Backlisted - Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot - Rerun

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

In light of it's republication by Faber this month, we are replaying this wonderful episode where author Rose Ruane first brought Gaining Ground A.K.A. Abra (1978) by Canadian feminist writer Joan Barfoot to our attention back in 2024.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 long listed for the Man Booker Prize, for Critical Injuries (2002). Back in 2024, her debut novel, seemed to have vanished almost as thoroughly as its female protagonist; as you will hear from our discussion, we thought the book richly deserved to be rediscovered and are very happy now it is available to purchase. * 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 get extra bonus episodes and original writing, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted + there's a free trial week. *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, it's Andy. Hello, it's John. Welcome to another backlisted rerun. And this week, we are rerunning a show from July 2024, two years ago. Two years ago. And the book is Gaining Ground by the Canadian novelist Joan Barfoot, published, first published in Canada with a different title in 1978. That title was Abra, but published two years later in the UK by Women's Press, I want to say three things about this podcast, Andy.

Do you remember it? You do remember it a bit. You know me. I jettison memories of every episode as soon as we're... Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete.

Delete. Memory almost full. Three things. No, I do remember this one. Three things about this episode. One is the excellence of Rose Ruehain novelist who came on, who read this book when she was a teenager and had sort of guarded it carefully, like a little sort of flame

through her adolescence and 20s and into her 30s. And as a book that she really changed her life and she talks beautifully about it. And it would be fair to say, I think nobody had heard of this book that I knew. Certainly I hadn't heard of it.

I don't think you'd heard of it that I knew until Rose brought it to us. I'm going to let listeners in on a secret. it. We use the internet to do research. And one thing that was notable about gaining ground by Joan Barfoot is that we had to rely much more on our wits than usual because there was almost no trace of it on the internet at the point we made this particular episode. Actually, I think you can hear that adds a bit of crackle to the discussion. It absolutely does. We're not relying on anyone else.

No. Well, there are two other things were one is, I'd completely forgotten this, but Rose, Rowan, is a massive fan of the manic street preachers. And for people who like hearing Andy talk about music, Andy and Rose talking about the Manix, the greatness of the Manix is one absolute bonus of the episode. And the final thing, and I don't know if you remember this, Andy, but it is perhaps on this episode the best author clip of all the 250 backlisted episodes we ever run. absolutely extraordinary answer to a question about how important luck was to her writing career. And Joan Barfoot answers that quite brilliantly.

So this is honestly backlisted at its absolute best. Okay, so when this episode came out, it was quite difficult to come by a copy of Gaining Ground slash Abra, depending which title you use by Joan Barfoot. That is no longer the case, I'm very happy to say, because the publisher, Faber and Faber, ever with the keen eye for a good thing have brought the book back into print in fact I think as we record this

the book is making its way back into bookshops at the beginning of August 2026 there's a lovely interview with Joan Barfoot you can find in the Observer in which she says the whole thing had completely vanished and now miraculously after 50 years it's reappeared and lovely Rose Ruin, quite rightly taking the credit for making this thing happen for another writer,

is appearing at Foyles Bookstore in Charing Cross Road in London on Thursday, August the 13th at 7pm. She's taking part in an event called Unearthing a Classic, The Rediscovery of Gaining Ground, in which she and three other writers will be discussing how this classic was unearthed, who rediscovered it. I am reliably informed that Joan herself will be making an appearance by satellite link or the equivalent thereof. So that's pretty amazing, right? That's at Foyles on Thursday, August the 13th, at 7pm.

Tickets available from their website. Speaking of websites, there are other websites. We've mentioned the internet, we've mentioned foils, let's mention Patreon, because that's where you can find us. Patreon.com forward slash backlisted, all sorts of things going on on the patron while we're on this so-called sabbatical. I think this whole sabbatical is interrogating the very meaning of the word sabbatical, because there's more going on than there is when we're not on sabbatical. Anyway, one of the things that you can do is you can go to the Patreon and you can hear a fantastic episode of backlisted readers with a discussion featuring our supporter Valerie Smith and Nikki and myself. And we're talking about Truman Capote's other voices, other rooms.

And also we talk quite a lot about in cold blood. And I get to do my impression of various people doing impressions of Truman Capote. So you wouldn't want to miss that. And the other thing that's coming up on which we are recording on August the 10th, you are so welcome to join us on the Patreon for this. It's our monthly random revisit of a winner from the history of the Booker Prize for Fiction. Last month, the sorting hat gave us heat and dust by Ruth Prava Jabba, Jabrallah, which won the Booker Prize in 1975. 1975, a red letter year for the Booker Prize, because it was a shortlist with only two tomatoes on it.

And I'm going to put my colleague John Mitchinson to the test right now. What, John, was the only other title on the book? book a short list of 1975. Astonishingly, it was, as you say, just one other, and it was gossip from the forest by Thomas Caneli. Now, I just want to be short, I just want to tell, reassure listeners, John and I have never met. He's not looking at the internet as he says this. He just knew it.

He just knew it. It was by Tom, John, I've never heard of gossip from the forest by Thomas Caneley. It is about apparently the peace negotiations to end the First World War. war. So the forest, I mean, I seem to remember that there is a forest involved in a railway carriage, but that's what it's about. I'm slightly amazed that a war novel by Thomas Kenealy, author of one of the great, obviously famous war novels, Schindler's List, has sort of slipped under the radar. So, again, it might be one to pack in my summer reading knapsack, should I have one? Notebooks out, publishers.

Thanks so much everybody. We hope you enjoy this episode. You will because it's an absolute banger and we'll either see you on the Patreon or we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. 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 around a row of corn plants. He'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.

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 Ruein. Welcome Rose. Hello, Rose. Thank you for having me. Rose Rewain 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. A 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 Ruein, 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 we had found the cover image that had to be the cover image, I think, three times before. And all of which, for various reasons, we weren't allowed to use or they were too expensive or, you know, we were sort of panting and desperate and desolate when.

Charlotte Strumer, 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 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 other ways, which was great, I was delighted with it. John and I would like to offer you a publishing pro tip, which is don't change it for the paperback.

Yeah. You're there. You're there. It is a fantastic cover, isn't it, John? Stunning, stunning, stunning. Yeah, I know. And it's funny, a few years ago, did a book by another writer that had ice cream on the cover,

and I'm really cross that we, this is so, 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 Pire photograph. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 inappropriate. 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 Manick Street Preachers, very well known in the UK, perhaps less well known elsewhere in the world,

certainly right in the States. And the Mannix 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 locklisted. 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 Manick Street preacher has never got quite got credit for something specific, which is they have got to be the most cultured and literate. 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 Fulman aren't responsible for the rest of it is all the Manix, 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 know, 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, 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 Manix

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... Story of the eye. Yeah, absolutely. George Batte. Can you?

When did you first see them? Where and when did you first see them? I think they were the second bands 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 sort of block of flats that looks like a Novatel 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 realizing 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. And then looked very shocked at what he'd sort of had this pure exuber and so I think it was that like when you see art that sort of makes you want to do something so destructive

and deprived in your pure excitement, being too big to fit into your body. So everything about it was a formative experience, including the tatanus shot afterwards. I went to, 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 base 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? They're sort of, by embracing,

the absurdity of what they were doing, they kind of push through into this zone of amazing self-expression and creativity. And all these things that we've talked about, listeners, will come back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Later in this episode, John, take us forward. Ah, 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-Rison 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 Marion Engel, 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 were 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 Abra in her cabin, here is a message from our sponsors. I saw my friend on the other side of the street. I was heading to school with the kids. I let go of mom's hand to wave. I had already forgotten their lunches. I went over to hug her. She came out of nowhere.

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Get tickets now. 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 Manix. and 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, 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 McEyennes. 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 woman's press coming into our exceeding. the middle brow 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 realise 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 in the most basic way you're starting to realise some of those things are shite

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 it was a really seismic experience reading, Gaining Ground. So before we come to Gaining Ground, I'd just like to ask John, 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 Women's Press, right, if I'm remembering rightly. That's what my, burnt into my cortex stocklist knowledge is telling me. They were kind of an edgier, more. street version of Ferrague, 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 iron as a kind of a logo. This is I remember. Women's Press and Verso. It's all part of that kind of great. Countercultural. Countercultural alternative publishing.

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 the sort of city's really tantalisingly there and you know there's book shops 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 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 Clueda style murder weapon, actually. I don't know. I think I always sort of imagined and that was like an iron for caving husband's heads in for some. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like a cross between Monopoly and Cludeau, isn't it? It's the iron. Rose, what was it about this novel about a middle-class, for one for 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 for 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. And I think probably at that point in my life, I already understood that I wasn't going to be a sort of, 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 Belgio 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 number. 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 a way.

opposed to just a reading experience, I think. And also, if that kind of thing hits you when you were 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 Manix, everybody, you see. It's the thing that gets you at the right moment. I think, I'm going to ask you, John, in a minute, 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. You can't, the fog. 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 will receive.

in front of you, 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 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 right.

So she writes in her late 20s early 30s. 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 this something which is such a, it's, you realize it's such an archetype. But I've not, it's the most original presentation of the, of the fantasy of escape that I've ever read. It's Walden. Yeah. It's, it's, 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, 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.

I mean, what's not to love? I mean, 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 it's, you know, people deserve to get to the ending in this. 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, The Stone Angel, that we read, where Hagar Shipley is a kind of difficult, difficult, not terribly likable, non-relatable character. And I was interested to see that Joan Barfoot said that she, Margaret Lawrence was definitely an influence on it. Well, we will hold that thought because we will hear from Joan Barth and herself later in the show. delighted Rose to be, you know, that's the thing I love most about this podcast.

So, Rose, in a second, 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 endeavor between my editor, Sarah Castleton. 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 next. natural idea. I'm a meanderer and I'm a long form humor. Blurbs are played to literally none of my strengths. That's why AI is so good at writing them, it turns out. That's why we've proved that on this, haven't we? A.I. It's the one good thing about AI. It writes the blurb better than we do.

Anyway, here is a pre-AI blurb for 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 alluded her in the world of city and family life. Nine years after Abra 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? It's okay.

I mean, six out of ten, isn't it? It doesn't really give you any reason to think that this book is actually a masterpiece. I think it sells the book completely short. I actually think it's not a very good blur. 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? I would if 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 well, 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've 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 question 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 who would always say, 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 Luchin. They popped me in a cab, sent me up to Lukan to get the picture. 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 wrecked, 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 to say. seen from an early fatal that I covered when I worked in Windsor and again was still very young. And a guy was hit by train and decapitated. And so when we got to the scene, they're 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. as well. I mean, I've killed people in several of my novels just out of basic peak. I mean, it's not like it's war or there's no, you know, 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. 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. 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 with a little baby. And you know, whatever else is going on here, nothing like that happens here. And you think, you know, 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 sort of the 60s onward to be a repellent boomer, but just totally lucked out. So particularly as a woman, but also all 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 Battlisted, 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, Rose, it changed how I felt about the book I'd read.

What do you make? Have you had 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, 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, frighten sway 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 Rames 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 as 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 cool. John, I don't know if you felt like that, but hearing her talk like that, when I read gaining ground, I did not laugh often.

In fact, 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 Murdo. Yeah, 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 the middle class life,

while it's gentle, there's a real, I think there's a real precision to it. That's part of what I love. It's just a little bit. I've just noted here that, you know, they said, these are the best years of your lives and their eyes shone with their own nostalgia. It's a brilliant line.

And something in me tightened and silently said, no, that can't be right. And then I shook myself and realized that it might be, for I couldn't think of anything that was wrong, except that I was lost. 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 and Barfoot and those of the songwriter and performer Bruce Springsteen. So join us after the break.

From the producers of Super Troopers and Super Troopers 2. comes, you guessed it. Broken Lizard and their rowdy patrol squad returned to the scene of the crime. In Super Troopers 3, the mustaches are thicker, the maple syrup stickier, and the pranks crazier than ever. Buckle up for the funniest comedy of the summer. Super Troopers 3, only in Theaters Friday.

Get tickets now. And we're back. It was the 1980s Joan Barfoot is feministing it up in the literary scene. while meanwhile on East Street, Mr Bruce Springsteen, the boss, is plowing his own artistic furrow. And Rose, in my head the whole time I was reading, gaining ground by Joan Barfoot, 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. 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 Manix. We all know that tragically, the history of the Manix 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 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 is the one about he just threw the whole thing up. Yeah. To Swagger the Nutsdrewen roads. And I think actually probably that formative combination of Manix fandom and Richie in particular, because, you know, what's wrong with you

if Richie and Nicky aren't by far your favour of the Manichick's. 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 disappeared. I've always been so fascinated by things like Donald Crowhurst and the writings that he left back. Reggie Perrin. Another formative cultural thing. And also the art of Juno Bacyanada, 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. You know, 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.

If 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 some something so fundamentally transparent about just almost disappearing into thin air, becoming bodiless in the minds of others, I think. Do what Jean Reese called the relief of letting go? Yeah. The relief of letting go, right? You know, the Manic song, I was quoting a Springsteen song, but the Manic song that this book made me think of,

whether you see it as being Nikki'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, right? 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.

You know, that sense of just wanting to go and be free. Freedom, even free if 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 books, you know, that 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, you know, that she's liberated herself without clocks.

you know, she's liberated herself from being in time. And mirrors, without mirrors as well. But, you know, 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, you know, 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.

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 gluing. or I don't know as 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 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 embroidered and when she wrote, 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.

and filling a page. Being in the moment. Being in the moment, yeah. So she's not making for something. She's, 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, like it seems like a very private experience. that she treats as nourishment. There's another radical thing in this novel. Unless a writer would have made Abra's husband, Stephen, more aggressively patriarchal. And less understanding. She doesn't, he's quite nice.

She says he's a sort of sweet beta male, doesn't she? 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,

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, she, she says, I, 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 eyes ability to form it. Where she gets towards the end of the book, I think, is this. 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 Willows,

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 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 childcare staff and housekeepers. And also, you know, the husband is quite sort of progressive and hands-on and sensitive and non-sortive.

tutorial 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 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 brilliant. Hey, listen, John, you mentioned Margaret Lawrence and the Stone Angel,

which we record an episode on about. six months ago. This is 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 Barford here. Let's listen to her. I read her when I was in late high school, I guess, and I was growing up in On 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, 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 this great men in 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, I just, I had no idea then of becoming a writer because 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, oh, blunt can be elsewhere.

It can be in the kitchen. There you go. So great. 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 prize winner. Joan Barford's had a long career. She wrote 11 novels. She was long listed for the book of prize. You know, why is this novel, you know, obscure? You know, I love what she said about novelist being dead. It was something that Sadie Smith said at Martin Amos's thing. You know, 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 get into the Penguin classics.

It didn't get into. 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, 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. 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. So I feel very lucky, a 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 Battlisted, 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. 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 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 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. You know, I totally agree with you, Rose. It's not just true.

This book, it's a malaise of contemporary thought and contemporary writing. You know, 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, eh? Going well. Going well. Now, listen, we have to wind up, Johnny. We do. 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. 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 with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 3000 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at batlisted.fm. And if you want to buy the books discussed on this or any other shows, not least the novels of Rose Ruyn, 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. Now, Rose, thank you so much for choosing this book. Thank you so much for being our guest. John, I think we both feel this is like 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. It's a Kindle.

It's on the Kindle called Abra Not Gaining Ground. It's so worthwhile. It's a truly, I think, a magnificent novel. And I'm going to be, for one, we'll be searching out more Joan Barthold. And I never thought that two weeks ago. It's probably easier to get in Canada, let's be honest, than it's in the UK,

or maybe for our American or Canadian, I'm North American and Canadian listeners. I imagine ABRA slash gaining ground is probably easy to get over there. But nevertheless, it influenced me greatly. Rose. I, for one, will be going off to live in a stone cabinet. 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 of that. 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. 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. Bye. Bye.