What happens when an Australian medical research institute “throw[s] a creative writer into the mix”?
Emily Maguire’s latest novel emerged out of a $100,000 fellowship from the University of Sydney Charles Perkins Centre. The centre focuses on lifestyle diseases: the “things we give ourselves”, as Maguire put it, during a thought-provoking discussion of her new book, Love Objects, at Guardian Australia’s monthly Zoom book club on Friday.
The fellowship offered Maguire the opportunity to explore a character that had been “haunting” her for over a decade. The protagonist of Love Objects, Nic, has so much stuff in her house it almost literally kills her.
In Love Objects, when Nic’s niece Lena discovers her aunt half buried and bleeding in her home, she steps in to clean up the house – thereby running away from her own crisis: a sex tape filmed without her consent going viral.
Hoarding, the first theme of Love Objects, ties into the novels’ second theme: consent. Lena’s experience shows how “devastating it is to your sense of privacy for something you thought was private to be shared”, Maguire said. But what Lena doesn’t understand is that cleaning her aunt’s house while she’s away in hospital could be seen as analogous.
Because of the Charles Perkins Centre’s connections with Royal Prince Alfred and Westmead hospitals, Maguire’s fellowship gave her access to people in treatment for hoarding disorder, as well as paramedics, who often have to report that hoarders don’t have a safe environment to go back into after their stay in hospital.
Maguire said her research showed that it was difficult to help people with hoarding disorder, as their behaviour made them feel good and they often did not want help.
Love Objects “plays with different concepts of privacy”, Maguire said. “Do you intervene against someone’s wishes when you think it’s affecting their health or wellbeing?”
“I don’t have an answer,” Maguire said. “That’s why I think it’s good to explore with fiction: you can play out the scenario.”
Lucy Clark, Guardian Australia’s features editor, chaired the book club and asked Maguire how class affects all these discussions.
“If you don’t own your own home, if you are a renter or are living in a housing commission, then there are people having a say over your home and how it is kept – and intervention is more likely to be forced on you than a home owner,” Maguire said.
She contrasted this with the example of Andy Warhol who “by any current definition of hoarding disorder was a hoarder”. But his boxes are considered “art”.
The experience of being paid a salary as an author was a “unique experience”, Maguire said, after spending her career supplementing her writing with other work. The salary made her grapple with what constitutes important work. “Not being grandiose about it but when I’m writing something like this, that to me is more valuable to the world than when I was answering phones in a call centre.”
The salary, she said, “allowed me a lot more time to write – that’s at the most basic level. And freedom. There’s something about not lying awake at 3am wondering how you’re going to pay the electricity bill that allows the mind to move more freely.”
• Love Objects by Emily Maguire is out now. Guardian Australia’s Book Club is held monthly on Zoom, hosted by Australia At Home
