Book Review - "Life in Half a Second" by Matthew Michalewicz

A lovely-sounding lady (via email interaction) called Jody recently sent me a review copy of this book, subtitled How to achieve success before it's too late, a timely gift out of the blue for a few different reasons.

The one that is of relevance to this blog revolved around the concerns expressed in the course of the Australian Society of Authors Congress which was held in Sydney last month. Like the music industry, the book industry is in a state of some uncertainty with regard to what the future holds in relation to authors' livelihoods. This is because of apparent diminishing p-book sales, variable e-book sales, and the looming take-up of the industry by large and powerful companies which are making what they see as good business decisions. They probably are good decisions in the shorter term, but what happens if the writers stop writing?

It won't happen, of course. Writers, being the peculiar people that we are, will continue to write, but the practicalities of earning enough to be able to eat, support our families, and pay the bills does tend to steal time away from our primary activity, which is likely to impact on the quality of what we are able to produce.

The long and short of it is that writers, like anyone else, need to be able to become somewhat entrepreneurial, if they are to survive. While many of us have spent the better part of our lives writing, honing that skill, not so many have invested time and passion into learning the skills of entrepreneurial success. This is where Author, Matthew Michalewicz's excellent book comes in.

I hesitate to call this a self-help book, because although it is eminently readable and practical, its scope is a little wider than the genre label might suggest. The author's personal philosophy shines through as he reveals his take on the all-important question of creating meaning in life, and the great satisfaction of not merely entertaining dreams, but actually realising them. It seems that we might even exceed our most dearly held goals, given the right attitude of mind, skills and work ethic.

This very readable book tracks through actions for achieving any goal that the reader might have, whatever that might be - whether it is to develop a successful business, write a book, write a very good book, become a body-builder, or start a successful charity to address a benevolent cause that is dear to your heart. While Michalewicz doesn't claim particular originality with regard to the ideas contained between the covers, he writes that he has used the approach in each of his business ventures.

The author has the credentials to write this book with some credibility, having achieved considerable success in a range of different endeavours. I don't suppose he was obliged to write this book to make his fortune, but in sharing his process, others might learn the techniques that have worked so well for him.

Michalewicz uses the metaphor of five doors one passes through, in order to achieve what it is that they wish to achieve, and at the end of each chapter details specific actions that guide the reader towards attainment of the goal. The book includes footnotes relating to the research supporting the writer's particular claims, and although these are interesting, they are possibly not essential to the text given the author's expertise in the area.

According to the information about the author at the end of the book, Matthew Michalewicz 'is an international expert in entrepreneurship, innovation, and success psychology'. He 'has a track record of starting businesses from scratch and selling them for tens of millions of dollars'. He has written a number of other books including Winning Credibility, Puzzle-Based Learning, and Adaptive Business Intelligence. At the time of the book being published he was lecturing at the University of Adelaide as a Visiting Fellow on the subject of technology commercialisation. A link to his website is included here.

Rememberence day, November 11

Book Review - The House of Fiction by Susan Swingler

The House of Fiction wasn't on my list, but I saw it at the Fremantle Arts Centre on the weekend, and after having seen the author interviewed on Australian Story about a week ago, couldn't resist buying it. As I said to the lady in the bookshop, I can't not buy a book when I go into a bookshop, and this one jumped out at me. She said she didn't mind at all.

This has pushed other books on my list further down, especially since I found myself strangely drawn into the story once I'd started reading. The writing style is unobtrusive and leaves the intrigue of the story itself to do the work. It does this in a self-contained way that suggests considerable restraint on the part of the author, quite a feat, given the content.

The House of Fiction is a memoir published last year by Fremantle Press, and concerns that part of Susan Swingler's life which involves the departure of her father when she was four years old, leaving her mother a single parent in England in1950. Her father was Leonard Jolley, head librarian of the University of Western Australia's library for many years, and husband to iconic and well-regarded Australian novelist, Elizabeth Jolley.

The book is an exploration of the mores of the time as much as anything else. The story ultimately reveals that Elizabeth (previously Monica) and Leonard were lovers while Leonard and Susan's mother Joyce were still together. The then Monica was a friend to both of them, nursed Leonard when he was in hospital with a flare-up of Rheumatoid Arthritis, and the two women (Leonard's wife and his secret lover) subsequently had Leonard's first daughters only five weeks apart. While this was hurtful and unorthodox behaviour, it was probably not a very uncommon story post World War II when the world had been torn apart, lost any innocence that it still might have had, and where the urge to procreate would have been strong.

The other aspect of the story was the secrecy that surrounded this, and continued to do so over many years - Joyce did not know that the woman Leonard had left her for was their friend Monica (Elizabeth Jolley) or that Monica's baby was fathered by Leonard, and Susan did not learn of this until she was 21. This was compounded by a further web of fabrications which left the people involved confused as to what could be believed, and angry at the deception.

This, while interesting, was not the most gripping part of the story for me. What impressed me was the exploration of the psychological aspects - how secrecy, half-truths, fictions disguised as reality, might shape the world of the developing child, causing a potential fracture in their understanding of reality and the ability to trust. In Susan's case there had been enough stability and love from her mother and maternal grandmother during these formative years to protect her from the potential damage of this behaviour. Even so, she alludes to these difficulties, and the hurt remained it seems, up to, and throughout, the writing of the book. This part of the story was courageously and thoroughly explored by the author.

The other thing that impressed me was the author's commitment to appraising the situation with as much honesty as she could - and the positioning of herself within the story, underlining the fact of its subjective nature, only added to this. To my mind, Elizabeth comes out of the story reasonably well in the circumstances - people are only human and sometimes they fall in love with people who already have other commitments, act on those emotions, and people get hurt. Good things come from that too - in this case, two more children. Elizabeth did, at least, try to provide some comfort for the child left behind across the ocean. There seemed to be some generosity in her actions as well as some arguably less generous impulses.

Not for the first time, this book made me reflect on the sacrificial nature of the confessional, or semi-confessional text - that the author exposes self for the sake of the story. I think this applies to the work of Elizabeth Jolley as it does to Susan Swingler. There is, in that, an impulse to explore a truth, the various ways in which humanity is expressed for better or worse.

An advertisement about finding love...

Difficult to segue into this topic from a blog about all things writerly I know, but I'll try.

Some friends have recently started up a local face-to-face dating service (and no, this is not a euphemism for something less lovely). They are hoping to direct people to the relevant website.

The idea is to enable people to meet up either for speed dating, or to facilitate them getting to know one another on a purely friendly basis (just friends). This might even lead to slow-dating (a bit like the slow-cooking movement).

The new service is called IYQ and is currently in the process of organising social events for people to get together in Perth. You can find their website here.

How does this relate to writing? Think Romance Novels perhaps. Or the link between reading a good book, and spending time getting to know one another. These introduction services aim to facilitate relationships in a deep and meaningful way, rather than by way of commodity, a form of alienation all too prevalent in contemporary societies.

Drawing a long bow? Ah well... As my mother is want to say, it's what we do.

National Kindness Day starts 16 days of kindness

November 6 is National Kindness Day in Australia, and starts the 16 days of kindness from 6-21 November.

Why be kind? Well the most obvious answer is that kindness creates a better world for us all to enjoy.

The Australian Kindness Movement makes for a convincing case. The following quote comes from their site. (Follow the link above to learn more and here for suggestions of how to contribute to the celebration of kindness.)

"Being kind is an enjoyable experience. It makes you feel good, and useful, and alive, and it validates you as a human being. When you are kind it triggers a number of beneficial physical and psychological responses. The most obvious response is the 'feel good' sensation,which has been officially titled the "helper's high".

The person who receives a kind act experiences the 'feel good' response, too. It's a nice experience when someone smiles at you, or thanks you, or compliments you, or helps you in some way. It creates a bonding, and in that moment there is a greater sense of worth about yourself and people in general. It is a feeling akin to falling in love, and in that moment you have fallen in love - with the whole of humanity."

 

The Broken Book by Susan Johnson

When I tracked Susan Johnson down at the Australian Society of Authors Congress in Sydney a few weeks ago with her book in my hot, acquisitive little hand, and forced her to sign it for me, with a wheedling smile and a dance of the cover of her book in her sight line, she was very gracious about the whole thing, wishing me well in my own work, in the inscription. She said she hoped I liked it and that it was a book that polarised - people seemed to either love it, or hate it.

I am firmly in the love camp, and I have been trying to put my finger on precisely why. I can't quite...

What I can do is note that this is a remarkable novel, and I can't understand why it didn't win some sort of literary prize (did it? Surely it has!?). I love the fragmented nature of a story that still makes perfect sense, and the style (to say it is confessional is to do it an injustice, only because that word has become associated in literature with a kind of cultural cringe about 'women's writing' - it is, at times, deeply intimate but never cloying). Johnson's expertise in carrying off an unorthodox structure is impressive, and through her own example, she infuses the work with an understanding that the best writing is not just something utilitarian, but art. Capital A Art, I think.

The latter is central to the story, inspired, rather than firmly based, on the life of Australian writer Charmian Clift aka (in Johnson's novel) Katherine Anne Elgin 1923 -1969. Clift collaborated on three novels with her husband, the writer George Johnston (who won the Miles Franklin for My Brother Jack) and had two novels entirely of her own making published in 1960 and 1964 - Walk to the Paradise Gardens and Honour's Mimic respectively. She was a well-known (and loved) columnist and a short story writer.

The Broken Book refers to the novel that Elgin (Clift?) is working on when she dies. In some ways the slippage between the real-life Clift (if such a person - any person - could be pinned down) and the fictional character Elgin, creates a space where (what I think ) the central questions of this novel are posed: What is art? How do the actual lived experience of the writer and the work inform one another? Where or what is the line where/when a written work crosses over into the territory of art? Is writing, or any artistic endeavour, a form of neuroticism? Is it worth it? Who gets hurt along the way? It seems that in this case, the answer is often the writer herself.

What I loved about this book was not just the subject matter, which I assume would be of interest to most writers, but the book itself. I mean, not only the insights Johnson displays in this sensitive and compassionately imagined story about the relationships between husband and wife of that era, parents and their children, and the desire for some sort of transcendence through knowledge or art, but the way in which the words Johnson has chosen catches fleeting human experiences and shows them for the beautiful, complex, often painful, but ultimately joyful gifts that they are.

I can't say any more about this book, except to recommend it to my fellow writers. The three last books I have discussed in this blog have encouraged me to keep going, not because I have a hope of equalling their outstanding artistic achievements, but because it is a beautiful thing to do. And sometimes, for one or two people, a good book implants a kernel of understanding that wasn't there before. And that is really something.

It's Elemental my dear...

I've just finished reading Amanda Curtin's epic novel Elemental. When the book was launched by Janet Holmes-a-Court earlier this year, she joked that she had considered giving a box of tissues to the first ten or twelve people that bought a copy. 'Buy it,' she said. 'Read it.' Now I know why. I bought it, but it took me a while to get around to reading it. I wanted to take it away with me so that I would be able to give it the attention it needed.  And deserved.

Even the tears were well-earned. This is Amanda Curtin's second novel, the second that I have read, and I felt with this one, as with the last, that I had just finished a satisfying, beautifully prepared and nutritious meal that has left me wanting for nothing but the hope that it won't be the last.

Elemental is largely told from the point of view of Meggie Tulloch who, as a young girl at the beginning of the twentieth Century, lives as far as you can go north-east of the Scottish mainland, 'closer to Norway than to London'. The story spans several generations of Meggie's family from Scotland to Fremantle, from 1904 to the present day. It is beautifully imagined, and as real as any work of fiction can be. It is about life, the cycle of the generations, patterns of life choices that seem to be almost inherited, and courage and stoicism in the face of adversity. It's a compelling story. It is also filmic in its scale; a work that would easily lend itself to a movie deal. I wonder if anyone will snap it up. Mmn... I hope so. I can already see it in my mind's eye. Great!