‘The story is very deeply rooted in Adelaide’: author Rose Hartley’s audiobook awakening
After releasing her first novel at the start of the pandemic, Adelaide author and bookseller Rose Hartley has gone straight to audiobook for her follow-up, the locally set legal drama DisGraced.
This is your second publication following Maggie’s Going Nowhere in 2020; when did you start writing, and how was the experience of publishing a debut novel at the start of the pandemic?
I’ve been writing fiction since childhood. I started and abandoned a couple of novel manuscripts in my teens and early 20s, but Maggie’s Going Nowhere was a project I stuck with because I kept having fun with it – the main character is naughty and irresponsible and every time I opened up the manuscript the writing felt like play as well as work.
Maggie’s Going Nowhere was published by Penguin Random House early in 2020 just before the pandemic started. I did a few events and interviews in Adelaide and Melbourne in February but once the pandemic hit in March the rest of the tour and scheduled radio interviews were cancelled. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were debut authors in 2020 who saw their years of hard work sink without a trace because the news cycle (and people’s thoughts) were entirely consumed by the pandemic, but I was lucky enough that Maggie’s Going Nowhere had a light-hearted feel to it that appealed to people while they were stuck in their homes; it had awkward sex and slapstick humour, not to mention the main character literally went nowhere, parked in her caravan on a suburban street. So sales were pretty good, although I have no idea what might have happened if it had been published, say, six months earlier.
Hartley’s debut novel Maggie’s Going Nowhere (Penguin Australia)
Your new book DisGraced is set in Adelaide’s legal profession; tell us about the story and what inspired it.
DisGraced is the story of Grace Cockburn, a hotshot young barrister who fell out of the favour with the Adelaide legal fraternity after her messy divorce from a popular lawyer and claws her way back by landing the case of a lifetime defending a psychopathic kidnapper. The only problem is, once she lands the case she learns her on-off lover Lachlan is working for the prosecution.
I happen to know a lot of lawyers, but I wasn’t inspired to write about them until I observed a manslaughter trial in 2021. I was surprised by the banality and awkwardness of court procedures, perfectly illustrated during a hilarious technological malfunction when the prosecutor was unable to turn on an iPad to show the jury evidence. That kind of moment was juxtaposed with the sombre silence of the courtroom before the judge entered and traditions like bowing to the coat of arms before you sit down. It wasn’t a high-profile case so the only other people observing the trial were family members involved, including a very sweet old man who asked me if I was a journalist and introduced himself as the father of the deceased. There’s an extraordinary amount of human pain often associated with ‘needing a lawyer’, and I started thinking about how we’re relying on other humans with normal human frailties to look out for us when we come up against the intimidating and often opaque legal system, which led me to write the very flawed, very human character of Grace.
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Are there any uniquely Adelaide touchstones that readers can look out for?
Setting is very important to me, so the story is very deeply rooted in Adelaide. Grace spends most of her weekdays working at cafes on Gouger Street. There’s a bit of a naughty incident in her car in the Central Market carpark, a road rage episode on King William Street, and Grace’s most disgruntled client chases her down Prospect Road waving a hammer.
DisGraced (Audible Australia)
Your first novel received a conventional publication, but Disgraced has been released direct-to-audiobook via Audible. What inspired that choice, and how did it shape the writing process?
Audible Australia commission a lot of local authors to create stories exclusively for their listeners. They approached me to see if I’d be interested in writing for them, and it felt like a good fit for me. My writing style is naturally dialogue-driven and cinematic, so I hardly had to make any alterations to write for audio versus a novel manuscript that would end up in print. I just had to keep in mind that the listener needed to be able to differentiate between all the characters in a scene and not to confuse them by having too many people doing too many things at once. The rest was just a matter of little things, like taking out descriptions of a person’s tone of voice, for instance, because the actor would do that work for me.
The audiobook is narrated by Shari Sebbens, did you have any input into the recording or direction?
The recording is all done separately and was arranged by Audible after I submitted the written manuscript, but I was so happy they chose Shari Sebbens as the voice actor to record my work. Not only does she have a beautiful, expressive voice, but she’s an incredibly talented comedic actor. When I listened to DisGraced for the first time she had me in hysterics, laughing out loud at my own work – which I’d read through in print probably 50 or 60 times, so you’d think I’d be unable to be surprised by it! Her performance in the courtroom scenes was reminiscent of David Wenham’s iconic turn in the film Gettin’ Square.
Having experienced both kinds of publication, what do you think the direct-to-audio model means for authors and publishing?
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I think audio is a nice thing to have in the mix. Compared to the much slower process of print – it’s often 12-18 months from getting an offer from a publisher to seeing the book in hard copy – it’s refreshing to be able to write a manuscript, turn it in and have it recorded and released just a couple of months later. On the other hand, nothing quite compares to the weight of your own book resting in your hands, so I’d never want to give that up.
Just like ebooks, audiobooks are another way to make reading accessible, and audiobooks in particular are great for when you’re multitasking, when you want to listen while you’re driving, walking or running, as well as for people who have visual impairments.
You also work in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop. How does being surrounded by books help (or hinder) your own writing?
I’ve been a bookseller for nearly 18 months in the beautiful Matilda Bookshop and I love the work. Talking to readers, pushing my favourite books on customers, and getting to read advance copies of new fiction are all perks of bookselling. It’s quite a physical and social job and provides good variation from my writing days, which of course involve sitting alone at a desk. I think my writing has benefited from the enforced socialising even more than the access to new fiction, actually. At my old job as a copywriter I worked remotely from home and would sometimes go the whole day without speaking to anyone. While I do love being alone it’s easy to get trapped in your head, and of course without human interaction you tend to run dry of material to write about.
Bookselling feels more meaningful than many other jobs I’ve had. People care about literature and they feel good in bookshops. They come back in and want to talk about what they’ve read and whether they think you’re a total idiot for recommending that horrible book or if you got it exactly right and that beautiful novel made them laugh and cry at the same time. The only downside of the job is that I’m tempted to always read new fiction at the expense of older releases and classics.
Are you still planning to publish physical books in the future?
Definitely. I’m working on a manuscript now which I hope will eventually end up in print.
What are the biggest challenges, and advantages, of living and writing fiction in Adelaide?
I grew up in Adelaide but spent around 12 years living in Melbourne as an adult. Now that I’m back in Adelaide, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. There are a few drawbacks for writers here: living outside the main hubs of literature of Melbourne and Sydney you miss out on some of the in-person creative opportunities, the kind of happy accidents that occur when you knock minds with someone else in your creative field at a party or festival. On the other hand, I think Adelaide writers develop their own voice precisely because they are outside those main hubs, and publishers are always looking for fresh voices. Given that the submission process for a novel manuscript is pretty global, living in Adelaide theoretically shouldn’t hold anyone back from getting a book deal.
This is going to sound bad, but I love that you don’t have to be ambitious to have a good life in Adelaide. You can just tootle around, have an ordinary job, pay your rent or mortgage, and wander about in the sunshine with your friends every weekend. The ladders available for climbing are shorter, if you know what I mean, so people are less competitive and just generally happier. I used to worry that the ease of living in Adelaide would make me creatively complacent, but now I’m just grateful to be here. Besides, every kind of life is interesting to explore in fiction, in its own way.
DisGraced by Rose Hartley is out now via Audible Australia