Amy Bloom
My Auckland Writers Festival 2015 began with a bang: Amy Bloom. One of the things I like best about writer’s festivals is discovering new writers with whom I feel an immediate connection. In this case, I mean “new” as in new to me – Carole Beu began the session with a stern admonishment to us all that Bloom is nowhere near famous enough in New Zealand. So this is my attempt to help try and change that.
Bloom writes fiction and non-fiction; short stories, essays and novels, and it was good to get a taste of each of those different kinds of writing in the session. Before becoming a writer, Bloom was variously a barmaid and a psychotherapist: “they’re not so different”. She now teaches creative writing as well as writing professionally.
Bloom says the things she finds compelling are people and language, time and memory. She’s interested in “the kerb”: the gap between how people look and who they are; between what they say and how they feel. Her writing is concise – “I want to leave out the wheat-threshing scenes” – and she considers the reader to be her partner in constructing the story. Bloom likes the “rigour and demand” of the short story form, saying “a bad sentence stands out like a missing tooth”. Titles are very important to her; she says she wants the titles of her stories to resonate differently with the reader after they’ve read her work.
There was a scrum at the book stall after her talk, and I managed to grab the last copy ofNormal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude; a collection of four of Bloom’s non-fiction essays. She spoke warmly and entertainingly about her research for this book, going – amongst other things – on cruises with the “family values crossdressing” crowd. Bloom is interested in the way we care so much about gender, and asked what it is that distresses us about the range of human variety?
We continued this theme with ‘An Evening’ with Alan Cumming, a Scottish actor whose breakthrough role was as Emcee in Cabaret and who, when he shaved all his body hair to play the role of a transvestite, said “I looked like a weird depressed exhausted plucked chicken”.
I wanted to attend this event because – if I’m honest – I have a bit of a crush on the character Cumming plays in The Good Wife, Eli Gold. I didn’t know he was a writer: he’s published a novel, Tommy’s Tale, and a memoir, Not My Father’s Son, which he’s here to promote. I didn’t know he was a singer. Because I’ve only ever seen him speak onscreen in an American accent, I didn’t even know he was Scottish.
Cumming had an awful childhood, with a physically abusive father. In his late twenties, facing potential fatherhood himself, repressed memories came flooding back and he suffered a nervous breakdown. Later on, he hit the big time on Broadway, and in films and television. When Michael Hurst introduced him, I was surprised how much of his filmography I recognised. He himself draws a distinction between “the kind of actor I am”, who becomes immersed in their character, and a movie star, who is just themselves in successive films. The reason I hadn’t recognised him is that he’s always different.
Listening to an actor talk about their memoir is very different to listening to an author do the same. There’s a kind of automatic modesty we expect writers on stage to have – we expect the spotlight to make them in some way uncomfortable. Cumming, though, was completely at ease with the fact that there was a sold-out theatre audience who had turned up for the explicit purpose of hearing him talk about himself. He accepted, totally without question, that we would want to be as absorbed in him as he is – and indeed, for an hour, we were.
This partly has something to do with his philosophy about shame. He read out the part of his memoir where, as a twelve-year-old child, he consciously decided to reject shame. “I say no to shame. I just won’t have it.” This includes sexual shame (he is out as bisexual and is a gay rights campaigner), the shame of mental illness, and the shame of being a victim of abuse. He said “I want to self-determine in everything I do”.
It’s also partly to do with being a performer. I felt like, in this Writers Festival session, he was performing his book for us, in a way that most writers just don’t. Cumming has that actorly desire for attention, “to be understood”. He obviously revels in the spotlight, and delightedly told us that his portrait now hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, replacing one of the Queen. “I want”, he said, “to be a provocateur.”
A splendid and very stimulating start to what feels like it’s going to be another superb writers festival. Onwards!
Reviews by Elizabeth Heritage
funny as you would expect her to be. She explained that the fastest way to get somewhere is by walking in a straight line: therefore, the same should be true for conversations. Her straight talking involved a hilarious story about trying to get to a small town Australian town for the birth of her first grandchild.
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