prose: Geraldine Brooks

Pulitzer-winning writer Geraldine Brooks talks about bringing women to life, playing with words and the inspiring yet divisive nature of religion

Geraldine Brooks. Photo: Randi Baird

Geraldine Brooks is the best-selling author of five novels and three works of non-fiction. Born in Australia but currently living in the U.S., she spent the early part of her career as a reporter covering conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans.

Nine Parts Desire, her first book, explores the lives of Muslim women living behind the veil. March , her first novel, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and her latest book, The Secret Chord, is a historical novel that traces the life of King David.

How do you decide whether you will write a book of fiction or non-fiction. Can you work on both simultaneously?

I was a non-fiction writer and a journalist before I had my kids. Then, when my eldest son was born 20 years ago, I turned to fiction. I wanted to be in control of my own schedule, and when you’re working from your imagination you have that luxury, whereas with non-fiction you have to follow the story wherever it might lead, for however long it might take. Now, I might work on essays or small reporting assignments between novels, but novels have become the real work of this part of my life.

You live in a rural place with patchy Skype. What are the challenges of this kind of existence, and how does relative isolation affect the quality of writing?

I was a city person for most of my life. Born and raised in Sydney, graduate school in Manhattan, foreign correspondent for

The Wall Street Journal based in London and Cairo. It was only after I turned to fiction that I had discretion about where to live, and much to my surprise I found that I love small rural places best. I love to be close to nature much more than I love bustling, vibrant city life. I love animals and am able to enjoy three dogs, a horse and three alpacas here at my home. I love to garden and to walk on the beach and in the woods. I think it’s actually good to be away from the hothouse writers’ ghettos such as Brooklyn in New York or Cambridge in Boston where you can’t spit without hitting a fellow scribe. Much as I love the company of my fellow writers, I think it’s valuable to have the kind of diverse friendships you form in a tiny community. Here my friends are fishermen, farmers, carpenters and blacksmiths as well as writers, poets and painters, and that has a good influence on my work, as well as on my worldview.

You’ve travelled extensively away from your native Australia. How important is the idea of return to you?

I miss Australia to an unreasonable extent. I love the light there, the trees and birds, and the easy humour with which people negotiate ordinary daily encounters. I’m a completely Australian product, I think. Certain ideas about fairness and a progressive political orientation are very deeply etched.

You’ve written such a wide range of books — historical novels, memoir, reportage. Is there a theme that binds these books together?

I’m just fascinated by the world — always have been since I was a kid in suburban Sydney writing to penpals all over the globe. The question: “What’s it like to be them?” The deep need to empathise and put myself in different shoes. This drove me as a journalist and still does as a novelist.

Hilary Mantel said of one of her early efforts of writing historical fiction, “I saw that the women were wallpaper.” How do you manage to bring your women to life?

You have to hunt them down. It’s not easy. Their voices are elusive because there were so many obstacles in the way of them telling their own stories. So many women weren’t allowed to become literate, or, if they were, they were too darn busy with work and kids to have time for much self-reflection. But I’ve learned you can find them in court, if the courts took verbatim testimony. In those old transcripts you can hear her, at last, speaking in her own words. You can learn how she sounded and what preoccupied her. I found her in the courts of the Spanish inquisition, the English country assizes and Boston religious courts.

What quality of language do you aspire to as a writer?

I love words. I love to play with them. I like to bring what I love about poetry into prose. That concision and freshness that poetry has. There is nothing more satisfying than writing a sentence that has the right pitch and melody, and that makes you look at a common thing in an uncommon way.

Faith, religion, spirituality — this is bedrock for you. Why do you find yourself returning to them again and again?

I’m fascinated by what religion does for us, and what it does to us. How these particular ideas can be at once so inspiring and so bitterly, hideously divisive and destructive. I can’t seem to turn away from it as a subject.

Tishani Doshi is a writer and dancer. Her most recent book is The Adulterous Citizen: Poems, Stories, Essays.