Backlisted - Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

Author Rose Ruane (This Is Yesterday, Birding) picks Gaining Ground AKA Abra (1978) by Canadian feminist writer Joan Barfoot. One day, seemingly on a whim, a woman walks out of her home and her marriage, forsaking her family for a life of near-solitude and self-sufficiency. Many years later, her daughter, now grown-up, comes to find her and to ask a simple question: why? But there are no easy answers... In a long and distinguished literary career, Barfoot has won the Marian Engel Award and been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, for Critical Injuries (2002). Her debut novel, however, seems to have vanished almost as thoroughly as its female protagonist; as you will hear from our discussion, we think the book richly deserves to be rediscovered.   *For £100 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at http://seriousreaders.com/backlisted *Backlisted will be live at Foyles in London on 17th July with guests Caroline Crampton and Andrew Male - on Agatha Christie's Endless Night - tickets are available now via the Foyles website * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone. Hi everybody. People often ask me how I read so much and it's a fair question and one of the answers is, well, I have a very good reading light which makes a serious difference. Aha, I think I know what you're doing. You use, if I'm not mistaken Andy, a serious reader's lamp. The ones with daylight wavelength technology which are supposed to replicate the daylight spectrum as closely as possible. I do. I've been using one for about five years, and I absolutely love it. It's amazing how much clearer the type stands out on the page, and it means I can whip through my 50 pages a day without any risk of straining either my eyes or my brain.

So I just got one, and actually it does. It's true. It makes me want to sit and read from an actual book and not turn the TV on, which is a double win. It's also ridiculously easy to unpack. Beautifully hand-built in Great Britain. So, Backlisted friends and listeners, we're going to make you an offer we hope you can't refuse. Yeah, if you order any Sirius Readers HD lamp, you'll get £100 off plus free UK delivery.

You just go to SiriusReaders.com forward slash backlisted and enter the code back b-a-c-k if you're unhappy with it there's a 30-day risk-free trial you can return it after 30 days for free but trust me you won't want to because they're great so for that 100 pounds off your serious reader lamp go to seriousreaders.com forward slash backlisted and enter the code back b-a-c-k it actually makes reading enjoyable again now there's a slogan we can stand by let's make reading enjoyable again hello and welcome to backlisted the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you find us in the farmlands of Ontario in the late 1970s.

We're on a back road approaching a small isolated stone cabin. Next to the cabin, in the middle of a vegetable plot, a thin woman with close-cropped hair and sun-brown skin is weeding with a hoe, carefully dislodging and collecting the small green weeds from around a row of corn plants. She's entirely absorbed in her work and apparently oblivious to the younger woman who stands watching her from the cabin's porch.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we are joined by a new guest to Backlisted, Rose Ruane. Welcome, Rose. Hello, Rose. Thank you for having me. Rose Ruane is a writer and artist.

Her novels This Is Yesterday and Birding, just out and much recommended by Andy Miller and John Mitchinson from Backlisted, are published by Corsair Books, and she is currently completing a PhD working with the Adamson Collection. Paintings, drawings and sculptures created in the art therapy studio at Nethern Hospital by individuals who were compelled to live there during the mid to late 20th century. Rose Ruane, Birding, a wonderful novel set at the British seaside, features on the front cover a remarkable photograph of an ice cream cone.

Did you select that photograph yourself or was it presented to you by your publisher and what did you think when you saw it it was presented to me by my publisher after um we had found the cover image that had to be the cover image i think times before and all of which for various reasons we weren't allowed to use or they were too expensive or um you know and we were sort of panting and desperate and desolate when uh charlotte streamer who designed the cover found that amazing photograph and all of a sudden we were delighted that those other people said no and it felt like there couldn't be another cover and like it was one of those things where aesthetically for me as a human being like a sort of nostalgic attraction repulsion disgusting delicious ice cream of course was perfect and it really spoke

to the feeling quality and the setting of the book and it just felt like it never could have been otherwise which was great I was delighted with it uh John and I would like to offer you a publishing pro tip uh which is don't change it for the paperback don't don't you're there you're there it's a fact it is a fantastic cover isn't it john stunning stunning stunning yeah i know and it's funny i a few years ago did a book by another writer that had a ice cream on the cover and i'm really cross that we this so this this this completely captures the spirit of english seaside kind of retro that we were trying to get. So well done to Corsair and well done to you.

Because I'd always imagined it with like a sort of Martin Parr photograph. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those kind of seagulls eating chips or like if there was going to be an ice cream, it always had to be melting or dropped. And then when they found this, I couldn't believe it. So, yeah, gratitude to Charlotte Strumer, the designer. You can judge a book by the cover in this case, because it is both delicious and very not disgusting, Rose, that would be unfair, as you just said, but highly consumable. Your first

novel, This Is Yesterday, is named after a song by the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers, very well known in the UK, perhaps less well known elsewhere in the world, certainly not in the States. And the Manics came up in the late 80s, early 90s. They're sort of an antidote to Britpop in all sorts of ways in the 90s. The reason why I mention it, Rose, is, you know, we mention bands on this podcast and on lock listed often we like the books we also like music and we like films and we like art we like all

sorts of things but i feel as though the manic street preachers never got quite got credit for something specific which is they have got to be the most cultured and literary, while also amazing punk rock group, to have existed in the UK since the 1980s. And I wondered, I know the Mannix were a big influence on you as an artist and a writer, weren't they? Yeah, they absolutely were. I think everything about my sort of aesthetic sensibilities that Oliver Postgate and Peter Furman aren't responsible for, the rest of it is all the manics, probably. I mean, I learned how to do my makeup from them and I've stuck with that since the 90s. But actually, genuinely, I sort of used both their lyrics and all the cultural references in it and every interview

that I ever read with them as a sort of laundry list a shopping list for the culture that I started to consume some of the most formative books and poetry and films and art that I came to at that you, completely instrumental point at your life where you're a teenager and you're just this great, big sort of ravenous satellite dish of like seeking and desperate to sort of pull in all these messages from the universe. And especially, you know, I had such a stereotypical,

and especially, you know, I had such a stereotypical, stultifying sort of middle class upbringing and quite a sort of, to my mind, petty bourgeois sort of suburb that, you know, I think both the films of Derek German on Late Night Channel 4 and the music of The Mannix and everything I read, you know, I would read their interviews and I would go straight to a bookshop and go and read, you know, things that seem such. Story of the Eye.

Yeah, absolutely. Georges Bataille, yeah. When did you first see them? Where and when did you first see them? I think they were the second band that I ever saw. So I saw them in like a little old kind of faded ballroom that's also since been knocked down and turned into a sort of block of flats that looks like a Novotel called The Plaza.

It was when they would have been touring their first album. And not, you know, it wasn't just this sort of cathartic, galvanising experience of seeing them. It was also seeing the people in the audience and realising there were other bookish weirdos out there because there certainly weren't any others at my school. And also a man leant forward and bit me on the shoulder during You Love Us. any others at my school and also a man leant forward and bit me on the shoulder during

you love us and then looked very shocked at what he'd he'd sort of had this pure exuberance i think it was that like when you see art that sort of makes you want to do something so destructive and depraved in your pure excitement being too big to fit into your body so everything about it was a formative experience including the tatami shot afterwards i i went to um the first time i saw them was the middle of the afternoon at the reading festival in 1992, which was the Nirvana headlining year. And me and my seen-it-all friend, we were both seen-it-all, you know, seen-it-all 24-year-olds, we went to watch them on the main stage. I wasn't a big fan.

They came on. They were throwing all the shapes. I thought they were ridiculous. Nicky Wire threw his bass into the pit and clonked a security guard on the head, and they had to run away. And the following day, I went into Reading Town Centre, and I bought a copy of Generation Terrorists, and I've been a fan ever since then.

Do you know what I mean? By embracing the absurdity of what they were doing, they kind of pushed through into this zone of amazing self-expression and creativity. And all these things that we've talked about, listeners, will bear fruit later in this episode. John, take us forward. The book that we're here to discuss is Gaining Ground, the first novel by the Canadian writer Joan Barfoot, originally published in Canada in 1978 by McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited under the title Abra.

It was first released in the UK by the women's press in 1980. It tells the story of Abra Phillips, a woman who leaves her comfortable middle-class life, including her husband and her two children, young children, to live as a hermit in a cottage with no clocks or mirrors, feeding herself with food she's grown in her own garden and generally avoiding contact with other humans. The unexpected arrival of Abra's grown-up daughter Kate nine years later

precipitates an existential crisis. As Abra confronts the limits of her own selfishness and the depths of her need for freedom, the book explores a range of issues in a strange and powerful way, unpicking the very idea of the self, of motherhood, and of personal responsibility. Abra was well-reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic and won Joan Barfoot the Canada First Novel Award in 1978. It was republished in the UK, as John says, two years later as Gaining Ground. And although she may not be as well known as some of the contemporaries to which her work is frequently compared, including Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence, Carol Shields and Marian Engle.

Barfoot has a strong claim to be considered one of the most interesting and original feminist novelists that first came to prominence in the 1970s, something we will be discussing during this episode. As the English writer Nell Dunn commented, Nell up the junction, Dunn, gaining ground, quote, is one of those rare books which puts you in touch with yourself as deftly and deeply as the bell jar by sylvia plath but before we join in her cabin here is a message from our sponsors this is an advertisement from better help everyone

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Drink responsibly. Copyright 2024. Bacardi, its trade dress and the bat device are trademarks of Bacardi and Company Limited. Rum 40% alcohol by volume. And just like that, we're back. Why didn't they call it Abra Gold, Rose? That's what I want to know. Let me start with the question that we ask all our guests. Where were you when you first became aware either of Joan Barfoot's work or of this novel, Gaining Ground?

At home, sort of at a very similar time in my stuffy, frustrated teenage existence in the suburbs as probably around the same time that I was discovering the Mannix um and my my parents always had a lot of books in the house but there was never sort of any distinction made between what kind of books there was never any sense that they were sort of guiding my reading or uh you know they just assumed it was a good thing that I read. So it was everything from sort of Bodice Rippers, Barbara Cartland, the classic Flowers in the Attic, Lace, all of those like too much, too young books that everybody sort of read in the 90s to, I suppose,

like the sort of contemporary, like good novels of the time, me and MacKierens. And I remember my mum's friend, Anne, who I think she considered like a little bit of like a smelly, disgusting hippie, must have given her, you know, because I can't think of anybody else my mum knew that would have been the cause of a book from the women's press coming into our exceedingly middle,

well, slightly sort of snooty, lower middle class household. So I assume that it came from Anne. And I found it and I was just so intrigued by it. And it gripped me from the beginning at a point in my life where I was starting to realize not all books were equal, I probably sort of granted them all this authority of like, oh, they're a wonderful, edifying, wholesome, enriching thing that some very clever person has done. And it was probably at that point where, like in the most basic way, you're starting to realize some of those things are shite, you know, and some of them are sort of great works of literature and you're starting to parse why that is how that is both in your own taste and how they might sit in the world and and it was a really seismic experience reading gaining ground so um before we come to gaining ground i'd just like to ask john i is this the first time we've done a novel on Backlisted published by the Women's Press?

Oh, I don't think it is. For those of a certain age, the Women's Press was a significant cultural force. Do you remember them from when we were out there on the field? Yeah, definitely. Wasn't it famously Alice Walker was the field? Yeah, definitely. Wasn't it famously Alice Walker was the women's press, right? If I'm remembering rightly. That's what my, burnt into my cortex stock list knowledge is telling me. They were kind of an edgier, more street version of Virago, weren't they?

They had less classical refined covers. Yes, they had less classics, didn't they? They were more in the vanguard as they saw it they had that that the iron uh as a as a kind of a a logo remember this is yeah this i remember women's press and verso but it's all part of that kind of great countercultural countercultural alternative rose where was the nearest countercultural bookshop to you when you were growing up? Oh, yeah, so it was probably in the west end of Glasgow and I grew up in the suburbs.

And I think there was that period of time where, like, the sort of city's really tantalisingly there and you know there's bookshops and record shops and gigs and you're not yet allowed to go. And then when you sort of first arrive I remember just going in this frenzy of record buying and book buying. Gaining Ground is published in 78 and you presumably therefore discover it about 10 years after it's after it's written right? More than that I was one when it was published so I was probably like 13 or 14, 15 at the most when I read it.

And then I went around looking for those stripy spines of the books and that little iron that I always imagined as sort of a Cluedo-style murder weapon, actually. I don't know. I think I always sort of imagined that was like an iron for caving husbands' heads in for some reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a cross between Monopoly and Cluedo, isn't it?

It's the iron. Rose, what was it about this novel about a middle-class, for want of a better word, housewife, which is what we would have called her in that era, that appealed to 14, 15 year old you? I mean, I think that was a period in my life where again, I was reading whatever was in the house. It tended to be books that probably had predominantly male protagonists. I think it was probably one of my first experiences of reading a book that had a female protagonist who was difficult and irascible and perhaps not particularly sane and who was singular in pursuit of what she wanted. in my life I already understood that I wasn't going to be a sort of marriage and motherhood

type of person you know in that way where I was probably already in the period of my life where I was thinking I don't particularly want to live a life like my parents I'm not going to have their politics I'm not going to have their values and so it was just incredibly exhilarating bodily experience and also I think it spoke to me you know I've sort of had mental health issues my entire life and I think it was the first book I read you know I would have read the bell jar by then and it you know sort of wrote itself into my marrow but I don't know less so than this because it's so incredibly, I guess, gothic in a way, whereas this is sort of quieter. It's sort of, I don't know, feels a bit like Mary Oliver

before I had any idea who Mary Oliver was. But I think there was something in it about the way that it evokes the difference between the thought position and the felt position, that kind of disassociation and the kind of flux of that and the fact that sort of Abra alternately is sort of overpowered by these engulfing onslaughts of feeling and then this sort of detached numbness. And it all felt like it spoke to me on a profound level. I think it was my first experience of reading something that really described, I think, that sort of combination of excess of feeling and absence of feeling in a way where I guess where those books make you feel seen and heard as much as you see and hear them. You feel like you've had an encounter with it as opposed to just a reading experience, I think. I think and also if that kind of thing hits you when you're 14 or 15 when you are still to quote the phrase wet cement it really stays with you right it really has a just exactly this is why

we talked about the manics everybody you see it's the thing that that gets you at the right moment I think I'm going to ask you John in a minute how what you made of reading this book for the I assume the first time. But in terms of the comparison to The Bell Jar, it strikes me that The Bell Jar is a book that treats mental illness, perhaps perfectly reasonably, as disease. But Gaining Ground is a book about mental illness as unease. It has a really, in my experience, accurate depiction of the sense of things being just slightly beyond you, slightly slipping away, just one step away. She talks about the fog. I'm going to read a bit later. The fog, the idea that you can step into the fog, but the fog recedes in front of you.

That seems very accurate to me. John, tell me what you thought of the novel. That seems very accurate to me. John, tell me what you thought of the novel. I completely fell for this novel in a way that I wasn't expecting, just because I came to Joan of Barfoot with absolutely no preconceptions. I mean, you've touched on some of the reasons. It kind of is remarkable, I think, and not much like anything else that I've read. It has that kind of intensity that, I mean, this is her first novel, right? So she's quite young when she's writing.

So she writes in her late 20s, early 30s. Yeah, I mean, let's say it's impeccably written. I mean, there's not a slack sentence in this book, I don't think. And it mines something which is such a... You realise it's such an archetype, but I've not... It's the most original presentation of the fantasy of escape that I've ever read, I think. It's Walden.

Yeah. By Thoreau. It's Walden. Totally. It's totally subverted, isn't it? It is. And it's, it is everybody who's ever thought, I just want to walk out one morning.

And, and what I love about it is it, she, although I have heard, I've, I've read some pissy criticism online is how did she get where, how did she get electricity that far out? But we'll,

you know, let's leave that beside. I think she thinks through it's thought through really you know it's like andy it's a page turner in which nothing happens my goodness a page turner in which nothing happens we've never encountered one of those um i mean yes i agree completely what's not to love i mean i'm i'm still kind of reeling from the ending, I have to say. I mean, it's… No spoilers. No, I'm certainly not going to spoil it because, you know, people deserve to get to the ending.

So on all kinds of levels, I'm very, very excited. There is something that really reminds me, and I know a couple of critics have mentioned this, of Margaret Lawrence's book, Stone Angel, that we read, where Hagar Shipley is a kind of difficult, difficult, not terribly likeable, non-relatable character. And I was interested to see that Joan Barfoot said that Margaret Lawrence was definitely an influence on her. Well, we will hold that thought because we will hear from Joan Barfoot herself

later in the show. I loved it. I'm delighted, Rose, to be... That's the thing I love most about this podcast. So, Rose, in a sec, I'm going to ask you to read a short passage from the novel so people can hear what it was that grabbed you so forcefully. But before we do that, I think I'll read the blurb to people off the back of the book.

This is from the Women's Press edition from 1980. I will ask you both to say whether you feel this is a good blurb or a not-so-good one. Before I do that, Rose, who wrote the blurb on birding? Did you or did someone else? It was a collaborative endeavour between my editor, Sarah Castleton, and me. It was you.

It was you it was you i meddled i tinkered i seeded certain things and i insisted on others and in that way we ended up with a blurb that i didn't know it's very like all the sort of selling and pithiness is not my natural idea. I'm a meanderer and I'm a long-form human. Blurbs are plateletrically none of my strengths. That's why AI is so good at writing them, it turns out. That's why we proved that on this, haven't we? AI is the one good thing about AI.

It writes the blurbs better than we do. Anyway, here is a pre-AI blurb for G gaining ground by joan barfoot tell me what you think gaining ground is the story of abra a woman who leaves her husband children and suburban security to live as a hermit she buys an isolated cabin and a piece of land and settles to a life without mirrors clocks or human contact the first winter is extremely hard, but her senses sharpen and her muscles harden, and as her socialised masks drop away, her rhythms gradually match the seasonal changes dictated by nature, giving her an inner peace and strength which had increasingly eluded her in the world of city and family life. Nine years after Abrah chooses solitude and

self-sufficiency her peace is broken by her daughter now a young woman full of questions how and why had her mother quotes run out on her what do you think um it's okay i mean six out of ten isn't it doesn't really give you any reason to to think that this book is actually a masterpiece but i think it sells the book completely sure i actually think it's not a very good blurb i think the i think by focusing on who they think is going to buy the book they leave out all the things or many of the things that make the novel so interesting rose could we hear a little bit of it, please? Yes. Is there a passage that particularly you want to share with us?

Oh, do you think it makes sense to just read that start of chapter four, which is when Katie arrives and sort of memory enters as a character and as a force with the character of Katie? Sounds great. Okay. The memories collapse on me, striking me, and I have no protection against them. I think, I do not want to cross over into this. It cannot be of any use. And then I am into it anyway, quite helpless. Look, the memories say, this is what it was, this is what you left. Look at it, see the way it was.

Why is it happening now when so many years ago, when everything changed, there was very little reflection or thought or confrontation or regret? It is strange, although I do not see this right away, that what I would recall are not only the rhythms of the life and later the lack of rhythms there is a coldness a distance about them an unreality and a lack of substance as if they come from someone else's life perhaps that is a fault of the memory or perhaps it is that I was then unreal and without substance and so I am helpless to remember any other way. I cannot tell. I know, however, that the memories are painful now. I am unconnected with them and yet they hurt me and this is what I remember. This is how it was. Elliot was 11, Kate 9. My husband's name was Stephen, my name was Abra. They were the labels

we used for each other and of course there was the dog, Fletcher. We got him from the Humane Society for Elliot's seventh birthday and let him name it. He chose Fletcher after his first grade teacher Alice Fletcher because he hadn't liked her and he knew that although he loved the puppy there was an insult in naming it after a person he said he was going to tell Alice Fletcher what he'd done but he was neither so brave nor so cruel Stephen and I worried for a while though about such a curious inheld hatred in the child. It's interesting, isn't it? It's a much stranger book. It was straight off the back of the blurb. As we compare the blurb with the section you just read,

it's a much stranger and more opaque book in a good way than one might expect from the description on the back cover. I would like to listen now to this is a long clip of the author joan barfoot who is still with us i'm pleased to say here she is she's recorded in about 10 years ago 2014 stick with this clip, everyone. She delivers here what I think is one of the best structured and most considered answers to a seemingly quite random question. And the question is to do with luck. The questioner has just said to her, what part does luck play in how you think about your work and your life? And this is what she says. Oh, all sorts of ways, I suppose. Just small things that I had a mother who read to me and a sister who read to me. And I remember the magic day when I was about four and I looked at a book and I could read it all by myself.

And I just fell in love with words and wasn't that lucky that we actually had a book that I think was a child's version of Shakespeare or something really pretentious for a four-year-old. So there was that kind of nurturing that you really can't take for granted if you look around a bit. Then I went into journalism when I basically got the boot from Western. I mean, you may say I have a degree, and I do, but it was a paltry little thing by the time I got it. But I went into journalism, and in those years as a reporter, I mean, people would always say, you must meet the most interesting people. Well, yeah, you do, but what is more to the point is that you tend to meet

people, at least in the kind of reporting that I was doing, at real extremes. So, I mean, I had a summer job at the Free Press here, and I think I was the only woman in the newsroom, naturally, in those days, and I was working a Saturday morning. Some guy wiped out his whole family. He killed his whole family down around Chatham. We found the dead wife's sister lived in Lucan. They popped me in a cab, sent me up to Lucan to get the pictures. Wow.

And because even as an adolescent, sort of old adolescent, I was fairly ruthless, I took their whole photo album. But I sat with that sister for an hour and a half. I didn't actually care about deadlines at that point because she was wreck, because everybody had been wiped out. But I took her photo album, and I didn't use hardly anything of what she'd said, because that wasn't why it was there. But things like that, or getting over Edgar, I used a scene from an early Fatal that I covered when I worked in Windsor, and again, very young and a guy was hit by a train and decapitated and so when we got to the scene there are the little lumps of body up and down so I mean that's not useful in day-to-day life but it came into

really excellent use in any case all I mean is that I have been always attracted to extremes, not necessarily those physical extremes but emotional extremes as well. I mean, I've killed people in several of my novels just out of basic pique. I mean, it's not like it's a war or there's no ideology behind it, it's just a really bad day. Sort of the culmination of a relatively unhappy life. So I've stopped killing people, I think, but there's a litter of dead people for no cosmic reason.

Then my late 20s, I went across the Sahara Desert. I went to Morocco and Algeria. This is something I would not of course do now because there I'd be and no one would pay the ransom. And into Mali and Niger. And that kind of reinforces that whatever else... There were little villages of starving people, because the Sahara was moving south, creeping into people's lives further and further. There would be nothing in these places except Singer sewing machines, oddly enough. Those Singer salesmen were really something.

But I remember driving out of a village with a little girl running behind our truck, carrying a baby saying, please take my sister, a little baby. And you know, whatever else is going on here, nothing like that happens here. And you think, but for a crapshoot of just... It really is a crapshoot to whom you're born, where you're born, what century you're born in and specifically female as a woman, I think, man, I hit it lucky to be the 60s onward, to be a repellent boomer, but just totally lucked out. So particularly as a woman, but also all the the guys too we're just lucky and we should

probably try to know that every day okay we've done about 215 episodes of bat listed and i think that might be my favorite i've played that half a dozen times today all the way through that's absolutely inspiring in its and it and it rose it changed how I felt about the book I'd read. What do you make? Have you ever heard Joan Barfoot speak before? No, I haven't. Actually, I've been really scared to find out anything about her and I've been really scared to read Gaining Ground again.

I think I slightly tricked myself into doing it by telling you that I would pick it for this because it had been such a sort of profound and important. As I said, it felt like an encounter more than a reading experience. experience it completely sort of rewrote bits of my brain and certainly my idea about what books could be and what writing can do and I was very I felt very protective of that I felt like I've really sort of cut the little flame of it in quite a sort of hunched jealous frightened way and not frightened way and not wanted to sort of risk it being extinguished by the sort of quite often the chilly draft of finding out more about that person or their other books or going back to the book itself. And I cannot tell you how genuinely heart-soaringly exhilarating it is to find out that she is a complete dude.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. How amazing is that? Imagine you were sitting in that audience and someone off the top of their head spoke for five minutes with a perfect arc of answering the question discursively, but totally relevantly. How would you feel? You'd be so happy.

And, you know, I think it feels like nested with all these kind of elements. It feels like, you know, the Charles and Reims film Powers of Ten, where it sort of comes out from the universe to the atoms in the ground and back out again in the same way that like the text of the book is completely embroidered with all of that there's that deft fluidity of like here is the huge and cosmic and here is an earthworm and here between it is sort of all the messy entanglement of all the things that human heads and hearts can do she does that in that answer as well as you know the way that all of that permeates the book i think i'm so happy i am so relieved that she's gone

john i don't know if you felt like that but but hearing her talk like that when when i read gaining ground i did not laugh often in, it didn't strike me as a particularly funny novel. Hearing the sensibility that went into it doesn't make it funny, but it allows the possibility that there are other things going on than I had perceived on first reading. Very much like, I have to say, my experience with The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, which I thought was being presented to me as a thoroughly earnest exploration of philosophy. And I subsequently discovered Iris Murdoch, which I thought was being presented to me as a thoroughly earnest exploration of philosophy.

And I subsequently discovered Iris Murdoch and John Bailey both thought was her funniest book. So I wonder whether there is a kind of wit at play in Gaining Ground. Do you think? Yeah, I think she is very sharp. And, you know, the kind of the skewering of of the middle class life while it's gentle there's a real i think there's a there's a real precision to it that's that's part of what i i love it's just just just a little bit i i just noted here that's you know they said these are

the best years of your lives and their eyes shone with their own nostalgia it a brilliant line. Yeah, except that I was lost. There it is right there. Yeah, perfect. Perfect, right? It is a sort of wit as in metaphysical poetry wit. The language in this book is astonishing, I think. Well, we'll pick that up in a minute. We have to take a break now. When we come back, we will be exploring the links between the work of Joe Barfoot and those of the songwriter and

performer Bruce Springsteen. So join us after the break. Prime Day is here with epic deals exclusively for Prime members. You'll feel like you just won an award. Oh, wow. I didn't even prepare a speech. I'd like to thank my family for always needing stuff. Also, Sam, my delivery guy, for bringing all my awesome deals so fast. You're the man, Sam!

Shop deals on electronics, home, and more this Prime Day, July 16th and 17th. For those who embrace the impossible, the Defender 110 is up for the adventure. This iconic, award-winning vehicle has been redefined with a distinctive, modern design. And we're back it was the 1980s joan barfoot is feministing it up in the literary scene while meanwhile on e street mr bruce springsteen the boss is plowing his own artistic furrow and uh rose in my head the whole time i was reading gaining ground by joan barfoot um i had the opening lines of hungry heart by bruce springsteen stuck in my head those being listeners got a wife and kids in baltimore jack i went out for a ride and i never went back like a river that don't know where it's flowing, I took a wrong turn and I just kept going.

Yeah. But imagine my delight when I discovered that Joan Barfoot's next novel was called Dancing in the Dark. Incredible. I'm working on a PhD right now. But, Rose, here is why we were talking about the Mannix. We all know that, tragically, the history of the Mannix is overshadowed by the loss of one of its members, the great Richie James. And I wondered whether something in Gaining Ground spoke to you about people walking out of their own lives.

I mean, we know, we think we know what happened to Richie, which is terrible. But do you know what I mean? There was a long period where his disappearance, because that's what he wanted to do, was understood by the other band members, by people who followed the group. And I wonder whether there was something gaining ground about that sense of just

saying, sorry, everybody, fuck it, and going. What do you think? Yeah, absolutely do. I think when I was reading it, I was thinking, I can't remember which Philip Larkin poem it is, the one about, he just threw the whole thing up. Oh, yeah. To swagger the nuts during roads.

And I think actually probably that formative combination of Manic's Phantom and Richie in particular because, you know, what's wrong with you if Richie and Nicky aren't by far your favourites? But I think that and gaining ground, I think we're all sort of horrified alternately by both the idea of not being known, not being seen, not being regarded, and also we have a horror of feeling sort of known and understood and too human and pathetic in all our realness. There's

something incredibly appealing and fascinating about walking into myth. And of course, it's not romantic like that. It's not like that for the families of people who go missing and the loved ones you know there's a huge gulf between the sort of poetics and mythology of someone self-determining by absenting themselves in some way and what that experience is for those left behind. And actually, I've always wanted and tried and failed spectacularly so far, but not forever, to write a novel about someone who absents themselves, someone who disappears. I've always been so fascinated by things like Donald Crowhurst and the writings that he left behind.

Reggie Perry. Reggie Perry. Reggie Perry. Another formative cultural thing. And also the art of Juno Basianada, who disappeared at sea in a very similar way, which actually was in my mind in the passage about Abra falling, that thing where he talks about, I allowed gravity to be the master of me,

something about how we try to avoid feeling as alive as we do when we're falling or have just fallen. I feel like all of those things are woven into Abra. And I think that sort of refusal, there's that book of essays about artists who refuse called Tell Them I Said No, that's all about acts of refusal and particularly what it is for a woman or any minoritized person to say no and to stop granting things and people and expectations, the authority over them and how they live their life. That was a radical thought for me. It's still a radical thing, but I think both those poetics, both that mythology and also the art of disappearance, all of that had such a huge effect. I think that combination of the very banal and human and bodily and then the fact that there's something so fundamentally transparent about just almost disappearing into thin air,

becoming bodiless in the minds of others, I think. Do you know what Jean Rees called the relief of letting go? Yeah. The relief of letting go, right? You know, the Manix song, I was quoting a Springsteen song, but the Manix song that this book made me think of, whether you see it as being Nicky's attempt to write what Richie wanted to do or how the other members felt after Richie had gone

is Australia from Everything Must Go. If you don't know that song, everybody should listen to it and think of that in the book and think about the people involved. That sense of just wanting to go and be free. Freedom, even free freedom comes at a terrible cost. Mitch, I wonder what you felt in the novel about the tension between self-determination in the character of Abra and selfishness. How is that handled, do you feel, in the novel? She doesn't let Abra off the hook. You know, she doesn't make Abra's family awful.

She doesn't make the husband awful and terrible. You're sent on this journey where the language is used so that you're in Abra's consciousness. So you don't really have any choice but to follow her journey and to somehow feel that what she's doing is entirely right. But she has doubts. She has, without going into the ending of the book, she says at one point, I've become kind of like an animal.

And she's tending her plants and she's living this life without time, that she's liberated herself without clocks. She's liberated herself from being in time. And mirrors, without mirrors. And without mirrors as well, but nothing's being. So it's as full and as persuasive an account of what it would be like to really properly live on your own and what happens to the self under those conditions. The self kind of almost disappears.

I agree with you, Mitch. But at the same time, that idea of self-determination and selfishness involves making choices. And certainly in the second half of the novel, she's fundamentally asking herself, can I do this for anyone else? Can I make a compromise? I cannot make a compromise. It seemed to me, Rose, that one of the feminist messages of the book is no pain, no gain.

Yeah. In order for women to throw off their assigned roles, they are going to take other people down with them. Yeah, the emotional load. I thought that was very brave, right? Yeah. Also, you know, the sort of radical act of a woman being allowed to be someone who hurts people as opposed to sort of heals them or

mollifies them being someone who shatters things in order to make free rather than being a force of glowing or I don't know it's interesting isn't it how often sort of metaphors of craft and making and those kinds of women's work. Let me ask you about that. So she breaks free from feminine pre-existing role models in order to take up crocheting. What is – is she crocheting on her own terms? Is that the point?

I don't know. I found that – I found it interesting that i suppose there's that thing about she's making not for anyone she's making for the presence in the moment that that making allows her when she embroiders and when she wrote uh draws and you know she's journaling not for any kind of posterity but almost for that sort of flow of the moment of, like, moving pencil against paper and filling a page.

Being in the moment. Yeah. Being in the moment, yeah. Yeah. So she's not making for something. It's about flow. It's about being creativity in the moment, right? Yeah, it's not for an audience and it's not for a consumption

and it's not even really for her to enjoy. There's a part where I think she does put one of her wall hangings on the wall, but in general, it seems like a very private experience that she treats as nourishment. There's another radical thing in this novel. A lesser writer would have made Abra's husband, Stephen, more aggressively patriarchal. And less understanding. But she doesn't. He's quite nice.

She says he's a sort of sweet beat about it. She said, Stephen, I have said he was loving, fair, kind, gentle. I have said that people from his office told me he was efficient, demanding, intolerant of mistakes. Their view of him was different from mine. Still thinking about him, I feel the tenderness towards him. Such a good person. And yet, and yet and yet

screw that guy i saw what i wanted to see he wasn't like that it was a role it was a role he played at work he had depths i did not know about and surfaces as well he was a different person from the one i knew did i make him up yeah did i make him up but what does she mean there john she means she means that's not just a judgment on him, is it? It comes at a point where she's saying, oh, okay, we make up roles for each other. We see one another to the extent to which we adhere to or veer away from the roles assigned to us within society.

Yeah, she says each of them stephen katie her daughter elliot her son my mother the business people at the dinner parties their wives each of them was something entirely different i made them up gave them characters from within my own tiny view assessed them made them into people i knew i simplified them and then i reacted to what i'd made up behaved as what I'd invented was real. And of course, they did the same to me. Absurd. It must be always like looking into a mirror, seeing what is recognisable through a particular set of eyes, not seeing the rest, because it's shapeless without the eye's ability to form it. Where she gets towards the end of the book, I think,

she really has sort of developed a kind of a wisdom. You know, I was thinking of, you know, the witch appearing at the end of Lolly Willow's, how she goes, that's another escape, right? She just goes off and becomes. Yeah, yeah. It's the knowledge she's got is of absolute being in the now, as you say, as you said earlier,

of absolute connection to the world around her. And everything else, all that made-up stuff, when she's talking to Katie, her daughter, who comes to see her, about going back, she said, you know, that doesn't exist for me. That isn't reality anymore for me. I think the ending as well underpins that idea that should you choose, quote unquote, selfishness.

Yeah. The gleam of selfishness, she says at one point. It won't come for free. There is a price to be paid. There are things in it that are like a radical act of ingratitude, especially in relation to the sort of material comfort of her life and the fact that you know she's well off right the family is well off they're well off yeah and they have you know they have staff if she doesn't feel like being sort of wholly the primary caregiver of the

children there are bits where there are like child care staff and housekeepers and also you know the husband is quite sort of progressive and hands-on and sensitive and non sort of dictatorial and authoritarian especially for the time and I think you know as a woman probably in contemporary terms but certainly in that historical period that's a man that and a marriage that you are meant to be grateful for you're meant to be enormously grateful that he's not a dick a radical act of ingratitude that is that is brilliant hey listen um john you mentioned margaret lawrence and the stone angel which we record an episode on about six months ago this is jo Joan Barfoot talking about what Margaret Lawrence meant to her as a young woman.

And actually, this hadn't occurred to me, but Rose, there are echoes of what you in turn were saying about Joan Barfoot here. Let's listen to her. I read her when I was in late high school, I guess, and I was growing up in Owen Sound. I had spent like 17, 18 years planning to get out of Owen Sound, so I was near to achieving my goal.

But I hung out at the library a great deal, and I worked my way really pompously, I'm sure, through all the Russians, you know, all those great men in the tundra and the blah, blah, blood on the snow, as I used to call it. the tundra and the blah, blah, blood on the snow as I used to call it. And it seemed to me at that time, in that place, that writers were... Well, for one thing they were male, for another thing they were dead and they were far away. So Margaret Lawrence was a discovery in the reading just because she wasn't dead and that was... reading just because she wasn't dead and that was you know I just I had no idea then of becoming a writer because I I just had it in my head that they were dead and they certainly weren't Canadian

and almost certainly they weren't women because I hadn't read women until I read Margaret and then I thought ah blunt can be elsewhere it can be in the kitchen there you go great uh she's great tell me why you think this novel is not better known and goodness me is not well known there's very little we can find out it's a it's a prize winner joan barfitt's had a long career she wrote 11 novels she was long listed for the book of prize you know why why is this novel, you know, obscure? You know, I love what she said about novelists being dead. It was something that Sadie Smith said at Martin Amis' thing, you know, that growing up you think writers are dead people

who are very distant from you. I think perhaps that it was women's press and canadian and fell and came out at a particular moment in time it didn't it didn't get into the penguin classics it didn't get into i i think i honestly don't think there is anything other than just i mean she would appreciate the irony of this bad luck that has prevented it from being acknowledged as a classic also it was published in such a way in an era where don't shoot the messenger um you know i am a man john mitchinson is also a man we were not being invited to the joan barfoot party you know it's true though isn't it you know they saw who their market was, probably rightly,

and we saw from that blurb that's who they pitched it at. And yet it seems to me a frustration because the book is so full of great wisdom and beautiful writing that it seems to me a good example of, John, a book where you have to choose who to sell it to yeah who is the group of people most likely to return the advance your investment on the advance and by doing that you necessarily leave out other readers yeah so i feel very lucky, Rose, that you chose this particular novel for us to read. There's no way I would have read this had you not chosen it,

and I feel so enriched for having done so. Rose, why do you think this is, even by the standards of Batlisted, quite a forgotten book? I have never thought about the sort of commercial aspects of it because I'm incredibly lazy about thinking about things that I'm not very interested in. Sort of defiantly uninterested in that kind of stuff in a way that I'm sure is absolutely dog shit for my career.

Such as it is, you know, I'm sure is absolutely dog shit for my career, such as it is. I'm probably constantly consigning myself to being the sort of Joan Barfoot of sort of current strange singular eccentric books about women who may or may not be mad or who may or may not have just gone very very sane but I also think that there are ways in which Abra is not likable or relatable and I also think the ways in which she is actually relatable to a lot of human experience and female experiences the stuff that people are afraid of and they are scared to say i found this relatable people are frightened or even ashamed to say i related to the bits about uh her having like disdain or disgust or disinterest in her children. And people are afraid to say that they understand disassociative states.

Yeah. This is why relatable is such a bullshit thing because relatable means likable. People don't understand this. What's relatable is unlikable unless you're so delighted with yourself constantly that you can only relate to likable people. I totally agree with you, Rose. It's not just true of this book. It's a malaise of contemporary thought and contemporary writing. Human beings, it seems to me, are often not likable and we would do well to remember to relate to them as much as the ones who make us feel good about ourselves.

So, God, that's powerful, wasn't it, Nick? Going well, going well. But, yeah. Going well. Now, listen, we have to wind up, Johnny. We do, we do. So, do you want to take us out? I will.

As Abra reminds us, everything takes the time it needs. And, unfortunately, this podcast is about to run out of time. want to take us out i will as abra reminds us everything takes the time it needs and unfortunately this podcast is about to run out of time huge thanks to rose for inviting us into joan barford's strange and beautiful garden and to nikki birch our producer for weaving our conversation into something of oral integrity libraries gave us power listeners if you do want show notes uh with clips links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the um 3000 that we've already recorded please visit our website at backlisted.fm and if you want to buy the books discussed on this or any other shows not least the novels of rose ruane yes visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop.

And we're still keen to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, and wherever else you feel compelled to write from. If you want to hear Backlisted early and ad-free, you can subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits. If you subscribe, they're lot the lot listener level for roughly the price of a uh paperback not by um joan barfoot you'll get not one but two extra exclusive podcasts every month it features the three of us talking recommending the books films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight and for those of you who enjoyed

our what have you been reading slot that's where you'll now find it it's an hour of tunes musings and superior book chat plus lock listeners get their names read out accompanied by praise and gratitude like this patty miles thank you stephanie butland thank you christina honeyset thank you maria trombin thank you w andrew gowder jr thank you sir uh timothy bergin thank you richard utley thank you anna zobel thank you helen partington thank you and jim woodlaw thank you i would just like to say that on the netlist lock listed episode i am going to read uh there wasn't time on this because we were chatting so hard and so full on that there wasn't time for me to read my favourite passage from Gaining Ground. I'll do it on Locklist because it's an amazing piece of writing.

There are a couple of brilliant things that we didn't get to in this one. So, you know, you won't want to miss that. Now, Rose, thank you so much for choosing this book. Thank you so much for being our guest um john i think we both feel this is like um one for the ages don't we absolutely it's not massively easy to get although it is available i think as an e-book as a kindle called abra not gaining ground it's it's so worthwhile it's it's a it's a truly i think a magnificent novel and i'm going to be, for one,

we'll be searching out more Joan Barthel. And I never thought that two weeks ago. It's probably easier to get in Canada, let's be honest, than it is in the UK, or maybe for our American or Canadian, our North American and Canadian listeners. I imagine Abra slash Gaining Ground is probably easier to get over there.

But nevertheless, it influenced me greatly. Rose, I for one will be going off to live in a stone cabin in the middle of Sefton Park. And I'll be touching my vegetables in a fond and gentle way. Well, I feel like I should go and water my plants, which is as much solitude and nature as is available to me in a top for a bet. And maybe turn off my phone for a bit and not reply to messages.

Yeah, that's right, isn't it? Maybe I'll turn off my phone for a bit. I'll stay off Twitter for up to 36 hours and that will be my homeopathic experience of going a little bit missing and no one will notice that I'm not there. Thanks very much, Rose, and thanks, everyone. We'll see you next time. See you next time.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.