About Laura Bloom
About my writing:
In The Mood is the first in a series of novels set in Australia at different times in the last century.
While my novels are set in different eras, they focus on relationships and people. My aim is always to make my characters and their stories as real and sympathetic to the reader as someone they might meet now – whether the story is set in the present or the past. I am interested in the ways we’ve changed and the ways we haven’t, and what this reveals about us and our society now, and what might constitute our fundamental natures. Particularly in the areas history can’t go and that yet are so important, maybe even the most important, to a lot of us – our intimate relationships, how we feel about ourselves, what holds us back, and how far we’ll go for what we want and believe.
When writing I am trying to convey a sense of ‘all time happening all the time’. Not just because I think this is true in people’s personal experiences – our memories and past experiences are always informing our experience of the present, and vice versa - but I think it’s true in our social experience as well. Our memories of the past as a society, as well as the experiences themselves, are here with us now, changing us, just as we keep changing and retelling the story of our past, in a constantly evolving exchange.
My next novel, The Cherry Walk, is set in the present, and takes place mainly in Mullumbimby, a small town on the east coast of Australia.
About me:
I was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1968 and grew up in the inner city suburb of Glebe. Once a suburb for middle class professionals in the late nineteenth century, it became a slum in the Great Depression and was still that way in the early 1970s when my family moved in. In the time I lived there it went through the process of gentrification - thanks to its proximity to Sydney University and the city - and yet it still retained pockets of extreme poverty and deprivation. This environment had a formative influence on me, as did my experience of travelling all over Sydney for my schooling, which wound up being at five different schools, including Loreto Convent Girls School, Kirribilli – my best schooling experience, and The Ökumenisches Gymnasium in Bremen, West Germany, where I attended ‘Year 13’ for a year as a Rotary Exchange Student.
While I knew I wanted to be a writer, I had my doubts about studying writing at university. Extended writing courses like a writing degree did and still do seem to me to be an uneasy fit between the orthodoxies of an institution and the individualism good writing demands. I tried, briefly, and dropped out quickly. It seemed to me that everyone was sounding increasingly the same, and were increasingly of the one mind on matters of taste and preference. I instinctively knew the best way forward for me was to learn through life experience and the practise of writing.
In 1992 I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications from the University of Technology, Sydney, into a recession, which I think marked me, along with many of my generation, for life. I responded by starting my own small filmmaking business, and the following years were spent writing, travelling and working for the government in the area of community development and health promotion for young people, including young people from Aboriginal and South Pacific Islander backgrounds.
In 1999 I fulfilled a long held dream and lived in Southern India for a year, and then for the next three years in London, where I wrote two novels, Augustine’s Lunch, a novel for young adults, and Choosing Zoe, a romantic comedy. These were published by Allen & Unwin and Penguin respectively under my maiden name of Laura Budd. Augustine’s Lunch was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Young Adult Fiction and runner up in the Young Australian Readers Awards.
On returning to Australia I worked as a project manager for a small public relations firm providing services to the global team of a multinational pharmaceutical company based in Sweden and the UK, and also a global NGO affiliated with the UN. This experience, which involved exposure to the workings of global big business and NGOs was very interesting. It also allowed me to earn sufficient funds to resume writing in 2008.
In 2005 I moved with my husband and son to the Northern Rivers Region of New South Wales, on the East Coast of Australia, where my family on my paternal side have lived since the 1880s. Having spent long summers here as a child, it’s one of the places, along with the suburbs of Glebe and Bondi in Sydney, that feels like ‘home’.
More about me: The Proust Questionnaire
These questions appear regularly in Vanity Fair magazine, and are based on a nineteenth century Parisian parlour game believed to have been originated by Antoinette Faure. Proust completed it twice. I answer it here for the first time.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
On my front verandah at dusk on a Friday evening. Chilled glass of white wine in my hand, bowl of salty snacks at my elbow, family and friends arranged likewise. The children are playing happily, yet look distinctly sleepy.
What is your greatest fear?
Illness or death of people mentioned in the previous answer.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
My unwavering sense of dread. I can find the dark cloud to any silver lining.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Unkindness.
Which living person do you most admire?
Margaret Atwood. She is an original thinker, a great writer, and tells wonderful stories.
What is your greatest extravagance?
Travel.
What is your current state of mind?
Happy with a base note of dread.
What is the quality you most like in a man?
Kindness. Strength. Tenderness.
What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Kindness. Wit. Charm.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Fuck it.
When and where were you happiest?
February 28th, 1992 - my second date with my future husband. I could feel the future opening out before me.
Who are your favourite writers?
Fiction: Anne Tyler – her middle period, from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant through to A Patchwork Planet. Margaret Atwood. Colette. Thomas Hardy. Nancy Mitford. John Updike. John Irving. Jane Austen. Edith Wharton. Sue Miller.
Non Fiction: George Orwell, Judith Thurman, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Antony Beevor, Louis Menand, and, a recent addition to the list - Ariel Levy.
What talent would you most like to have?
To ice skate like Michelle Kwan. To sing like Donna Summer.
Who is your favourite hero of fiction?
Linda Radlett, in The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford. Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick, by John Updike.
Who are your heroes in real life?
JS Bach, Dolly Parton, Doris Lessing – and all those who have endured great difficulties and overturned expectations to fulfil their unique creative potential.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
My chosen family. Coming to grips with the art of the novel.
Where would you like to live?
Apart from where I live now - in a house on South Park Green backing on to Hampstead Heath, in London.
What is your most treasured possession?
My PC hard drive.
What do you regard as the lowest depths of misery?
The pediatric ward at Tweed Hospital. Although it’s peopled by angels, it feels like hell.
What do you most value in your friends?
Commitment through the good times and the bad.
What are you favourite names?
Leo. Fu-He. Violet. Adelaide.
What is it that you most dislike?
The sociopathic drivers with a death wish who so often end up behind me on the winding country roads around where I live.
What is your greatest regret?
That I didn’t end some important relationships much sooner than I did.
How would you like to die?
At peace.
What is your motto?
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
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