Alice Pung is the author of the wonderful Laurinda, a book I just finished reviewing. It’s a story that will stay with you because you’re going to think that you knew someone just like Lucy — or perhaps you were Lucy. Perhaps you were the someone that didn’t stand up to bullies, or the one that yelled them down and found yourself ostracized. You’ll see a lot of familiar characters in Laurinda, which I think is one of the strengths of the book — read on to find out how her own school years influenced Alice when it came to Laurinda and Lucy.
If you could have dinner with a literary character or author, who would it be and why?
I would have dinner with a deceased US author named Robert Cormier, who wrote some of the most memorable books I had read when I was fifteen (The Chocolate War, Fade, The Rag an Bone Shop). Robert Cormier grew up, and remained mostly in a place called French Hill, Massachusetts, working as a local journalist. Most of his works are set in his hometown, but his stories were very deeply psychological and explored morality and conscience. He also seemed like a very quiet, wise and gentle man who’d be a good conversationalist.
Looking back on your work, how has your writing evolved?
The older I’ve become the less insular my work is. It is still very character-focused, but being in my thirties has made my voice less focused on myself and more on other people. I think this is a good thing.
After all your success, what do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of being an author that you had?
That we are fabulously loaded! J Maybe if you were a bestseller in the USA, but Australia’s market is quite small so even our most loved writers – Melina Marchetta, John Marsden, Sonya Hartnett, Christos Tsoilkis – have had, or continue to have full time jobs.
What sparked the idea for Laurinda?
High school is the only time in your life where a large part of your identity is actually shaped by other people. As an adult you can choose your friends, and your time is finite, so of course, you try to only spent time with people who like and affirm you. As a teenager, though, you are forced to fit yourself in amongst 200-1,000 other people, who are all with you every day. So I’ve always been interested in how teenagers adapt to this.
How did your own experiences shape the book?
Growing up, I went to five different high schools, and I have always been fascinated by the way institutions shape individuals. In each new high school I felt like I was a slightly different person – not because anything about me had immediately changed – but because people’s perceptions of me had.
Did anything change for you in regards to the characters or thinking about your past school days from the time you started to when you finished the book?
Writing Laurinda, I had the wisdom of hindsight. At high school you are looking at the world through a microscope, only able to focus on one thing at a time; but as an adult, you look at high school through a telescope – the telescope of distance and time. So even though all the feelings of awkwardness and anxiety of being fifteen were easily remembered, I could also begin to see things from the perspective of those girls who were very much like the characters on which I based the Cabinet. I could understand how much pressure there was on them to be perfect: not only smart, but attractive, sporty, musical and feisty.
One of the things I enjoyed most about Lucy was the gradual change in her voice as the book progressed: she is always funny and very witty, but in the beginning of the book, there’s a warmth to her humour, something that had me laughing out loud on the train (I’m a commuter reader!) at the beginning. Later on, her humour was sharp, brittle sometimes, and without warmth. I’ve always thought humour must be one of the hardest things to write as a reader – what is your experience of it as a writer?
I am glad you noticed the change in humour! Humour is so important to me not just as a writer but a human being – it’s an important part of my personality. It is important to my writing because stripped of humour, Lucy’s circumstances at home are quite bleak, and her prospects of assimilating in Laurinda are very slim. Also, she is an instrument of other people’s desires and expectations at the school. So her humour gives her a sense of self-agency, as well as an independent – if internal – voice.
Bullying is a thread that runs through the book, even including teachers, and Lucy is aware of it and stands up to it eventually. Do you think we need to change how we perceive bullying? How?
There is a line in the movie Mean Girls about how seeing a teacher out of the classroom is like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs. One unacknowledged reality that has continued through generations is the bullying of teachers by students, who have more power collectively than they think they do. Often students have no idea until they are a decade out of high school that they actually traumatized a vulnerable teacher. We have no idea that they might have had a death in the family, or were going through divorce, or were never really given a chance just because they happened to wear strange clothes on the first day.
Lucy, I think, is an accessible character for any kid, as much as her story is uniquely an immigrant’s tale – what was the most essential part of her you knew you had to keep true to while writing?
Lucy had to have a voice that was uniquely her own and yet true to a 15-year-old girl’s. What I didn’t want to do was to give her heightened awareness of her own ‘culture’, because this was not meant to be a didactic story about race. Most importantly, what makes her such an astute observer is her awareness of other people – I had to hone in on her powers of observation and insight by recalling my own teenage years.
What’s next for you?
I am finishing a series of historically set children’s books called the Our Australian Girl series, to be published next year! They are for a younger audience – 8-12 year olds.
For more on Alice Pung, check out her website!
