Very Impressive for Your Age is a witty and relatable book about the highs and lows of chasing your ambitions. We chatted to Eleanor Kirk about developing the novel from a short story, writing with humour and how her screenwriting skills helped her craft fiction.
Very Impressive for Your Age has some interesting crossover with your work of short fiction, ‘The Next Dame Joan, Probably’. Can you tell us about the relationship between these two stories?
Yes! I wrote the short story back in 2023 as a sort of proof of concept and was lucky enough to have it published by KYD in the New Australian Fiction anthology, which was a huge honour as I always love reading the work you guys discover and put out. Writing a novel is such a big undertaking, so making a smaller version of it and sending it out into the world first as a sort of test-run was crucial in giving me the kick up the bum to keep going.
I wrote the short story back in 2023 as a sort of proof of concept.
I did notice a lot of differences in writing the novel version—in the short story, Evelyn can’t speak at all, whereas I found that too tricky to do for a whole novel, so I changed it to be that she just can’t sing (mostly—she has periods of not speaking too). The short story also focuses more on how people treat someone who is voiceless, whereas the novel is more internal and goes into further depth about Evelyn’s character before and after the voice loss. But there was one part of her voicelessness in the short story (specifically how men treat her when she can’t speak at all, as a sort of sounding board for their trauma dumps) that I found a way to work into the novel, just because it was so fun to write.
Evelyn goes through a bit of a mid-20s crisis. What did you want to capture about this particular period of someone’s life?
I can’t speak for everyone who’s ever gone through their mid-20s, but I think for myself and a lot of my peers, there comes a point where you’re a few years into your career and you suddenly have an ‘Is this it?’ moment. Like, everything you’ve studied and worked towards has led you here, and suddenly you realise that this is the path you’ll be on for the rest of your life—which is a very long time. And that can be very frightening and overwhelming to think about. Ambition and adrenaline get you through most of your 20s but then they start to taper off (at least for some people), and you’re left wondering if you made the right choices. It also (absurdly) feels too late to change your path by then, because you’ve already sunk so many years into study and internships, training, etc. But that’s just the sunk cost fallacy! You can actually change your mind and do something different at any time if you’re willing to get over the shame (which is self-inflicted—nobody else cares). Life is very long. Just do what you want and quit when you’re done!
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