I am thrilled to be launching Briohny's brilliant, funny, electric novel, Why We Are Here.
Why We Are Here is a novel of so many things: the surreal and lonely world of grief, and surviving in the aftermath of huge personal loss; the real-life contagion plot we have all lived through in recent years; the dogs that elevate our human lives into something more; the expansive powers of love; and the ways that places can sustain you.
Let's spotlight Silver City - the imagined Sydney of the novel that shadows the real city so closely that we can readily map out our own journeys and places within it. Standing here tonight, in the tattooed arms of the Midnight Special, Silver City is very, very close, almost overlapping with the here and now. Maybe you can sense it, a pink/blue shadow like a double exposure photograph - I'm thinking of Nash Ferguson's cover photo here - and her photos throughout the book which make perfect atmospheric companions for the novel.
Let's go east, to a place - a suburb - that feels like it is "at the edge of the world". It was with mounting excitement that I read the description, near the start of Why We Are Here, of Balboa Bay - a narrow stretch of land, with a prison, a golf course, a football field, a rifle range, and a wastewater treatment plant - and amid all this, a beachside suburb. Yes yes yes, I thought, this can only be one place, the suburb of all Sydney suburbs which perhaps most strongly highlights the extremity between wealth and disadvantage, between what's on show and what there is to hide, and between the ancient deep-time presence of the land and the brief temporality of suburbia. Here in Balboa Bay/Malabar are the elements the city wants to push to the edge - the prison, the sewerage plant - but then also...golf. And its absurd, strolling, strutting privilege: all that green good land reserved for the few. Land that's so perfect for walking on - and for lying down and rolling on, if you're a dog, like Baby. Throughout the novel BB and Baby risk - and sometimes relish - the antagonism of the golfers as they go for walks on the green. I think Baby says it best, psychically communicating with her human, BB as she rolls happily on the golfing green:
Grass! [Baby] telegraphs approvingly. Feel!
Baby consistently tells it like it is throughout Why We Are Here - she brings it down to the essentials. She knows why we are here. The seamless slide into the BB and Baby telegraph channel has us inside their soul and spirit connection. 'Telegraph' is the perfect way to describe this deep entwined interspecies communication - I felt a thrill every time I read this word - because it captures so well the sense of a message transmitted as energy between different but aligned beings. There are many frequency channels open to BB in Why We Are Here, those with her partner and father which open through memory, the distinct energies of friends and lovers in the present, and the energies of place, complex in time and space.
'Why we are here' - that search for meaning, and purpose, and the stories that we craft out of the material of our own life to give it this - can feel so fragile and exposed when we are grieving. Grief realigns everything, alters perception, makes the familiar strange - nothing's quite right, no matter how hard you try. It feels exactly like a Silver City version of yourself - almost the same, but not quite, some things heightened, others muted, other things just so slightly weird or off-kilter. I loved the surreal moments in Why We Are Here as an expression of this - the prison intercom that quotes Simone Weil and other philosophers, a childhood memory of drinking the purple fluid from a magic 8-ball, the desire to develop an inner life that resembles a Pedro Almodóvar film, and BB as a bunch of different kinds of highly-situational roses, dispensed one by one.
Grief is at the centre of the novel - BB's life in Balboa Bay is an 'aftermath' life, returning to Silver City, wanting to rebuild herself, looking to the power of place as an anchor, in a time when life in the present so often doubles back over into memory. When time is playing out unpredictably in your psyche, place is there in the present for you to connect back into.
In Balboa Bay, BB's apartment, with its glittery ceiling, slanting floor, and rattling windows is a place open to the elements, to the wind and the nearby ocean, and open to time, through its anachronistic, one-step-ahead-of-the-wrecking-ball presence in the rapidly gentrifying suburb. This apartment is always going to be a temporary anchor, but is anything, ultimately, forever? Even if we want it to be? Why We Are Here writes deep into this heartbreak - the churn of time and change and loss.
This is a novel so distinct in its voice and powers: I think everyone here probably already knows that Briohny can write a sharp sentence like no one else and I loved this description of how this happens: "Sentences are the most compelling and anticlimactic labour of my life. I work on them with the determination of a dog digging a hole. I dig and dig, dirt flying, getting in my eyes, my ears: I dig and my body drops lower into the cool, dark earth. I'm really getting into this, is what I think, as I dig and the walls fall, filling my hole with dirt again while I keep digging until I'm spent. At the end of some days I have a hole. On others I'm just covered in dirt".
Well, I can't speak for Baby but I think she'd telegraph that it was time to rest from digging and have a good big roll on the grass. Congratulations Briohny - we love you and your brilliant novel and the way it tunes us into the beauty of being here, together.
Vanessa Berry 2023