It’s self-evident that novelists require strong imaginative powers, but that seems to apply doubly to Brisbane-based Joanna Horton.
Her new novel, Catching the Light, explores the relationship between a single mother and a teenage daughter on New Zealand’s South Island when the mother embarks on an affair with an older artist.
Horton writes the mother-daughter bond with sensitivity and insight; it’s hard to imagine that she is not the mother of a teenager. Indeed, she only gave birth to her son, Felix, after the novel was completed.
She also lost her own mother to illness when she was 11 years old.
Catching the Light revolves around a mother who has an affair with a famous artist and how it affects her daughter. Credit: Ultimo Press
“When you have a parent that died quite young, it’s a bit of a black box in your mind. You have very limited material to work with,” she says. “I’ve often wondered what our relationship would be like as adults.
“I think a lot of people have a moment of wanting to go back over their childhood and figure out what it was about, and how to have an adult relationship with their parents, and often this probably accompanies the decision to have children.”
In the book, Sylvie, an aged-care worker, moves with her daughter, Alice, into a rent-free artists’ community on the outskirts of Dunedin, where she finds fulfilment – at first – in painting, and in trysts with the owner, Michael, a famous artist.
Years later, Alice has grown up with trust and control issues, and has become slightly infamous due to something that happened under Michael’s roof.
Without giving anything away, Michael doesn’t always treat Sylvie or Alice very well – but despite the power imbalance, Horton’s portrayal of a self-absorbed male artist is not of the #MeToo kind.
Her previous novel, Between You and Me (2023), also has a male character who is older and more affluent than the two women he gets involved with, yet he doesn’t elicit loathing.
“I’m really not someone who can write a straight villain,” Horton says. “I’m just bad at it. I feel too much compassion for a character once I start to write them.”
In early drafts, Sylvie and Alice were going to be prisoners of a cult, but Horton found herself heading too far into thriller territory. “That’s not really the writer I am. The psychology between characters is what I find interesting about writing fiction.”
The novel offered other ways to connect imaginatively with her late mother, Robin, a prolific writer who left behind notebooks of ephemera. A poem of Robin’s, which foreshadows important themes and plot points, appears early in the novel.
Horton’s parents were both from southern Africa and met at university in Durban. They both studied PhDs at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, which is where Joanna was born.
The family moved to Dunedin, and Joanna and her father, Stephen, relocated to Brisbane after Robin’s death. Joanna feels a strong kinship with New Zealand but little with the US, despite returning to study her Master of Arts in anthropology at the University of Chicago.
“I thought I might want to live there again some time because I have citizenship,” she says. “Certainly, that’s not the case any more.”
It’s a few days before the US president will declare his trade war with the world, and we’re talking at the Smug Fig cafe in Stones Corner. The cafe is within the Griffith electorate, not far from the home Horton shares with Felix and her partner, Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather.
Chandler-Mather won the seat from Labor’s Terri Butler in the 2022 federal election. He campaigned on housing affordability and aircraft noise, mobilised an army of volunteers, and personally knocked on thousands of doors (mine included).
“Max makes tonnes of sacrifices to do his job,” Horton says. “I think couples with young kids can plan to go on a holiday, go on a weekend away. We don’t have that. There’s never really been a time in our lives together where he’s not been working a crazy schedule.”
His wins include the Greens securing an extra $1 billion for public and community housing from the government’s Housing Australia Future Fund. But last August, when the MP, a former trade union organiser, addressed the CFMEU and accused Labor of attacking “every worker in this country” by forcing the union into administration, he was lambasted by Labor for “grandstanding”.
How does Horton rate her partner’s chances of holding on to Griffith on May 3?
“You don’t want to take anything for granted,” she says.
“For me, I don’t want to be left feeling like there was more I could have done and didn’t. In the state election, when we lost South Brisbane, we shouldn’t have lost that seat. If we had campaigned harder there, we would have held it.
“Having been through quite a few elections, my personal philosophy is that you can only do everything that you can, and then there are certain elements that you can’t control, and you have to be OK with that.”
Horton’s dedication to the Greens’ cause doesn’t greatly colour her books. In Catching the Light, the grown-up Alice is writing a PhD in dystopian fiction about climate change, but it’s not a major plot point.
Still, when the character laments that “the people who were actively trying to avert the end of the world were the ones who got laughed at”, you catch a glimpse of concerns explored more nakedly in Horton’s writings for journals including Overland. (Horton also recently completed a PhD in food systems governance.)
More prominent in her fiction is the theme of compromised female friendship. In Catching the Light, the adult Alice begins spending time with an art critic, Caroline, but is unsure whether Caroline simply wants to get the goss on Michael.
Horton’s first novel, Between You and Me, depicts a menage a trois set in the sharehouses and apartments of West End. Credit: Ultimo Press
Her Brisbane-set debut novel, meanwhile, is about two best friends in their mid-20s, Elisabeth and Mari, who both become involved with Jack, a history lecturer in his mid-40s, with devastating consequences for both of them.
“The feedback I get from readers is that, ‘this is not a real friendship, they’re not very nice to each other’, but I think a lot of friendships can be like that, especially between young adults. When you’re working out how to relate to other people, sometimes you show your worst side.”
Horton is also adept at the difficult art of writing sex. Catching the Light’s erotic scenes are visceral and daring, while Between You and Me has scorchers that seem to prove that the brain is the most important erogenous zone. She’s making Brisbane sexy again.
“Readers say that!” she laughs. “They’re interested in the relationship with the older man as well. I guess they’re interested in the power dynamics.
“The older man [and younger woman] is a bit of a trope, and I wanted to subvert that trope. In the first book, both the women characters have their own type of power. They’re young, they’re sexy, they have freedom. He feels like he’s a kind of boring middle-aged fart next to them.”
Catching the Light and Between You and Me are published by Ultimo Press, RRP $34.99.
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