Ten Terrifying Questions with Tori Haschka!

Tori Haschka is a Sydney based author, food writer and mum of two. Her articles have featured in Grazia, The Times, The Guardian, Mamamia and the Sydney Morning Herald, and her blog eatori.com was ranked by Saveur as one of the five best food and travel blogs in the world. Grace Under Pressure is her first novel.

Today, Tori Haschka is on the blog to take on our Ten Terrifying Questions! Read on …

Tori Haschka (Photo by Snippets Photography).

1. To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?

I was born in Sydney and grew up in a suburb called Castlecrag, between the bush and the harbour. The all girl’s high school I went to had novelist Ceridwen Dovey in the year above me – and Nicole Kidman also went there. It was a pretty magical place where we were told we could be anything – just nobody told us you can’t do it all at the same time. After school I did a little bit of a law degree and then realised that my brain works better in circles and waves, rather than in straight logical lines.

2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?

At twelve I wanted to be cool. At eighteen I wanted to be indomitable. At thirty, I wanted to be happy. 

Twelve: I had been bullied pretty badly in primary school by a group of boys. All I wanted at twelve was to be on the in. Eighteen; I thought if I worked hard, did a law degree I would find my place and could take on the world. It took getting pretty sick with glandular fever, then chronic fatigue in my twenties to realise that there were other choices out there and that sometimes a smaller life is just as worthy. I started writing my first novel not long after. It lives in a drawer and is absolutely terrible, but was very therapeutic. At thirty I was living in London with my husband, ticking off a ‘baby bucket list’; all the things we wanted to be before we became three (now four). I was jut about to publish my first book of travel stories and recipes. It was a pretty golden time. 

3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now? 

That hard work is the answer to everything. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s just the express-lane to a breakdown. Life is also meant to be fun. 

4. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say, had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer? 

There is a lot of food in my fiction. Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir, Blood, Bones and Butter, is one of the most staggering examples of how meals and memory mesh together in memoir. I remember reading some chapters with my jaw on the table. 

I’m going to nominate a dish of food; Magnus Nilsson had the world’s most remote restaurant, Faviken, in far north Sweden for a time. My husband and I had dinner there. I know now that I fell pregnant the next day – it was our last supper as the two of us. There was a dish to start the meal called ‘Fifteen minute old cheese’; a tiny bowl of house-made soft cheese, with one angelically simple bud of lavender, set in the centre. It was so pure and simple; like an edible haiku. Without the lavender it would have been beautiful. With it, sublime. Anytime I want to overcomplicate things, I remember that little bud of lavender. One small speck can make a world of difference in your life. 

I listened to Janis Ian’s ‘Between the Lines’ on repeat while I was writing Grace Under Pressure, to the point where I don’t really hear it, it’s just part of the furniture, like a lap rug. But if I stop and listen to the words properly, ‘Tea and Sympathy’ can still unspool me. I think sometimes we feel like the vulnerabilities of us are things we should hide away, but it’s a good reminder that the marrow of it all is what makes things interesting. 

5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?

Because there was an idea that wouldn’t leave me. I heard it in doctor’s waiting rooms and at the park and from so many harried, burnt out women who didn’t think that this was what motherhood would taste like. ‘What if we lived in a village of women?’ was what they said. It kept tapping me on the shoulder. And I needed the space and scope of a novel to get it all down. 

6. Please tell us about your latest novel!

Grace Harkness looks like she has it all – two beautiful children, four cookbooks under her belt and an idyllic beachside home #blessed. But add another baby on the way (oops), a spouse that is nowhere to be seen and a relentless list of things she ‘should’ be doing, and Grace is starting to unravel.

When the madness of modern-day motherhood finally pushes her to the brink, Grace and her friends decide to ditch the men in their lives, move in together and create a ‘mummune’ – sharing the load of chores, school pick-ups/drop-offs and endless Life Admin. The new set-up seems like a dream, but is life in this utopian village all it’s cracked up to be?

Grace is about the messiness of motherhood, anxiety, the rot in the core of ‘wellness’ and what it is like to parent when the village that you have is largely virtual. But mostly it’s about the saving grace of female friendship. 

7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?

I hope a lot of women feel seen by it. I hope it gives them some laughs, makes them want to send thank you emojis and pity bolognese to women in their life and realise that sometimes the graft of motherhood is absolutely worthy of medals of valour. 

8. Who do you most admire in the realm of writing and why? 

Ceridwen Dovey, Meg Mason, Liane Moriarty, Jessica Dettman, Sally Hepworth, Rachel McIntosh, Holly Wainwright, Nora Ephron, Gabrielle Hamilton, Ruth Reichl. I’m an absolute sucker for smart women writing the murky realities of our lives in stories that keep me up well past when I should be asleep.

9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?

I would like to finish working on the world expansion of ‘Grace’ — I spent most of 2020 toiling on it in the early hours of the morning and, like a braise that’s cooked by someone in a bad mood, the taste of it is currently too sour. For many of us, 2020 was a hard year to be creative. I’d like to fix that, and then I’ve maybe got a kernel of an idea for another. And hey, if anyone would like to turn any of them in to a film or tv series, I’d be absolutely up for that too. 

10. What advice do you give aspiring writers?

When an idea or description comes to you, write it down, then transfer it onto a sticky note and put it above your desk. One day you’ll be stuck for an idea, you’ll look up and thank your previous self for doing it. Also, take a bucket of procrastination crudites up to your desk with you. That way when you’re stuck instead of biting your nails, you’ll at least get some of your five a day in. 

Thank you for playing!

—Grace Under Pressure by Tori Haschka (Simon & Schuster Australia) is out now.

Grace Under Pressure

by Tori Haschka

Grace Harkness looks like she has it all – two beautiful children, four cookbooks under her belt and an idyllic beachside home #blessed. But add another baby on the way (oops), a spouse that is nowhere to be seen and a relentless list of things she ‘should’ be doing, and Grace is starting to unravel.

When the madness of modern-day motherhood finally pushes her to the brink, Grace and her friends decide to ditch the men in their lives, move in together and create a ‘mummune’ – sharing the load of chores, school pick-ups/drop-offs...

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