Get to know our author of our book of the month for April, Frances Whiting. Frances is one of Australia’s best-known and favourite columnists. For more than twenty years, her weekly Sunday Mail column has engaged readers in the highs and lows and the wonderful of the everyday.
She is also an award-winning journalist and senior feature writer for Q Weekend in the Courier-Mail. She has published two collections of her columns, Oh to Be a Marching Girl and That’s a Home Run, Tiger!, and two novels, Walking on Trampolines and The Best Kind of Beautiful.
1. To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
Born in Sydney, raised in Brisbane! Growing up in the suburb of Indooroopilly I had one of those free range childhoods spent riding our bikes down a hair raising local street known as Killer Hill, playing neighbourhood hide and seek, roaming the streets until dark and it was time to go home to a roast dinner! I went to Ironside State School, then Indooroopilly High, where I was blessed with great English teachers and school libraries where I would escape at lunchtime to sit beneath the shelves and dream the lunch hour away. After school, I became a primary school teacher and taught here in Australia and also London. I loved teaching, but returning home after several years away I wanted to try something new, so studied journalism as a ‘mature age’ student – I was 28! I’ve been a working journialist, feature writer and columnist for nearly 30 years, and still love the job because I love telling other peoples stories. I have one husband, two children, and one giant hairy dog. I sing in an all female band called The Mrs Robinson’s and I am the oldest person in my hip hop dance class.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
12 …. A writer
18 ….A writer
30… A writer
Deep in my heart, I wanted to write my whole life. As a kid I was always scribbling down short stories and very bad poetry in my diaries. The thing was, I didn’t actually know anyone who was a writer, and had no idea how a person became one. Doing journalism at uni was the first time I thought ‘oh this is something people do for a living’ and it opened the door to becoming a professional writer, first as a journo, then a columnist, then an author. The first time I got paid for writing anything was just after my 30th birthday… I remember I burst into tears!
3. 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?
Book – Madicken by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. Also the author of another childhood favourite, Pippy Longstocking, I read Madicken at about seven years old growing up in Queensland in the heat of summer and it transported me to snowy Sweden where Madicken and her little sister Lisabet lived. I went ice skating with them, drank hot chocolate, built snow men – all from the 40 degree heat of my bedroom! This was the book that made me fall head over heels in reading.
Music – Many years ago Split Enz had a song that was purely instrumental called Albert of India… I had a visceral reaction to it, and I still do every time I revisit it. The best way to describe it is it will make you sway, make you swoon and make you immediately want to go on some sort of adventure. It also brings tears to my eyes… everything you want a song to do!
Poetry – I really love poetry and should read more of it! I love the late, great Australan poet Bruce Dawe, when I was a teen it was all about E. E Cummings, I love the works of Australian poet Thuy On and lately I’ve been enjoying the gentleness of Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese. That first line “You do not have to be good” made me sit bolt upright!!
4. Please tell us about your novel (which is also our BOTM!), The Nocturnals.
First of all I am CHUFFED it is Booktopias, BOTM, thank you! The Nocturnals is a love letter to our younger selves, a mystery and a romance all rolled into one! In the summer of 1997 five students meet in the last year of school – Hunter the Golden Boy, Beatrix, the Poet, Cosmo, the Genius, Nina the Good Girl, and Harriet the Ghost. At least, that’s how others have pigeon-holed them. Somehow these wildly different individuals find each other and form a bond forged from laughter, dancing, tequila, sorrow, trauma, and late night confidences shared. We meet them as teens, then again 5 years later when Hunter re-assembles them, and we discover all the secrets that broke The Nocturnals apart. I really liked all of them, and I hope readers do too. So many people have asked me who my favourite Nocturnal is, but I can’t choose! I will say, however, I am a Beatrix caught inside a Nina!
5. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
Hope! And a feeling of belonging. We humans are such complex creatures and we are all so messy, even when we appear to have everything together. I try to write characters who make readers feel that it’s okay to be unsure, quirky and to feel things so deeply it hurts! Our world can feel very disconnected, social media can make us feel very alone, I want my books to make people feel like they are sitting down and having a robust, funny, raw and delightful conversation with someone they feel very comfortable with – a stranger, or a friend. I’m about makng readers laugh out loud, maybe sob a little bit and be swept away in the emotional turbulance of what I hope is a cracking story!
6. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
So many, but as a late bloomer writer myself, I have always loved the fact that the British writer Mary Wesley had her first (adult) novel, jumping the queue published at 70! She followed that up with one of my favourite books of all time The Chamomile Lawn, and eight more after that. She, like me, didn’t know how to begin as a writer, but she, like me, couldn’t stop once she got going. She wrote beautifully, loved deeply, and lived a big, unashamed life.
7. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
I get asked by aspiring writers this question, and I used to say ‘just write’, or ‘just begin’ which is true, but as I have discovered, not actually very helpful. Because what I have also found is that most people who just can’t get started as a writer have some sort of block or belief that stopping them from doing it. And usually, that’s self-belief, that old ‘who am I to be a writer?’ whisper in their ear. So now I say – and I think/hope it’s more helpful is this – Writing is the one thing you can’t get wrong. You can’t get marked on it. There is no incorrect or correct way of doing it. It is the one area of life where there is no right way, there is only your way. So enjoy the utter delight and freedom of that.
Hope that helps!
The Nocturnals
In the summer of 1997, five high school students meet. Nina, the Good Girl. Beatrice, The Poetess. Harriet, the Ghost. Cosmo, the Professor. And Hunter, the Golden Boy. In their last year of school, they become inseparable, five sides of the same star, until a fault line cracks between them, scattering them to all corners of the globe.
Now, fifteen years later, Hunter has called them with his conch shell lips to return to the place where they lived and laughed and cried together, before secrets were whispered, and promises were broken. No-one knows why he has assembled them, but there is no question they will go. Because to outsiders, they might be, in turns, a little bit weird, a little bit glamorous, and a little bit dangerous. But to each other, they are, and always will be, The Nocturnals.
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