RE: Bookclub: The discussion of Emotional Geology (contains spoilers)
I can't begin to imagine it.
I suspect I've always been more Brahms than Wagner.
Keyboard Worrier  Posts: 903 Joined: Nov 2011 Thanked 22 times What I Read
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Yes, indeed. I can't begin to imagine it. I suspect I've always been more Brahms than Wagner.
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Posting Freak Posts: 620 Joined: May 2011 Thanked 1 times What I Read
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RE: Bookclub: The discussion of Emotional Geology (contains spoilers)I really liked the book and was looking forward to a discussion that would include Linda, but had some reservations, too. I made upwards of 30 highlights when I virtually never make any, which says something. (And of course I've left my Kindle at home!) I thought it was difficult to think "nothing happened" when there are so many life defining exchanges between the three main characters, not even counting the "dead" one. I liked the strength of Rose and Callum and the growing revelation of their vulnerabilities and the dialogue between them is remarkable. The switching between first and third person accounts of Rose and her inner experience of grief and memory of Gavin worked well for me. The picture of Rose's pain and despair that have led her to seek isolation seems so powerful that I was wondering where it came from. So thank you Linda for your honesty here in telling us how you drew on your experience for both of the characters. And I had also wondered why such a romantic (other sense) portrayal of Callum as a teacher? Did you set yourself high standards ? What worried me was whether EG might be (sorry, Linda!) Mills & Boon with kilts. So the darkness of the book completely blew that away for me. It did kind of turn into a happy ending with the redeeming power of love which made the older cynical bit of me squirm slightly. Would it really be happy ever after given all that had happened. Perhaps as Rose says about her own creations we all see things in art and they are equally "true". Maybe it's the genre thing you mentioned Linda: Romance/Love Story and the inner voice of the publisher. How about a sequel about Rose and Callum 20 years on, perhaps with Megan with a climbing fanatic daughter of her own, Linda? Call it Emotional Archaeology??!!! The other aspect for me was what else drove Rose towards Gavin other than lust? Why did that keep her so emotionally bound to him even after death when he gave her so little else. After all she had been around a bit and already had a daughter of her own. Yes he looked after her a bit but he wasn't there for much of the time. He shared none of her interests and connected so little with what was positive about Rose. Did he in fact feel stronger because of Rose being so weak? Until he found a younger version?! Even Rose embodied him as Fool's Gold. To answer that I thought we should know a bit more about Rose's earlier life and why she had struggled with life so much and what she expected from it. Perhaps some deeper strata of the emotional geology. That might "mine" a deeper question about what is mental illness? Is it experience, history and self-worth or is it biology and neurotransmitters or somehow both?? Tony Arab proverb: Only a fool lends his books and only a fool returns them.
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Fountain of Wisdom  Posts: 5,054 Joined: Aug 2010 Thanked 5 times What I Read
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RE: Bookclub: The discussion of Emotional Geology (contains spoilers) I wouldn't necessarily find someone who is polished, with his home spic and span, who never got drunk, attractive. I don't know many men who fit that bill, actually! 
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. ~Chinese Proverb
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Senior Member Posts: 200 Joined: Sep 2011 Thanked 0 times What I Read
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RE: Bookclub: The discussion of Emotional Geology (contains spoilers)This post was last modified: 14 Mar 2012 06:51 PM by Linda Gillard.
Wow, Tony, that is one hell of an analysis of my book...You've summarised in many ways why I feel EG is an immature novel (well, it was my first) and why it will never be one of my favourites, even though I'm fond of it. (Writing the thing just about saved my life & sanity, as well as allowing me to re-invent myself as an author at 47.)To pick up on some of your points... One of the reasons I broke down was, I was bullied by two head teachers in 2 different jobs. As well as dealing with violence in school, I lived in fear of random bullying attacks. After I cracked up, I sat at home, doped on meds, actually afraid to go out because I lived in the village where I'd taught and might bump into my persecutor. I knew I needed to get away to start over, but it took a couple of years. When I went, I felt I had to go 100s of miles. I went from Norfolk to the Isle of Skye! That's how far my poor wounded mind felt I needed to travel to get away from the man who'd bullied me into breakdown. (Readers often think I moved to a Scottish island, then wrote a book about it. It was the other way round. I wrote EG in a Norfolk village, then found the courage to go and live on Skye. Be careful what you wish for...!) So the idea of Rose being "on the run from her life" was very much autobiographical. North Uist was where I wanted to be. I knew it well from happy family holidays. I'll take gentle issue with you about the happy ending. I don't think I see it as rosily as you do. Rose and Megan are on speaking terms, but it's not exactly the end of a Lassie movie. Rose is shacked up with a recovering alcoholic and she's bipolar with a history of non-compliance with meds. How high do you rate their chances?... In the long term, I don't rate them at all, but I do believe in personal transformation, so I think there's a chance Rose & Calum will save each other. But I certainly didn't want to imply that everything is sorted. (Remember, the Epilogue is writtten from Rose's point of view, not the author's.) That's what that Epilogue was supposed to convey: the fragility and precariousness of their domestic set-up, like the tree that's clinging to the rockface. Trees like that do eventually blow down in gales, having clung on impossibly for years. It's just a matter of time. I wanted readers to be able to see whatever sort of ending they wanted. ("It means what you want it to mean," as Calum would say.) The optimists could see something nice & tidy; the pessimists could see that the couple might have a few good years only. The nature of the relationship between Gavin & Rose ("Was it love, Gavin? Or was it just need?" Ch 1) is something that I've explored in subsequent novels, particularly A LIFETIME BURNING and UNTYING THE KNOT. I think your analysis of Gavin's motives is spot on. Feeling a hero, needing to be needed, might have been a lot of the attraction, although I do think there was also a fascination with death and madness too. He was a climber, well acquainted with obsession and sudden death. As Rose says angrily in Ch 2, Gavin was turned on by the madness. (And I do think their sex life would have been epic!) But the fact that their relationship was a lot (mostly?) about sex n' death doesn't mean they didn't love each other. If you're interested in this aspect of the novel, check out UNTYING THE KNOT which, despite its romantic cover (meant to be heavily ironical, but I think I misjudged it) is another subversion of the romance genre. The couple in UTK are divorced but not over each other and one of the reasons is, they can't move on sexually. They can't live together any more for a variety of reasons (one of them being his post-traumatic stress disorder), but even 5 years later, they can't move on. If I were to revise EMO GEO I think I might put in more back story about Rose and Gavin. But one of the reasons I didn't was because it was necessary for the reader to accept Rose's view of Gavin-as-bastard. I wanted you to accept her version of reality, then see that it was only a version, not the whole story. (I'm very interested in the concept of an "unreliable narrator" and that's something I've explored in several other novels.) Rose can only begin to let go of Gavin - the idea of Gavin and her obsession - when she starts to see things as they really were and that's something Calum and Megan help her to do. See the big picture. Your question "What is mental illness? Is it experience, history and self-worth or is it biology and neurotransmitters or somehow both??" is a question well worth asking and sums up what I've explored in several other novels and will no doubt continue to explore in future novels. If EG seems a little naive, I can only say in its defence, it was a rookie's effort. I wrote it with no idea of publication. I thought it was just a private meditation on creativity and "madness", but my online writing group said I should try to find a publisher for it because the message about mental illness deserved a wider audience. In the end I decided I would try to publish because Depression Alliance published the results of a UK survey which said that 76% of the people interviewed didn't think mental illness was a real illness. Thanks very much, Tony, for sharing your response to the book. |
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Keyboard Worrier Posts: 903 Joined: Nov 2011 Thanked 22 times What I Read
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RE: Bookclub: The discussion of Emotional Geology (contains spoilers)Not so sure about the 'he would keep promises and not let you down' - he did cheat on his wife. Checklist on how to make myself more attractive to women: 1. write poetry: I can do that (I think); 2. live in a pigsty: easy; 3. drink too much: even easier; 4. care deeply about those around me: comes naturally; 5. grow incredibly long legs: ... aah, I knew there'd be a catch somewhere. Hang on though! Given the opportunity, I suspect that Rose would gladly swap Calum for the short-legged Gavin. Maybe there's hope yet. What fun these discussions are.
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Senior Member Posts: 200 Joined: Sep 2011 Thanked 0 times What I Read
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RE: Bookclub: The discussion of Emotional Geology (contains spoilers)(14 Mar 2012 06:03 PM)B J Burton Wrote: I only said that from the point of view of a mere male he wasn't attractive to me. From the reactions of Linda's female readers, including Susanne, he seems to be attractive to women. Indeed, Barry, it's already proving enormous fun. (Loved your line about Brahms btw!) To be fair to Calum (and yes, I'm biased in his favour - I'm his mother) the marriage was already rocky when he was unfaithful. She wanted kids, he didn't. He wanted to climb, she wanted him to give it up. He wanted to settle on his island home, she wanted to stay in Glasgow. Yes, he was unfaithful, which makes him a scumbag, but that marriage wasn't going anywhere. I could have levelled the playing field by having Alison (his wife) play away too, but I don't like tidy equations like that. I write for myself, even now when I have a considerable fanbase and what interests me is real, messy, flawed & complex people, not paragons, either male or female. But in the legs dept, it might be some consolation to you to know that 2 of my favourite hero-creations are short-arses. See A LIFETIME BURNING and HOUSE OF SILENCE |
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Posting Freak Posts: 620 Joined: May 2011 Thanked 1 times What I Read
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RE: Bookclub: The discussion of Emotional Geology (contains spoilers) Thank you Linda for your very thoughtful reply to me. I'm a bit worried that I'm keeping you from writng your next great book! I don't think you should see EG as either immature or a rookie work. It's pretty damn good for a first novel! But as someone else on this thread wrote - "you're the author"! But I was really interested in how you view it now and how you have changed your position to the "truth" of the story being told. I'm sure as you say it was Rose's idea of Gavin that obsessed her - so where do we get our ideas of people and how do we develop them or freeze them. Rose changed her view of Megan remarkably (despite all) when she could see that Megan could be her own person but still care enough to tell her about Gavin. I'm very relieved that you didn't think it was a happy ending but that through meeting Callum Rose had the chance to change but that there would still be challenges for her that could move her forward or back to isolation. I was very intrigued by the tree - it was my last highlight! It got me to check back to page 1 of the book about the rarity of trees on North Uist, never having got further north myself than Islay (the whisky of course ). So I felt that Rose did have a view of herself as a fragile existence rather than as Rose subsumed in Gavin. Mental health is funny - it's so common to have issues even temporarily but it's still difficult to talk about but maybe getting better. Associations with personal failure, feared reflections in the eye of the beholder or fear of not knowing what to do come to mind. Talking about it makes it easier for everybody. I'm professionally involved - you might have guessed even if you hadn't seen my comments on a previous KUF Bookclub book. But I have had my spell of relatively low level depression for a while after the end of a relationship quite a few years back. So have many people. At least I didn't have workplace bullies bringing me down to make me doubt myself. It's great that your writing group encouraged you to publish. How right they were. Tony Arab proverb: Only a fool lends his books and only a fool returns them.
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Senior Member Posts: 200 Joined: Sep 2011 Thanked 0 times What I Read
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RE: Bookclub: The discussion of Emotional Geology (contains spoilers)This post was last modified: 14 Mar 2012 10:20 PM by Linda Gillard.
(14 Mar 2012 07:11 PM)Notoriety Wrote: Mental health is funny - it's so common to have issues even temporarily but it's still difficult to talk about but maybe getting better. Associations with personal failure, feared reflections in the eye of the beholder or fear of not knowing what to do come to mind. Talking about it makes it easier for everybody. I'm professionally involved - you might have guessed even if you hadn't seen my comments on a previous KUF Bookclub book. But I have had my spell of relatively low level depression for a while after the end of a relationship quite a few years back. So have many people. At least I didn't have workplace bullies bringing me down to make me doubt myself. It's great that your writing group encouraged you to publish. How right they were. Thanks, Tony. If I'd ever had doubts about the usefulness of the book, they've been quashed many times. Only recently, someone contacted me on Facebook to say that her suicidal daughter had read EG and possibly identified bipolar as the cause of her own illness. Her parents followed this up and the diagnosis was confirmed. I've lost count of how many people have emailed me and said, "I didn't realise what was wrong with my mum/brother/friend was bipolar until I read your book." Most movingly for me, a woman approached me at an author event on Skye and, with tears in her eyes, said, "My husband was bipolar and he killed himself. Now when someone wants to know what it was like living with him, I can show them your book." It's been a humbling experience, also a responsibility I take very seriously. Once I'd got an agent and publisher, I had to decide whether I was going to be "out" about my own mental illness. I thought it might be a bad move from a professional point of view. The scope for being perceived as the loony author of an autobiographical one-hit wonder was considerable. But how could I write & talk about stigma whilst keeping quiet about my own illness? It was my contention that it should be no more of a big deal to tell people I'd had a breakdown than to say I had breast cancer. But if I wasn't part of that solution, it meant I was part of the problem. Bear in mind that I was publishing before Stephen Fry's famous documentary about being bipolar in which he interviewed celeb manic depressives like Richard Dreyfuss and Carrie Fisher. That milestone was still way off. There was a real job to be done in terms of educating people and stigma-busting and as a sufferer, I was committed to finding the upside of bipolar if there was one. That meant refusing the stigma. I wasn't inferior or mad, I was ill. (You can probably see how this also meshed with my bullying experience too. I was prepared to be a hero because I needed to be a hero.) So I decided I had to come clean - a decision I've never regretted. I've stood up in crowded halls, talked (and joked) about mental breakdown and bipolar. People come up afterwards, shake my hand and say they think I've been brave. I don't think it's brave, because I don't have anything to hide and I can't really tell the story of how I wrote EG unless I explain how I came to have time on my hands and a fervent interest in mental health issues. But it's a lot easier to be brave now I know people are going to greet my honesty with warmth & understanding. (And they always do.) But I didn't know it would be like that. To be honest, I worry far more now about being perceived as an author of Romance than I do about being regarded as mentally ill. I do have a mental illness. I don't write romance. |
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