Our literary journalism seminar convenes every Tuesday at the sleepy hour of 3pm. It’s a small class. Just before the hour, three or four of us arrive and huddle under the Physics Road Learning Hub overhang, tucked away from the rest of campus and the gusts of wind and rain foregrounding winter, waiting for the fifth.
We had a special guest speaker this week. As the few of us collected trudging to class, there was conjecture about how many people would be there to see Anna Funder. More, we hoped, than usual — this was an author of international renown! There had to be at least some semblance of a crowd! Then there was the usual, irresponsible chitchat of how many of the set readings we’d done. In this case they were her award-winning books Stasiland and Wifedom: one interviewing ex-secret police of the most perfected surveillance state in history, the other uncovering the forgotten wife of one of the world’s most celebrated writers, George Orwell.
Aside from guiltily admitting I’d only read half of Stasiland by that afternoon, I also simmered more private nerves that I now know were shared nodes among my peers. Her sentences, describing her German landlord speaking “as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was”, were still echoing in my mind by the time she rounded the corner with our tutor Mark. I immediately tensed up, correcting my usually awful posture. Meeting a famous writer with such keen observational skills and ability to articulate people for what she saw them to be with beauty and fairness, was for all of us in the class, I believe, quite intimidating. I wonder what her first impressions were of what my mind’s eye saw as a gaggle of confusedbright-eyed yet jaded university students.
After some shuffling around of classroom furniture to form a haphazard panel discussion arrangement, we all sat down. My brain was still trying to pinpoint what it found uncanny about the situation. Anna Funder’s closing address at the Sydney Writers festival in mid-May 2025, where she will be tackling the charged topic of AI writing, is already sold out. Yet she sat quietly with her hands folded neatly in her lap a few metres away from our measly media cohort plus a few, a tiny room of ten people. Her keen blue eyes followed the inevitable self-introductions around the room, and I could feel one of my confounding blushes burn from my ears to my face. I blurted out a generic answer: “…I feel so lucky to be here today!”
She smiled at me calmly and, too quickly, averted her eyes. I then mentally crashed out over my boring response, not knowing until I read further in Stasiland, with a weird sense of camaraderie, the reason why she might have: “The blush begins at the neck and moves rapidly up to her yellow hair. This used to happen to me until some merciful god put an end to it so I don’t look. […] and then the gods abandon me and I blush from collarbone to brow, crimson.” But by then I knew to blur what image I had of her after our discussion, because reading her writing was one thing, knowing her personally was another, and meeting her as a fan of her work is something entirely different.
Anna began speaking; Mark had started her on some questions he’d prepared. I could feel the whole room leaning in: her voice was very soft yet firm, stopping and starting with certainty, like the light rain misting on and off outside. Her presence shifted languidly between this gentle intensity and a laugh that was surprisingly loud and carefree, tossing back her elegantly curved blonde hair despite the humidity that evening. I looked down at my notebook with questions — ‘You write about difficult subjects: is there a certain distance you have to put between you and your work?’ ‘How do you feel when people try to put you in a box, as a writer or otherwise?’ — then turned the page to scrawl hastily when I realised she was inadvertently answering them already.
She was saying she wished she’d realised younger, that your writing voice isn’t really you. How it can be inhibiting and distracting, how you are just a vehicle for the story you’re trying to tell. In Stasiland, someone reminds her of herself: “your eyes are too pale”, “straggly fair hair she doesn’t care too much about”. Mark brought up her messy writer’s room, which she owned instead of being abashed about, and I noticed her black bag slung on her chair open and roughed up inside. I looked across and wondered how much her writing self translates into her real self. If who we were reading and meeting were both constructed versions of Anna, what were they made up of?
The discussion shifted to Wifedom. Anna spoke on the difficulties of writing about Orwell’s invisible wife: “I wanted to bring Eileen back to life. It’s hard to do interviews with dead people.” Together with the heavy tide of women whose histories have been systematically oppressed, the room released with laughter. Unpicking Orwell’s and Orwellian voices, she demanded both their contents and what they were missing. At the fulcrum of Wifedom, ridges between life and language, decency and privacy, art and artist come into relief. How can a man so famed for writing about justice and human dignity, be a serial cheater on his wife and suppress her brilliant legacy? Using Orwell’s own concept, Anna asked us to consider doublethink: should we need it to love great work by flawed people?
But maybe it’s a false binary; maybe the writer is never just one person. “We want people to be decent and we want our writers to be too,” Anna writes, but “none of us are who we think we are; none of us may be decent.” In her work as well as how she conducts herself, Anna probed the cultural impulse to separate art from artist in order to preserve our reverence for both. And yet, as readers, we continue to stoke “the dark furnace inside the artist… the place from which the work comes”.
We want art to show us “the invisible world”, to offer insight into our problems — even when it’s crafted by those using art to cope with their own. We bring pieces of ourselves to the person we think we’re reading, and expect the author to be, “not at all unreasonably,” our construction of them from their work. And yet, that person is an amalgam: a projection, a performance, and a mirror. An artist, Anna concluded, “is not their work, just where it came from.” The point isn’t to collapse the gap between art and artist, but to hold it in view — to resist doublethink, to sit with contradiction, and to let the work speak not instead of the self, but in uneasy proximity to them.
We were coming to the last half hour of our time together, and Anna had remembered my classmate’s self-introduction as a sports journalist, tailoring her response to him. I was stabbed again by regret at my mediocre first impression. Looking across at my peers, we all seemed sufficiently star-struck, eyes wide, hanging onto her every word. Despite our discussion, she was every bit as cool as we thought she’d be. She seemed to me like one of those rare famous people who actually seem human when you meet them, of whose kindness you read online accounts of but assume you’ll never have the luck of experiencing.
I recall how she said that in her experience, people don’t like being written about, and how she compared it to being shown a photo of yourself with your features all the wrong way around. I wonder if she thinks so too. So, if you’re reading this — you seem like the sort of person who will — I’m sorry Anna! If I hold up a crooked mirror, it’s because I’m still trying to figure out how to reflect people who deeply influence me, without reflecting too much of myself.
