We live dual lives: one real and one relegated to the world of potential, longing, imagination and regret.
Perhaps it is a characteristic of the human condition that we can always imagine ourselves in two places at once. If we have children, we wonder what life would be like without them; if we don't, we wonder the same. We think about travelling if we had not, about leaving and whether we should have, and about staying and whether we should have gone.
A more spiritual person might think of it as a kind of reincarnation - that somewhere, out there, there is a version of ourselves that fled when we stayed, that jumped when we hesitated or took that other road that converged in the proverbial wood.
It's a peculiarly human preoccupation that says something (or, perhaps, reveals our anxieties at the possibility that it actually says nothing at all) about how we conceive of ourselves and how our experiences shape us.
The writer, Courtney Collins, mediated on that idea on Wednesday night as she launched her most recent novel, Bird, at McLeans Bookstore on Beaumont Street.
"It's such an important thing for a woman to back herself," she said in answer to a question about how she felt now that her work was in the world.
Collins, an alumnus of the University of Newcastle, was in Hamilton for a conversation with Newcastle Writers Festival director Rosemarie Milsom on Wednesday evening. It was a sold-out event.
Bird is the story about a girl (named Bird) who comes of age in two challenging worlds - in modern-day Darwin as a young teen with a natural talent for art who is trying to figure out where she belongs in the world and as a child growing up in a village in the Himalayas, who has no intention of living life in a relationship forced on her as a child.
It is also the story of another woman, nurse Margie Shapiro, approaching mid-life, who is warding off an emotional breakdown and complete crisis.
The book addresses several themes: how we value young women, intergenerational trauma, the necessity of connection for survival, the power of art, and pursuing a spiritual life outside of organized religion.
Tellingly, the novel is narrated in an unconventional second-person style (often avoided by writers for its pitfalls and contrivances), but Collins deliberately chose this Style to convey a story of two distinct voices speaking to each other. In this story of finding oneself, Collins's preoccupation with the dual life is given a real, tangible voice.
"It's paying attention and wanting to name things as cleanly and accurately as possible to paint the picture. That's what I was aiming for," she told the Newcastle Herald's Weekender magazine.
"I knew I wanted to write a story about connection. I knew that I wanted to write a story about the way trauma ricochets through lifetimes. And I wanted the protagonist, the heroine, to be a young woman, a girl."
Bird is published by Hachette Australia. Following Wednesday night's launch, the writer will appear in conversation again on Saturday, September 20, with Katherine McLean at Betty Loves Books in Newcastle. She is also conducting a one-day creative writing workshop for the Hunter Writers Centre on Saturday, October 12, in the same city.
