{"id":138080,"date":"2021-02-25T12:24:25","date_gmt":"2021-02-25T01:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/?p=138080"},"modified":"2021-02-25T12:26:52","modified_gmt":"2021-02-25T01:26:52","slug":"the-silent-listener-lyn-yeowart-on-emotional-truth-in-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2021\/02\/25\/the-silent-listener-lyn-yeowart-on-emotional-truth-in-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"The Silent Listener | Lyn Yeowart on emotional truth in fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Lyn<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lyn Yeowart is a professional writer and editor with more than 25 years of experience in writing and editing everything from captions for artworks to speeches for executives. Her debut novel, The Silent Listener<\/a><\/strong>, is loosely based on events from her childhood growing up in rural Victoria. She is now happily ensconced in Melbourne, where there is very little mud, but lots of books.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, Lyn Yeowart is on the blog to share her thoughts on why fiction is the perfect medium for her to talk about the very personal issues of family trauma and violence. Read on …<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Lyn<\/a>

Lyn Yeowart (Photo by LJM Photography).<\/p><\/div>\n

How fiction creates the conditions to reveal the emotional truth of family trauma<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The word \u2018family\u2019 should never sit in front of the noun \u2018trauma\u2019, yet \u2018family trauma\u2019 rolls off our tongues as easily as \u2018domestic violence\u2019. And \u2018sexual assault\u2019. As if these pairings of words are normal. As if they aren\u2019t oxymorons the media report on and courts pass judgement on practically every single day. As if they aren\u2019t utterly unacceptable concepts, let alone realities that far too many people live with and sometimes die from.<\/p>\n\n\n

I have long wanted to write The Silent Listener<\/em>, partly to expand and contribute to the discussion about the long-term ramifications of family trauma. So why not write an essay or a memoir, or collect and document quantitative and qualitative data proving the lifelong legacy of sustained family trauma?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J.P. Pomare (author of best-selling novels Call Me Evie<\/em> and In The Clearing<\/em>) generously wrote of The Silent Listener<\/em> that it \u2018\u2026 is a novel about inherited violence and redemption packaged as a cracking psychological thriller.\u2019 And that\u2019s what novelists can do. They can \u2018package\u2019 difficult subject matter into a story we\u2019re willing to read, because fiction, after all, is \u2018made up\u2019, isn\u2019t it? Nothing to worry about here folks\u2026 read the last page then just move on back to your warm comfy life.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in crafting a narrative, novelists often weave together reality and fiction, and the thread they use (at least sometimes) is emotional truth. By pulling us into the \u2018story\u2019, novelists deliver a vicarious experience of events and the emotions felt by the characters \u2018living\u2019 those events. Ideally, after you\u2019ve read a compelling work of fiction, something stays with you, and if that novel depicts family trauma, maybe what stays with you is a little bit of that trauma. Maybe a little bit of the fear and anguish seeps in and changes your perception of the world. And maybe some good (in whatever form it takes) might come from that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

But there\u2019s another reason I chose fiction: if you think that reading a report about the abuse or murder of children by someone who should be caring for them is horrific, imagine how traumatic it is for the reporter who researches and writes the report. Fiction allows authors to step back from reality and write in a safe space. The Silent Listener<\/em>, for example, began as a cathartic exercise to process the legacy of my father\u2019s dominance and violence, but the more I wrote, the more I discovered that weaving in fiction did more than create a better narrative\u2014it meant I could go to places I couldn\u2019t have if I\u2019d been strictly adhering to \u2018the facts\u2019, because I could camouflage the truths of my childhood between events that are \u2018exaggerated\u2019 and\u2014significantly\u2014events that are downplayed. But to humbly paraphrase what Margaret Atwood said of The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>, there\u2019s nothing in The Silent Listener<\/em> that hasn\u2019t happened to someone, somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, some writers who read early extracts of the novel said that it contained events that were \u201cnot believable\u201d and went \u201ctoo far\u201d. So, because I was now writing fiction for readers, not memoir for me, I pressed Delete, even though those deleted lines were authentic descriptions of real events from my childhood, and I retained the fiction that rang true for those early readers. Because I wanted people to believe in everything in this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I once read that Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder wrote a non-fiction book about philosophy, which he presented to a publisher who promptly told him no one would read it, but added If you want to write a book people will read, go away and write a novel<\/em>. So he went away and wrote a novel: the bestselling Sophie\u2019s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy<\/em>. I wanted to write something about family trauma that people would read and take seriously, so I too went away and wrote a novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—The Silent Listener<\/a><\/em> by Lyn Yeowart (Penguin Books Australia) is out now.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Fiction allows authors to step back from reality and write in a safe space.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":138086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[6677],"tags":[12544,9480,9445,2303,12547,4212,12548],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/LynYeowart-Social.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138080"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138080"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138106,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138080\/revisions\/138106"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}