KYLIE MIRMOHAMADI is an Australian writer and academic whose work and research spans domestic Australian landscapes, online fan fiction, and 19th-century English literature.
On the release of her debut novel, Diving, Falling, Good Reading chatted to Kylie about her inspirations and her favourite books.
ABOUT THE BOOK
It’s never too late to rewrite your own story.
For years, Leila Whittaker has been the mediator in her family. She smoothes ruffled feathers between her sons; endures the volatile moods of their father, the acclaimed Australian artist Ken Black; and even swallows the bitter pill of Ken’s endless affairs. All this, for the quiet hum of creative freedom her marriage provides. Or so she tells herself.
When Ken dies, leaving his artist’s estate to their two sons, and the pointed amount of sixty-nine thousand dollars to his muse, Anita, Leila decides she’s had enough. It’s time to seek some peace (and pleasure) of her own …
Diving, Falling is a journey through grief, betrayal, and the intoxicating rediscovery of joy, examining the calculations and sacrifices women make to keep the peace, escape their pasts, and find the agency to pursue their own passions.
MEET KYLIE MIRMOHAMADI
Can you tell us a bit about your book The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard? What you think drives this ongoing fascination with this author?
The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen is about the world(s) of online fan fiction that have grown around Jane Austen’s novels. I think the fascination – which never seems to end, only change and morph – is to do with Austen’s focus on her characters and their relationships. You could argue that nothing terribly much happens in an Austen novel in the broadest terms of plot, but when we finish each novel we feel that we know those people intimately. Her novels bear repeated re-reading too. At different life stages they can have very different meanings.
As an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in English and Creative Writing at La Trobe University you’ve widely about authors and reading. What do you most like about your research and writing about literary studies?
My literary research has mainly been in reception studies, and I love reflecting upon and writing about how novels exist in the world. What people do with them and sometimes to them. How they have ever-changing lives of their own out there.
Diving, Falling is your debut novel. What idea sparked the story in the book?
One of the earliest sparkings was a visual image of Leila’s house by the river – the sleek modernist lines against a blue sky, with eucalypts. I was so thrilled when I first saw the beautiful cover design by Sandy Cull, reflecting just this mood.
After writing non-fiction for many years, what were the challenges you faced when writing a full novel?
After scholarly writing, some elements of writing fiction were almost an unlearning. I had to stop making arguments and offering evidence, and instead rely on my unconscious and my imagination and my inner life. This is much more exposing and raw, and required an openness to myself and a cultivation of the possibilities of language to carry emotion as well as ideas.
Did you use any elements from your research in your novel?
Not specifically, but I do think that my initial training as an historian gave me the skill of writing from research, which I put to work in the art elements of Diving, Falling. And my literary scholarship, most recently about the cultural obsessions that surround Austen and the Brontës, I suppose touched upon some elements of Leila’s character; her propensity to filter the world through literature, for example.
Are there any writers who inspired you to write stories like they did?
My longest, most enduring, most distilled, literary inspiration is Virginia Woolf. And I love the cool post-war style of writers such as Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Jane Howard.
What are you reading now?
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. It is tender and sad and angry, and very much of its time.
Best books you’ve read recently?
I am currently obsessed with the Chilean writer, Alejandro Zambra, and I’ve made my way through most of what has been published in translation (by the great Megan McDowell). He hits one of my favourite tones; deeply serious and very funny at the same time.
I also have loved Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and Carmen Boullosa’s (trans. Samantha Schnee) The Book of Eve.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kylie Mirmohamadi is a writer and academic whose work and research spans domestic Australian landscapes, online fan fiction, and 19th-century English literature. She has a PhD in History and is currently an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in English and Creative Writing at La Trobe University.
Kylie lives with her family in Melbourne where she often finds ideas for writing when walking among the tree-lined creeks of her inner suburb with her poodle.
She has published widely in the academic sector, most recently on the long afterlives of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters.
She was the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship in 2022 and her unpublished manuscripts have been highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award (2020).
Diving, Falling is her first novel.
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