Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings Debut Spotlight feature. For June that debut is Fragile Creatures by Khin Myint (Black Inc.), a powerful memoir about family, care and responsibility, told with gentle honesty and humour.
This interview has been transcribed and edited for clarity and concision. To watch the video conversation, visit KYD’s Instagram profile.
Can you tell us about your journey to publication?
Publishing is nuts. It’s obscene. It’s like stripping. (Laughs.) It’s like stripping in public. But something in my life feels like it’s telling me this is the right thing to do. For memoirists, I think, something deep inside them tells them it’s the right thing to do. I don’t know—I just know for me it was like that.
You participated in the Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter scheme back in 2020—can you tell us more about that experience?
The Next Chapter is a mentorship, and they pair you up with someone. I wanted an older woman—I needed her perspective on the parts of the memoir that make me look creepy. (Laughs.) I needed her perspective on those [parts], and you’ll know what I mean if you read the book. And she was good, she was gentle, she was confirming—I needed that.
[Kristina Olsson] gave me excellent advice about time. By that, I mean how to approach writing a book that’s about the past, while going through different emotions about it in the present. I felt angry sometimes in the present, but that transmuted over the years into acceptance and insight. Trauma doesn’t feel like dealing with trauma—they’re two different sets of emotions. What you’ll read in the book is the experience of certain types of trauma, but the emotions that I went through as I was writing about that trauma are a totally different set of emotions. To write a memoir is to be in the paradox.
This book is incredibly honest, yet gentle. How do you create that balance both on the page and in your practice when dealing with difficult topics?
I was about halfway through writing [the] memoir before I really realised what a beautiful form it is. Memoirs are philosophical, they speak philosophically, but they all speak politically because philosophy is like that. At the same time as being those ‘high end’ conversations, they’re very friendly on an interpersonal level. It’s like a writer coming out and saying, ‘This is the shit that happened to me. Come hang out for a little bit and feel less alone with whatever the shit is that happened to you.’ That’s a friendly thing to do! So they’re friendly, but at the same time they are philosophical and deep—not that friendliness isn’t also deep.
What do you hope readers will take away from your story?
What I hope readers get out of it is this experience of remembering how language colonises us. It colonises our bodies, it makes life feel the way it feels. I’d like readers to think about that in their own lives. They know that already, but it’s nice to read a book where you’re watching someone show how that played out in their life. That’s what I’m offering. At the same time, it’d be cool if the masculinity theme gets picked up.
What books have you loved lately and what’s on your TBR pile?
I’m really into Elena Ferrante. I love the fact that she really crosses taboos about motherhood. She makes it real; she doesn’t just lean into it. She goes for the jugular then goes beyond. She’s breaking taboos and that is thrilling as a writer, isn’t it? I think that’s why she’s so popular.
I promised myself I would say to read bell hooks’ The Will to Change. It’s about men and masculinities. We don’t do a very good job of talking about how men are attempting to embrace contradictory expectations that are put on them in the modern world. When we’re critiquing masculinity, we just critique it, but we don’t spend enough time thinking ‘how does it get that way?’ There’s this entitlement thesis that goes around—‘it’s just a sense of entitlement, that’s how guys end up the way that they are’—and I just think that’s way too two-dimensional. It lacks a depth of compassion. You can be critical and compassionate at the same time. I think that we can’t understand something unless we can allow ourselves to flow into it and imagine what it feels like.
Siri Hustvedt—she wrote The Shaking Woman. She just ploughs right into these questions of ‘What is consciousness? What is the body? What is the mind? Why do we imagine this illusion?’ She’s not being a hippy about it, she’s being much deeper. Hustvedt is on a board of psychiatry even though she’s a creative writer. She’s really well-respected in what they call medical humanities circles. She’s wonderful, you should read her if you’re interested or if you’re suffering from an illness that’s ambiguous in some way in/around mind and body.
You can pick up a copy of Fragile Creatures at your local bookstore today.
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