Kylie Mirmohamadi at The Burning Hearth

Welcome to The Burning Hearth! For those of you joining me from the northern hemisphere, Happy Fall! 🍁🍂For those of you joining me from the southern hemisphere, like my lovely guest Kylie Mirmohamadi, Happy Spring!🪻🌻🌳

My dear friend, Kylie, is not new to The Burning Hearth. She was a featured author for my “Echoes of Le Guin” series, and she was my guest questioner for the spring 2023 rotation of my “Circling Saturn with David Naimon” series. It gives me great pleasure to feature her once again.

Kylie has a PhD in History and is currently an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in English and Creative Writing at La Trobe University. This year, she added novelist to her CV. I am honored that she agreed to join me in conversation to discuss her recently released debut novel, Diving, Falling (Scribe, 2024).

There is a beauty and a grace and an erudition to Kylie’s writing that is undeniable. From the moment I sat in my patio swing and began the journey of the story’s protagonist, Leila Whittaker, I found myself diving and falling into the world that Kylie’s deft hand brings to life.

Wherever you’re sitting, I hope you enjoy our conversation.

The Burning Hearth

presents

Kylie Mirmohamadi

Burning Hearth: Welcome, Kylie, to The Burning Hearth. This interview has been a long time coming, and I’m so glad for you that your book is finally making its way out into the wider world. Congratulations!

I would love it if you would start us off with a brief summary of your book.

Kylie: Thank you so much, Constance. I’m thrilled to be talking with you about my book. I’ve so much enjoyed our conversations here about Ursula Le Guin in your Echoes series, and also having the opportunity to pose a question to the marvelous David Naimon in your serial interview with him. The Burning Hearth has definitely been a place of warmth and nourishment for me.

Diving, Falling is told in the voice of Leila Whittaker, a recently-widowed novelist from Melbourne who is living in the aftermath of her complicated marriage to the famous artist, Ken Black. While she begins new relationships over the course of the story, she is also constantly being re-entangled in the familiarity – and turbulence – of her existing relationships; with her two sons, her friends, and her sister.

A number of things are upsetting Leila’s equilibrium (true to its name, there is a lot of dropping, falling, drowning in this novel; Leila’s home ground has given way). Among them, Ken’s Will contains a surprise bequest, and her oldest son, Sebastian, re-kindles a relationship with Lola Springthorpe, the daughter of Leila’s closest friend. An ambitious and enigmatic young woman, Lola is involved in the staging of a controversial exhibition concerning Ken’s work, and also in the sale of his final painting. This sale brings considerable wealth to his sons and reverberates further by ushering into their circle its buyer, Remy Pascal, and his son Charles.

Always, in this novel of waterways and oceans, Leila finds herself drawn away and returning; from her landmark modernist house on the river at Kew, to the sea and a house in the northern beaches of Sydney. She also feels the tidal pull of her own creative work, calling her dangerously to speak of her truth, and – resembling Ken- to be heedless of the cost to others.

In Diving, Falling Leila looks to break the patterns set by her dead husband’s excesses, and is determined to live her life outside Ken’s long shadow. In the process, she’s casting some shadows of her own.

Burning Hearth: Diving, Falling is your first novel. You are a widely published academic writer. In fact, I read your book The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen. I was gripped by this book because, as I shared with you at the time, I simply had no idea of the Austen fan-fiction writing and publishing frenzy taking place online. This book was a thorough deep dive on your part and written with a keen academic eye. Fiction, as we know, is an entirely different beast. What, if any, are/were the challenges for you in moving between academic writing and fiction writing?

Kylie: These two modes of writing are very different. I came to fiction writing much later than academic writing, and I had to learn to access and write from my unconscious and also to trust my intuition more. I had to dig deep and be open to emotion, and pay attention to the symbolic landscape of the world I was creating. Language itself becomes more exposing, more personal and at the same time more elemental, when it’s carrying emotion and symbol as well as ideas. A lot of scholarly writing is about argument and evidence, while fiction, for me, and the way I write it, is not about attempting to convince anyone about any one point. In fact, when I try to make one of my characters parrot some theory, I end up deleting it. The style falls down in the shift from imaginative to rhetorical mode.

One of the greatest challenges is letting go of that vaguely defensive academic style – the qualified statements and the anticipation of possible refutations. When writing fiction, I need to let loose to allow the characters the space to become truly themselves, and the story to shape itself and be what it needs to be.

Creative writing is a much more organic process for me. Once I have my characters and the language in place, everything flows from there. Sometimes it’s a wild old ride!

Burning Hearth: I recently read your blog post “In which I annotate my own book, and think about Jane Austen.” I have to imagine Austen fans will love Diving, Falling. Why are you drawn to Austen, both as a reader and an academic?

Kylie: As a reader, I really admire the way that Austen writes with such wit, acerbic at times, and yet with fondness for her characters too (the worthy ones, that is). Her ear for dialogue is pitch perfect, and she values emotion over sentiment.

As an academic, especially in my work on fandom and reception, I find I am drawn to – and fascinated by – people’s fascination with certain subjects or activities. And the afterlife of Austen is a wonderful example of this type of magnificent obsession.

As I said in the blog post, initially I shied away from connecting Austen and my fiction writing. I wanted to be the novelist ‘me’ not the academic ‘me’ when I was considering and talking about Diving, Falling. But I’ve come to realise that the Austen connection is, in fact, a really interesting and generative way of considering my book and my approach to writing. Especially in the light of Persuasion, her book about maturity and the working of time, and the sea. And there’s even a fall (or a dive) at the Cobb at Lyme Regis in that novel.

Burning Hearth: One of the things I believe you handle brilliantly in Diving, Falling is the ripple effects of betrayal. Once that first pebble is dropped, others who are caught in those ripples often find themselves betraying others. Often the guilt of betrayal can be assuaged by the desire to protect the person being betrayed. Your protagonist, Leila Whittaker, is one such person. Of course, being married to a famous artist, and being a published author herself, heightens the repercussions of her being betrayed and her betrayal. Private affairs can’t and don’t stay private in public lives. But Leila learns that betraying others can be an inevitable, although unwanted and hoped against, consequence of pursuing one’s self-focused desires. In Austen’s time, is there ever a moment when a woman can pursue her own desires? Can she even come to know her desires? How is Leila trapped differently, if indeed she is, than an Austen character?

Kylie: Leila is choosing to pursue her desires in this novel, after many years of tending to (her idea of) the emotional needs of others. Choosing to pursue desire, and so taking some responsibility for the fallout in other people’s lives, though this is uneven, and more limited in some cases than others. She has, over her long marriage, tried to understand and accommodate the driving force of Ken’s libido (in the broadest meaning of the term) and now she is referring to, reflecting on, and responding to her own. I think that this reaching out for new experiences, new people, is something to do, too, with her stage in life; her children are grown and growing away, her husband is dead, her long-term friendships are newly destabilised.

And Leila claims her knowledge, her authority, her sexuality. She speaks from her maturity and her experience, just as she acts from her desire. I heard once on a Jungian podcast the suggestion that a woman reaches a stage where she can claim ‘I know what I know I know’. I think there is great power in this statement.

Is Leila trapped? This is a very interesting question, Constance. She’s wealthy, she is white in a settler colonial country, and she has cultural capital. Even though she is caught in the relational patterns and the pain of her past sometimes, I’m not sure she’s trapped anywhere. She’s certainly making a late bid for freedom, and her own selfhood.

I really hope that readers can try to understand Leila’s impulses and choices rather than merely judge them.

Burning Hearth: Before starting this next question, I feel I must let readers know that I’m stepping outside of the Austen framework in which you placed Diving, Falling in your blog post and thinking about this in terms of 21^st Century people with means and access, as the characters in Diving, Falling have. Because while I believe self-reflection, at the level I describe below, is available to us all, I believe it is much harder to afford the time and space to reflect to this depth without the luxury of access and means.

It is always interesting to me, to witness the attitudes of others towards men who pursue their desires at the expense of, and with no regard to, other’s needs and emotions, against the attitudes towards women who do the same. How often we hear of women who have been betrayed and, in the case of Leila, publicly humiliated, who are left to clean up the lives of the men who betrayed them. We don’t often hear of the story of men who have had to do this. In part, perhaps, because its fewer; although, I have a dear male friend who is going through this right now. The role reversal is quite astonishing.

But I wonder, what does it mean to be the one, male or female, to escape accountability for the life you’ve lived through death, leaving the people who have been made the fool to clean up your life? However, like Leila who knew of her husband’s affairs, these betrayals are often no secret to the survivor. Once we have knowledge (that first affair that becomes the second, the third…), we are choosing to either act on that knowledge or not. That then becomes the question of our personal accountability and how willing or unwilling we are to take it. What is the sacrifice and what are we saving when we choose to ignore a known offense against us; choosing then, to betray ourselves by staying in relationship with our offender, whether that’s a friend or a spouse or a parent? How does a life change, if we allow that staying under these conditions is indeed a choice?

Kylie: I don’t really think of Leila quite so starkly in these terms. I’m not sure her life with Ken can be seen entirely as a self-betrayal. It’s messier than that; these are murky waters. Leila, after all, had a rich creative life and career (funded, as you say, by her access to funds and time and education), and she had authentic and fulfilling, if complicated, friendships and relationships. And she was a very involved and engaged and loving mother to her sons (again, made possible by her class position and Ken’s wealth) and she gained a deep satisfaction from that. She made a trade-off, for sure, and she exposed both her sons, in different ways, to their father’s damaging and dangerous behaviour, as well as weathering serial humiliations. Leila cobbled together a life for herself and her family, with compromises, and mistakes, and making way too many allowances for Ken because of nebulous ideas about his ‘genius’, but it was a life, and her life.

Burning Hearth: I enjoyed reading the scene where Leila (a novelist) attends her friend Denise’s book launch. I worked for a large independent bookstore in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in my twenties. For most of my tenure there, I set up the book events. I enjoyed meeting the authors; they came in an array of personalities, as did the people who attended their events. Always, I put myself in the author’s shoes, dreaming of my future book events. I would love to have you riff on what it means to be in that place where the book (or becoming an author) is only a future vision that you then move towards and through and then arrive at its arrival.  

Kylie: Constance, the amazing thing about that is that my actual book launch was at the same bookshop as Denise’s fictional one! It’s not explicitly named in the novel as Readings in Carlton, but anyone who knows Melbourne would recognize it. It was a lovely occasion. I felt that my book was being sent out into the world with such love and joy. My friend, the brilliant Australian author, Yumna Kassab, came from Sydney to launch it, and hearing her talk about Diving, Falling was beautiful.

I think that it’s really important to mark these occasions, because it’s sometimes difficult to celebrate or even claim our achievements, for fear of bragging or tempting fate, or something, but the publication of a novel is a big thing! It means that characters and places and scenarios that a writer has made up in her own head are going off to live and dwell in another person’s consciousness and (hopefully) spark emotional and intellectual responses. What a wild idea! And a privilege, for the writer, too.

My path to that evening in Carlton in September began some years earlier. Unlike many writers, who seem to have been writing since childhood, I started writing fiction only in (late, ha!) middle age, so for me it has been part of the arc of the second part of my life, the time that Jung would say is for the journey inward. I know on some deep level that I could not have written this novel when I was younger. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading the work of young writers, and there are many, many accomplished authors in the first flush of their youth, but this novel, for me, required a long perspective and a looking back from a whole span of experience.

Burning Hearth: I love titles. I so enjoy that moment when the title reveals itself in the story. I’m generally sad if it is within the first few pages. So, I loved the buildup and anticipation of discovering your title as I did on page 244. (Very satisfactory as the book is 247 pages.)

“My daytime concerns about rising sea-levels giving way to larger, nocturnal fears, that collected, swirling in my words like an eddying. Dreams of drowning. Diving. Falling.”

This is exquisite writing!

How and why did this title become the title?

Kylie: The title is a reference to Carl Jung’s description of James Joyce and his troubled daughter, Lucia, as two people going to the bottom of the river, one falling and the other diving. The notion of two people in the water, one with greater intent, autonomy, agency was a guiding image for me. And, in the context of the novel, and as it developed during its writing, which are the two? Leila and Ken (as I first thought), or another combination? Sebastian and Leila? Otis and Sebastian? Ken and Otis?

I certainly made you wait for a title reference didn’t I? But I think, because of this, these two words are carrying significant symbolic weight in that passage. I put a full stop between them, and I like the way that this perhaps feels like something dropping. I read this passage at my launch, and at my Salon conversation for the amazing Melbourne bookshop, Paperback Books (which is also in Diving, Falling) because it seems to me to be a key moment.

It is also testament to the importance of the ocean as a waterscape and as an idea in the novel. Leila is drawn to the coastline, to the particular coastline of the northern beaches of Sydney. She sees the ocean as a place of myth and creativity and especially female creativity. It is a physical entity – and one that has become a site of climate change and its effects – and a profoundly symbolic one too.

Burning Hearth: Who are you on the other side of your book’s publication, now that it is diving and falling into the hands of readers? What is on your horizon now?

Kylie: I’m very much enjoying talking about Diving, Falling in this post-publication phase. I think I will always be writing new things too. I may have started late, Constance, but I feel that I have many novels in me! I’ll keep writing and being amazed and grateful that I can live a creative life.

Kylie Mirmohamadi is a writer and academic from Melbourne/ Naarm whose research spans domestic Australian landscapes, online fan fiction, and 19th-century English literature. She has a PhD in History and is currently an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in English and Creative Writing at La Trobe University.

She was the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship in 2022 and her unpublished manuscripts have been highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award (2020).

Diving, Falling is her first novel.

Instagram: @kyliemirmohamadi; Website: kyliemirmohamadi.com

I hope you’ve enjoyed my interview with Kylie. If you haven’t read Diving, Falling yet, you can click here to order it now.

Up next at The Burning Hearth is author, Andrew Porter.

Until next time, I hope a bit of joy finds its way into all your days!

Constance