ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

The Stella Prize is due to be announced tomorrow, but today I had the opportunity to listen to one of the shortlisted authors in conversation, courtesy of the Melbourne Jewish Book Week Writing Lives series.

This is the description of the event:

Katia Ariel discusses her 2024 Stella shortlisted sensation, ‘The Swift Dark Tide’, in conversation with playwright and theatre producer, Jessica Bellamy. Ariel’s memoir deftly oscillates between journal entry and reminiscences of a childhood in Odessa, emigration to Australia, a happy family life, and the urgency and turmoil of a same-sex love affair. The depth and honesty of this ‘Writing Lives’ is both disarming and profound.

And this is a description of the book:

What happens when, in the middle of a happy heterosexual marriage, a woman falls in love with another woman?
The Swift Dark Tide is a story of selfhood and desire, of careful listening to an ungovernable heart.
Part memoir, part love letter, The Swift Dark Tide is also a chronicle of life by the sea, journeying between Melbourne’s St Kilda and the Black Sea town of Odessa. Katia Ariel introduces us to a lineage of soulful, strident women and beautifully nuanced men. She invites us into home and heart to witness love, loss and joy, motherhood, daughterhood and the urgent wildness of the body.

The conversation began with Katia talking about language and stories as a key part of her childhood life, and how she then ‘shut it underground’ in adolescence during the period of her migration to Australia aged 10, learning a new language and adjusting her identity.  She didn’t start writing again until she was in her 30s, with falling in love with another woman as a catalyst.  Now she loves writing and wants to do it all the time!

Jessica asked about the influences on her writing, and Katia responded by saying that she is culturally omnivorous, consuming all kinds of books, art, music and food from a variety of cultures.  She is observant of other creatives and that inspires her.

The book, being a memoir that explores romance, eroticism, joys and sorrows, involves the common contradiction… it traverses secrecy and privacy in a form that is, inevitably, revealing.  Bring vulnerable and open, Katia thinks that telling the truth ‘faster’ is best.  So, because her memoir involves her children, the father of her children, the woman she loves and many other people who matter to her, she read everything to them beforehand, and has their permission to put it in the book.  But she could also write freely about herself and her body without seeking permission.  She is hopeful that the result can be ‘unshaming’ for other women who are like herself.

Some elements, for example about the decision to have an open marriage and some unusual aspects of her child’s birth, have generated different reactions, but she wanted to be honest.  She also wanted to be honest in discussing the mother-daughter relationship.  Her options were to ‘offer comfort’ or for them to ‘free themselves’ but her own ‘becoming’ meant individuating away from her mother.  They have a lot in common and have always been very close — and still are — but she felt that motherhood i.e. being ‘someone else’s parent’ meant that they needed to ‘let go’.  To let the new person arrive, the new person that was Katia, and the new child.

They talked a little about Soviet Jews, and how they have a unique experience and identity i.e. Jewish-pagan-communist-atheist.  Katia called it a ‘cellular’ inheritance, and this reminded me of my recent reading of Anne Berest’s The Postcard, in which she wrote about how — in contemporary France — a Jewish identity is conferred by others, even on secular Jews who are not observant in any way and who never really identify as Jews.  Berest recounted having a relationship with a Jewish man who thought she was ‘hiding’ her Jewish identity because she hadn’t mentioned it… but it just hadn’t occurred to her to do that.

In the context of discussion about ‘coming out’ in later life, there was the question of: what do we owe those in the past who could not do what we can? Katia feels that any answer can only be speculation, because we cannot know what our ancestors wanted of us. All you can do is engage with the ancestors who you know, and her immediate ancestors just want her to be happy.  To be herself.

The talk concluded with a reading from the book, which is in the form of vignettes from a diary, covering the three years in which her new love changes her life and her concept of self.

The long- and short-listed books can be seen here.