In the Spotlight: Madeleine Ryan
Madeleine Ryan is an Australian writer, director, author and an outspoken advocate for neurodiversity. Her articles and essays have appeared in SBS, The Daily Telegraph, The Sydney Morning Herald, Vice, Bustle, Lenny Letter, and the New York Times.
A Room Called Earth is her debut novel - and wow! - what a debut it is. I was super happy to receive an advance copy to read and review, and it has swiftly made its way into my top ten reads of 2020 already. Here’s a little taste of what the book involves:
As a full moon rises over Melbourne, Australia, a young autistic woman gets ready for a party. What appears to be the start of an ordinary night out, though, is, through the prism of her mind, extraordinary. As the events of the night unfold, she moves from person to person, weaving a web around the magical, the mundane, and the tragic. She's charming and witty, with a touch of irreverence; people can't help but find her magnetic. However, each encounter she has, whether with her ex-boyfriend or a woman who wants to compliment her outfit, reveals the vast discrepancies between what she is thinking, and feeling, and what she is able to say. And there's so much she'd like to say. When she meets a man in line for the bathroom, and the possibility of intimacy and genuine connection occurs, it's nothing short of a miracle. It isn't until she invites him home, though, and into her remarkable world that we come to appreciate the humanity beneath the labels we cling to, to grasp, through her singular perspective, the visceral joy of what it means to be alive.
I had the opportunity to ask Madaleine some questions following reading her book (and I had a few!).
A Room Called Earth is such a rich story, covering so much within a really short time frame and such seemingly inconsequential exchanges. I was completely engrossed from the first page. How did you first come up with the idea for the book?
My adventure with the book began when the protagonist started talking to me. Thankfully, I’d made a lot of changes in my life, which meant I had space to listen to her.
I’d moved to the country, deleted social media, started eating plant-based, stopped taking the hormonal birth control pill (which had a huge impact on my mental, spiritual and emotional health), and I’d committed to writing in a more serious way. Then I was able to hear her, and to see what she saw, and to follow her lead.
It wasn’t always easy, though. I still had to get out of her way pretty often.
The narrator seems to dance around with social convention, carefully selecting the parts she enjoys and doesn’t. She reads as so free and empowered, and incredibly connected to understanding her own wants and desires. I’m curious how much of the narrator's internal dialogue and social commentary was creative and how much is a reflection of your own observations and thoughts about the world?
The narrator uses a lot of my thoughts, experiences, and feelings to create her world and perspective. Definitely. The book is a dance between us in lots of ways. However, I do see the relationship that we have as being a lot like the mother and child relationship: she’s of me, but not me. She’s from me, but not me.
There are many ways in which we differ, even if we’re closely related.
Although the blurb tells us the narrator is an autistic woman, this isn’t really broached within the text itself. Was it important for you to have this in the blurb and do you think knowing this is vital for the reading experience?
I don’t think it’s vital for the reading experience, but it’s nice.
The autism label could use some love, and I’d like to think that A Room Called Earth can help with that a bit. Autistic people are amazing and magical, and it’s taking the world a bit of time to catch up with that. However, in many ways, I think categories and labels can be restricting, which is why I avoid them in the book.
I could’ve used many ‘isms’ in addition to autism, like feminism, veganism, mysticism, sexism, environmentalism, colonialism, and multiculturalism. They’re all themes in the novel. Yet the humanity and nuance beneath these kinds of labels can easily get lost as we proceed to make assumptions and generalisations about what they represent. So I try to be very selective about where, when, and how, labels are used.
I’ve already seen the book being compared to Gail Honeyman’s ‘Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine’, but I know Honeyman has said that Eleanor is not an autistic character and very much a product of nurture. There’s a little bit of the influence of nurture in your own work, with the narrator sharing how her parents engaged with her and their own world. I was wondering how you feel about the comparison and the role of nurture on your own character's identity?
Nurture - or primarily a lack of nurture - plays a huge role in her identity. For various reasons, she’s been forced to parent herself, which is a process I think everyone inevitably needs to go through, and it’s healthy.
Learning to truly care for ourselves is a rite of passage, and I’m very interested in how we manage it. Largely because we’re rarely ever questioned about what influences us, or why. We’re rarely ever encouraged to stop, think, take time, and reflect. Yet, somehow, we’re meant to trust that the conclusions we come to about ourselves, and others, and the world around us, are consciously made. Often they’re not.
I think that our minds, and the shaping of our realities, and our choices, are a lot more complex, vast, and mysterious than we’d care to admit.
Many readers of WODT are budding writers themselves. Do you have any advice you can share around your writing process, or about writing in general?
I have no advice for budding writers and I hope they’ll thank me for that one day ;)
And finally, I need to know, is Porkchop the cat completely fictional or does he really exist?
Haha! He exists in your mind, and in my mind. Some would argue that where Porkchop lives is more real than life. He’s my cat, he’s your cat. He’s every cat and no cat.
Long may he reign.
Madeleine Ryan is an Australian writer, director and author. Her articles and essays have appeared in SBS, The Daily Telegraph, The Sydney Morning Herald, Vice, Bustle, Lenny Letter, and the New York Times, and she is currently working on the screen adaptation of A Room Called Earth. Madeleine lives in rural Victoria.
About the Interviewer
Elaine is a freelance writer and editor from London, currently residing in Tasmania. She is passionately interested in the ways in which we can learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves, and believes in the power of words to connect. She's also obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her on Instagram @cestelaine
