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You know those novels, the ones you reread every few years, that feel like having a cozy cup of tea with a very witty and fascinating old friend? Like I Capture the Castle or The Pursuit of Love? Jessica Stanley has written one of those books with Consider Yourself Kissed, which is already a hit in her native Australia and her current home, the U.K. It spans ten years in the life of Coralie, an Australian copywriter new to London, and Adam, the political reporter she falls in love with after rescuing his daughter from a dip in a duck pond. The relationship at the heart of this book survives challenges like births, deaths, Brexit and COVID. Coralie and Adam are immediately convincing and relatable thanks to the way they communicate, which is the way actual people in love do: sometimes via deep thoughts and good jokes, sometimes via texts about scheduling children’s weekend activities — sometimes both at the same time.
I am lucky that Jess is one of my good friends, though our relationship is weird in that we’ve communicated nearly every day for over a decade in spite of having only met twice IRL. She lives in London and we are on a longstanding WhatsApp group called “Novelist Moms” along with fellow writer-mother Meaghan O’Connell. The three of us met via the gentler, weirder internet of the early 2010s and kept in touch through, collectively, the births of seven children and the publication of four books. It’s hard to pick a favorite child of the seven, but I think we’d all agree that Consider Yourself Kissed is the best book Novelist Moms has produced so far. We talked a few weeks ago after Jess had just returned home from launching the book in Australia.
How did you write a book where two people convincingly fall in love, then stay in love without being sappy or creepy or cliché at all? When you’re trying to get love down on the page, what are you keeping in mind?
I think for me, the most important thing is the rhythms of speech. How you are listened to and how you listen to the other person, especially how you are funny together and how you’re speaking to each other on one level, communicating, but then what’s going on underneath all of that stuff. It was like just making music out of two people. It’s hard for me to write descriptions, really, but when two people are talking, I could go on forever. I just like that so much.
How did you train yourself to write dialogue so naturalistically?
My brother and I used to always imitate people, so we would imitate my parents and especially my dad. Half of it is the sound of your voice, making your voice sound like the person. But even more, it’s the exact words they use and the kind of introductory sounds that they make before they start speaking and that sort of thing.
But also, I suppose because my dad was in the Air Force and I went to so many different schools, and every time you move school, do you say “bathroom”? Do you say “toilets”? Do you say “felt tips”? Do you say “coloring pencils”? Do you say “colors”? Do you say “eraser”? Do you say “rubber”? Just to fit in, I had to be monitoring these tiny differences, and so I just can’t get rid of that now. I’m always noticing.
Did you know at the outset that this was what you were setting out to write?
I didn’t. I don’t even know if I’ve told you this story, but in 2020 I wrote to Jonathan Franzen — this really, really intense, and in retrospect, maybe hypomanic, email about how much I love The Corrections. I woke up one morning at 4 a.m. — that’s always a bad sign mental-health-wise — and was full of just thinking about The Corrections and the huge role that it played for me. I’m thinking about things like how one of the characters has bacterial breath, and I still always think about that.
And so I wrote to Jonathan Franzen and said how much I love the book. I don’t know how long it took, but he actually wrote back and — I think maybe because my praise had been so specific — he was really taken with it and was sort of reminiscing about how he first discovered bacterial breath and stuff like that. And then we corresponded for a bit, but then life took over. It was during COVID. But toward the end of the correspondence, he said, “And when A Great Hope” — my first book, which I was working on at the time — “comes out, get Picador to send me one.” And I was like, “Okay.” And I sent that on to my editor at the time, but I didn’t think that it would really happen.
But then they remembered and sent it. I don’t think I even necessarily knew that they had, but out of nowhere, I got an email from him saying all sorts of really nice things about A Great Hope. Really amazing, lovely things, which really helped me deal with the fact that hardly anyone had read it in Australia, and that it hadn’t sold anywhere else outside Australia, so not in the U.K., and certainly not in the U.S. But one of the things he said in the email was that he thought that I should learn to stay in scene. Start a scene and stay in it, instead of cutting away to a flashback, a memory, some backstory.
And at the beginning of writing Consider Yourself Kissed, I was like, “I just want to do a love story and I have to learn to stay in scene.” It was like an experiment: Can I start from the start and go all the way to the end? Not just start the start of the scene and go to the end of the scene but start the start of the story and go all the way as far as I possibly could. So in this case, ten years.
The couple in this book, Coralie and Adam, aimed to have an equal partnership, but somehow his career ends up taking precedence over hers. And that was the detail that the reviewer in The Guardian really focused on. She wrote, “I have long noticed that in a house with one spare room and a heterosexual couple who both work from home, the spare room is where he works with a door that shuts and perhaps even a designated desk. And she works somewhere else, always for good reasons, but always.”
Is that literally true in your house? I know at one point you had a work shed in the backyard.
I’ve moved house now and Jude works in half of the sitting room. And I work in a top-floor bedroom because I make all the kids sleep in the same room. And that’s only going to work …
Until your oldest child decides that she wants her own room.
Yeah, so I’m living on borrowed time.
Could you build another shed or that’s not really it?
To be real, I didn’t enjoy the experience of the shed because I’m always having to come in to get my tea, and then when you’ve had a tea, you have to come in to go to the bathroom. And once, when I was writing my first book in there, I left the door unlocked overnight and someone stole all the Christmas presents. And another time I left it unlocked and a fox came in and took a shit on my draft that I had printed out at the copy shop. It didn’t feel like a safe space. So I’m unwilling to try that again.
Workplaces aside, I think that specter of male precedence hovers over almost all the heterosexual partnerships that I know of. And in the book, Coralie wonders how the world can be made fair when two people who love each other can’t even manage it. Do you feel like you’re closer to being able to answer her question now?
This is my main theoretical preoccupation: How can humans, who are a mess, ever get anything done or ever make anything better? Maybe if I was pushed to answer, I would say it’s something about childhood that if everyone could just be loved when they were young, we’d all be happy and better. But every certainty I thought I had about politics and what is good and bad politically I’ve had to get rid of because things are just going so badly and I don’t know what to do about it.
Some people ask me how I managed to write this book in one year when my other book took me eight years, as you know. I truly think one of the main reasons is that in 2020 Jude took over the laundry and he does the laundry now. He always did the dishwasher and cleaned the kitchen. But that was fine because I cooked and shopped. But then he also took on the laundry, which is such a big job for a family of five. And that has made an enormous difference in my day-to-day life. So often when people ask me — especially women, and especially women with young children — “How on earth did you manage?,” that is what I tell them.
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So just to talk about your first novel for a minute, it’s a book with sections written from many different characters’ points of view. What did you learn by writing in that way? I saw a lot of drafts when you were working on it, including some fascinating parts that didn’t end up in the finished book, and it sort of felt to me like you could have gone on writing it forever. What did you learn from that process that informed the way that you decided to work on your second book?
It took eight years to do the first one, and you’re right, as soon as I had the six or eight main characters in the book, and I had their points of view, I could just go on and on and on forever. And it was almost compulsive to me. I could have written about 20 years of each person’s life. I wonder if that was defensive time-wasting because I wasn’t ready to have any writing in the public domain. So I was just going to go on and on forever spinning my wheels. And then when that book was published and it was well-reviewed and all my friends bought it and nothing too awful had happened to me as a result of writing a book that I thought, Okay, now I’ll try again.
I’d had a lot of unconscious fears about what would happen to me if I expressed myself in public. Then I got them out of the way. I had also been in therapy that whole time. One of my parents had died. I was really happy in my family life. I just felt more safe and strong and able to say, “Here is something that I have made. I hope you enjoy. And if you don’t, that’s fine.” There were things I learned on a craft level, but it was also personal growth that I had to go through to say, “I’m a legitimate person with a legitimate need to express myself. I have some skills in that area.”
So you sort of had to write a book in order to write a book.
Do you have any advice to writers who are just starting out and who, like you, don’t come from the MFA world and who don’t live in a place that has a literary scene? I mean, you do live in a place that has a literary scene now, but you didn’t when you lived in Melbourne.
I was always a reader, and the transition to being a writer was much more difficult. But it really helped to have friends who were writers to see that they’re normal people with struggles, that they weren’t born with a magic aura or magic powers. That they read a lot, thought a lot, and wrote a lot, had a lot of disappointments and rejection, but kept going and then put their work out there.
From the outside, it might look amazing and enviable, but from the inside, observing my friends who are writers, I can see that for every amazing piece of attention you do get a nasty email. The important thing is to take being a writer off a pedestal, but to take reading and working much more seriously than you could ever dream. Just to work like mad and to try and separate off from ego stuff.
But everyone who writes has felt unspecial and is in many ways unspecial. You don’t have to have anything special about you at all. It’s just a job. I always thought that to be seen writing was almost like being seen dancing in the nude or something, that it was embarrassing and masturbatory, and one of the most shameful things you can do. I suppose I just had to come to a middle point where it’s not magical, but neither is it shameful. It’s just something you do.
You have a long-running newsletter called READ.LOOK.THINK where you collect everything fascinating and worthwhile that you encounter online. How would you define your sensibility?
I like women writers. I like people who are always really thinking about themselves and being honest about their feelings. And I never share anything where it’s trend-based and especially not when the emotions are trend-based, the emotions or observations. We go through periods where everyone talks about the same thing and I never share something that everyone’s talking about in the same way. I started it in 2011 to get freelance work, because that was when I moved over to the U.K. One of my jobs was to do an online brand presence for a big advertising-agency group. And then I thought, Well, I’m not going to be able to take this blog with me. I should do one for myself.
Because I was sharing commerce and brand stuff in the work one, I just wanted to keep this one perfectly safe from all of that stuff. I had always been really interested in politics, the emotions of politics. So no facts about climate change, but facts about how people feel about climate change. And I like to share very unstyled interiors of interesting people. And I occasionally share things like, “These are the pens that my children use.” Or, “This is a tinted moisturizer that I use.” And without fail the thing that is dumbest to me is the most clicked every time. Always, if I share what storage box I got for the kids’ stationery, that will be what people click. And often I think about giving up the newsletter because I don’t think it’s good for me to be seeking things online anymore. Sometimes I have this perfectionist feeling, this kind of all or nothing feeling of wanting to be a books only person and not have anything come into my life from the internet anymore.
But I’ve just met so many people through the newsletter, and I think that nobody would’ve bought or read my Australian first book if I didn’t have the newsletter, not a single person. And when I went to Australia just now for my Australian tour, apart from friends and family, the people who came were people who read my newsletter. So I don’t think I could ever stop doing it because I feel like I’m not a majorly outgoing person in real life, the newsletter is sort of like my digital stand-in, and people get to know me through that, and then I get to know them after that. It’s like an interim knowing, and it would be really hard for me to give up that interim knowing.
I’ve never met a person who reads as much as you do. Not just novels and memoirs, but newspapers, magazines, blogs, newsletters, Instagram. You’ve read The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst 200 times and you used to maintain the @lollinghurst Twitter account, which quoted the particularly funny and perfect lines in the book. I know you revere your fellow Australian author Helen Garner. But if you could only pick three books to bring with you to … not a desert island because that’s too unpleasant of a situation. But let’s say a nice sort of mountain sanitarium. They have good meals and you get plenty of sleep, and you know you’re only going to be there for a month or so, but the only thing is you can only bring three books. Which three would you bring?
I actually do know the answer. The first would be Helen Garner’s Diaries. Technically that would count as three books in Australia because they were all published separately, but over here they were published as one big chunk, about 800 pages. They are of unlimited interest to me, and I always find something new every time I read them, and they’re very funny. And of course, The Line of Beauty, I would take as well, because it is my comfort book at this point. Two hundred times sounds like a lot, but it isn’t just opening the paperback and going all the way through it. It’s also that I have it on my Kindle app, on my phone. Often I try and wean myself off the internet, and so that’s when I turn to the Kindle app and just read that book, in those times when I’m on the bus or whatever.
And then the third book — this is now revealing a secret about myself — is Psychoanalytic Diagnosis by Nancy McWilliams. It’s like a mega-thick textbook. There’s something about the book where it feels like mainlining humanity. And Nancy McWilliams also is very funny, so her tone is just extremely welcoming to me.
Apparently the cello is the instrument most like a human voice. And to me, these books are the cello of books. The way they sound when I’m reading them is as if someone is talking to me.
