Jackie Bailey on ‘The Eulogy’: First Book Club

The Kill Your Darlings Podcast
The Kill Your Darlings Podcast
Jackie Bailey on 'The Eulogy': First Book Club
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Editor’s note: This episode contains discussion of death and grief practices.

Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings First Book Club. For June that debut is The Eulogy by Jackie Bailey (Hardie Grant), an autofiction novel about family, death and grief that was shortlisted for the 2018 KYD Unpublished Manuscript Award.

Our theme song is Broke for Free’s ‘Something Elated’. Sound production by Nial Hosken.

Further reading:

Read Ellen Cregan’s review of The Eulogy in our June Books Roundup.

Read about Jackie’s favourite books and reading habits in this month’s Shelf Reflection.

How To Be Between is available now from your local independent bookseller.

Stream or subscribe: Apple Podcasts / Google Podcasts / Spotify / Other (RSS)

Let us know what you think by rating and reviewing in your app of choice!

TRANSCRIPT

Ellen Cregan: Welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings podcast. I’m KYD First Book Club host, Ellen Cregan, and today I’ll be bringing you our June First Book Club interview. Our book for June is The Eulogy by Jackie Bailey, out now from Hardie Grant. Jackie Bailey is a professional writer and researcher and a recognised international expert on cultural diversity in the arts. Her work has been published widely, including in the Roots anthology from the 2020 SBS Emerging Writers Competition. Jackie is also an ordained interfaith minister, trained death walker and practising funeral director. In The Eulogy, Kathy Bradley has driven from Sydney to plan a funeral with her five surviving siblings, most of whom she hardly speaks to, because their sister Annie is finally blessedly, inconceivably dead from the brain tumour she was diagnosed with 25 years earlier. This autofiction novel tells the tangled story of the Bradley family, weaving together storylines and relationships over decades. I sat down with Jackie to discuss her book.

Ellen Cregan: Hey, Jackie, thanks for joining me.

Jackie Bailey: No worries. Thanks for having me, Ellen.

Ellen Cregan: We’re just going to start with a reading from Jackie to begin.

Jackie Bailey: Cool. Well, before I start, I’ll just acknowledge country, that I’m dialling in from the traditional lands of the Wadi Wadi people of the Dharawal Nation. And I’m very blessed and privileged to be able to live on this land, which is where I wrote most of this book. Okay, so I’ll read you a little bit from The Eulogy.

Don’t worry Annie, I won’t do it here. I know how terrible it is to be the finder of the body, and I would never want to put the big kids through that. Besides which, the bureaucratic procedures for transferring a body interstate would be a nightmare and I wouldn’t inflict the paperwork on anyone I loved, not even Barb.

Much easier to drive back to Sydney after your funeral, where I will head straight out to the Garden of Remembrance.

But first, your funeral. It is time to brave the crowds. The Hyperdome is less than a kilometre up the road, but it is never the right weather in Queensland for incidental exercise. Remember when I tried to get you to go for ‘mall-walks’ in the Logan Hyperdome? One of my many ideas for trying to get you fitter, more active, more independent. More like someone I did not have to feel guilty about leaving behind.

The Logan Hyperdome has metastasised since I was last here. I attempt to interpret the directions of a touchscreen map, then wander around trying to look like I know where I am going until I stumble upon a jewellery shop not far from the cinema.

A female shop assistant unlocks the cabinet of crosses for me. Her fingers are strewn with cubic zirconia. I sit down, weary at the mere thought of the hours that went into her make-up. She only has two necklaces that have body of Christ figurines fused to the golden arms of the cross. ‘This one is $329, the woman says, indicating the rose gold one. ‘The yellow gold one is $249. I can probably do a ten per cent discount if you want to get a good chain to go with it.’

‘No, I don’t need a chain,’ I say.

I prefer the rose gold crucifix because it has a more detailed corpse. I ask if I can take pictures with my phone, and the lady nods.

I send Val the images. She calls me. There are outdoor sounds where she is: I imagine sunshine and the quiet satisfaction of getting things done.

‘We’re just picking up the coffin and taking it back to our place so we can get started. We only have three days and they weren’t going to be able to deliver it until Friday, so we just got a work van and picked it up ourselves.’

Val sounds pleased with her own initiative.

‘Oh, good one. Thanks for that,’ I say. ‘Have you dropped off clothes to the funeral parlour?’

‘Yes, I did that on the way. I bought a lovely pink frilly top and a nice pale green skirt.’

‘Nice. Hey, listen, which crucifix do you reckon I should get? I think the rose gold one is more like the one she used to wear.’

‘I agree, I think the rose gold one’s more like hers.’

‘All right, I’ll get that one then.’

‘But you said it’s more expensive?’ I know what she’s really asking. Are you sure you want to spend that much on something that is just going to go into the flames?

‘I want to do it for her. It wouldn’t be the same Annie with no cross on.’ My voice wobbles.

Val’s voice drops. ‘I know what you mean.’

When I hang up, the shop assistant is looking at me.

‘It’s for a funeral,’ I explained.

‘Yes, I gathered that.’

‘That’s why I don’t really need a new chain,’ I add, probably unnecessarily, because the woman merely nods. As she does so, not a hair on her head moves. I have never, not even on my wedding day, looked as well groomed as she does.

‘I’ll take the rose gold one, please,’ I say. I hand over my credit card.

The woman places the crucifix in a padded gift box and ties it with white ribbon. She taps numbers into a calculator and mutters to herself. She applies a 30 per cent discount to the purchase and, without meeting my eye, drops a fine gold chain into the bag. She then goes out back and brings back a handful of tissues for the tears that have been sliding down my cheeks since I got off the phone.

Ellen Cregan: Thank you, Jackie. That was lovely. So for those who are listening who haven’t read your book yet, can you just give us a quick rundown of The Eulogy?

Jackie Bailey: I’ll give it a red hot go, Ellen. So The Eulogy is what’s called autofiction as a genre, so it’s kind of drawing on my version of my life, but also with fictional elements. And basically the protagonist, Kathy Bradley, she’s at a kind of crisis point in her own life when her sister Annie dies. And Annie has been sick for most of their lives together from a brain tumour. And so Kathy drives back to Queensland from New South Wales for her sister Annie’s funeral, and Kathy is to deliver the eulogy. And in the process of preparing and researching the eulogy, she’s sort of grappling with and uncovering all the family secrets and trying to work out how they ended up where they are.

Ellen Cregan: So, as you mentioned, it’s autofiction—the story in the novel has close parallels to your own life experience, but it’s not exactly the same. What was it like to put so much fact into fiction? Like sort of, changing those details and making your own story work in that fictional context?

Jackie Bailey: Yeah, it was…interestingly, not as tricky as it sounds. So I started it off as straight up memoir when I started writing it. So I started writing it as part of a PhD ages ago, like almost ten years ago now. And a year or two in I had a reader, Andy Kinnane—you get really good readers when you do a PhD, and he’s a poet and a writer, and he just sort of said, you know, it works as memoir, but have you ever thought about fiction? Because it can give you a bigger canvas and it allows you to kind of create plot points in the present tense to push the narrative along. So I sort of turned my hand to that, and I found it really freeing. And it allowed me to kind of delve a bit more deeply into my parents’ and my grandparents’ histories, and they lived through some pretty interesting times, so that was really useful. And then it also just allowed me to really focus in emotionally on what was important to me in the story, which is very much about me and my sister, and overcoming intergenerational trauma.

Ellen Cregan: There’s something that you do in the novel that’s, I guess we could call interesting choices—it’s all in second person, which is so refreshing to read, you don’t really see it that often. Why did you choose to narrate in the second person?

Jackie Bailey: Yeah, if—for any writers listening, and if you’re a writer too, Ellen, you know that you just try various drafts of things. And so I tried first person, I tried third person, I did massive finds and replaces. And then I just really felt right to address it to my sister—or in the book, Kathy to address it to her sister Annie. My sister Alison, she did pass away, she died about halfway through my PhD, and about halfway through writing the book. And it was, I hadn’t thought about this before you asked me that question—but I think it was after she died that I switched it to the second person, and it just felt right, because it was like writing to her.

Ellen Cregan: Because a lot of what Kathy does is, it’s almost like she’s trying to create this, or even reclaim a dialogue with her sister—because towards the end, or towards the end of her life, Annie loses a lot of the ability to communicate and engage in the ways that she had been able to as a teenager and a child. So, yeah, that’s really interesting that that’s sort of when the switch happened for you.

Jackie Bailey: Yeah, that’s a really good pickup, Ellen, hadn’t thought about it. But it’s absolutely true that as my sister, my real sister Alison got sicker, her condition did deteriorate. And you don’t necessarily know this when someone gets sort of brain cancer, but, yeah, it’s a degenerative condition if it goes on long enough. I certainly didn’t know it when I was a kid. And as she got older, she developed early onset dementia. And that does affect a person’s ability to be in the present, and to know what’s going on, and to be in conversation with whoever’s around them. And so I kind of started to lose her in that way. And then over time, she also lost the physical abilities to speak, and so I lost her in that way as well. And so it’s like—I think psychologists call this sort of grief ‘unresolved loss’, where you’re just kind of losing someone permanently, in an ongoing way. And so I think that’s…when I was writing the book, I really struggled with for a long time, I was really, like, I can’t…I experimented with Annie’s voice as well, because I write some stuff from the parents’ points of view, but in third person. And I experimented with that for the character of Annie as well. But it just didn’t feel right, because I really didn’t feel like—my sister had lost her voice, and for so long couldn’t speak for herself politically or emotionally or literally. So I really didn’t want to do that for her. So it just felt like the right thing to do to address her in that kind of dialogic way. And then when she does speak, it’s really based on what I remember of her speech patterns, and actually on her journals as much as I could.

Ellen Cregan: The journals become kind of important to the actual eulogy in the book towards the end, and I really loved that that was how Annie got agency sort of in the end, was that Kathy reads the journals and realises—I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read the book yet, but realises something about Annie or about how something that had happened in her teenage years, and she’s able to take that information and then sort of change the narrative a little bit in the eulogy itself, and everyone’s a bit shocked—but I loved it. I thought it was such a great climax.

Jackie Bailey: Thanks, Ellen. Yeah, that was…because I really wanted to speak to the way that people with an intellectual disability are really infantilised—not just by society, but by the people who are supposed to love them as well, quite often. And it’s not—like, my mum and my family were extremely caring for my sister, so I don’t want to, I’m not trying to villainise them at all in that way. Vilify, sorry, not villainise. But that does happen. Whereas when, like for me and my sister growing up, we were so close in age that I kind of always knew her as a person first. And her disability is obviously part of her, but it was only ever part of her, it didn’t sort of define her agency and her ability to fall in love, and all that sort of stuff. So it was very important to me to communicate that aspect of a person with an intellectual disability, that even though it might not seem like it, even if they’ve got dementia and whatever other kind of conditions—I know for my sister, she still exercised a lot of courage and agency inside her own head, as well as in the world, the very limited physical world that she operated in.

Ellen Cregan: So writing autofiction—this kind of maybe throws a spanner in the works of this question I’m about to ask, but did you have a favourite character to write, when it was sort of, when there were those parallels to your own life and people you really knew? Was there a favourite, or maybe even a least favourite?

Jackie Bailey: Good question. Was there a favourite character? I quite like writing Evan, who’s the, like, the romantic lead, because he’s loosely based on my actual husband. And so that was kind of fun, because we, he’s kind of funny and he gets to be kind of casual but funny and handsome and whatever, and dashing and brave. So he gets to be pretty cool. So I quite enjoyed… (Laughs) And also that was just a lighter part of the story, mostly. I mean, obviously not in the context of Kathy’s mental health issues, but it was a sunny, that was the hopeful part of the story. And I really loved the way, and I love the way that my actual husband interacts with casual racism. He just lets it slide—he’s amazing. He just lets it slide off him because he’s had so much worse. Whereas I get all outraged and whatever about really casual stuff where he’s like, oh, whatever, let’s just move on. So I quite enjoyed pretending to be like him, (Laughs) kind of even briefly.

Ellen Cregan: I love that, that your chosen person in life was your favourite character to write into the book. That’s really beautiful.

Jackie Bailey: (Laughs) I’ll let him know, he’ll be very impressed.

Ellen Cregan: So you mentioned before this book started as a PhD project—what was it like going from, because writing a PhD is such a specific way to write something- what was it like to go from that to a sort of mainstream publishing kind of process, with the editing and all of that sort of stuff? What was that contrast like for you as a writer?

Jackie Bailey: It wasn’t too much of a transformation, really. I think the way that I did my creative writing PhD was fairly self-led anyway. Like, I’m pretty old, I was obviously a mature age, whatever that is, person, student, and I was offsite down in Wollongong, whereas my PhD supervisors are at UNSW. So I was pretty self-directed, and I pretty much did the PhD so that I would write this book. So I didn’t feel any strictures around the work, around form or anything like that. My supervisors were really supportive, so it was actually just a very supportive and helpful way to get a piece, get it done. And at the same time, of course, I was doing the academic research and dissertation, and that was, I find that stuff really interesting too. So it was quite a good balance.

Ellen Cregan: I think from our conversation so far, people will be able to tell if they haven’t read the book, there is a lot of darkness to it and a lot of tragedy. Was it difficult to linger in such traumatic spaces while you were writing, both the PhD and maybe even through the editing process for the final product?

Jackie Bailey: Yeah. It wasn’t too bad in the edit, because you know, you’re a few steps removed by the time you get to the edit, you’ve done the hard lifting. Although that said, actually when I read through the proof, the typeset proof, I was just like, ‘far out, this is sad!’ (Laughs) But you know, there’s a happy ending, so it’s all good. But yeah, it was. I’m not going to lie, it was hard. People sometimes think that sort of thing is going to be cathartic—it wasn’t cathartic for me, but I didn’t think it would be, I didn’t do it as therapy, I did it more as a statement of agency and taking control of the narrative, which maybe is therapy, I don’t know. Yeah. But it was hard, and I had to have a fair bit of mental health scaffolding in place, so I didn’t see a counsellor the whole time or anything like that, but I did have a mental health plan in the bottom drawer kind of thing if I needed to. I had pretty strict self rules about exercise and sleep. And my husband is a creative as well, and he was working on his sort of autobiographical piece, which is a play called A Practical Guide to Self Defence, which is all about his growing up Chinese Australian and getting into a lot of street fights, which is what I mean by he lets casual racism just go by him, because he’s had so much worse. And so he’d be working on that, and I’d be working on my thing, and then we’d just convene at lunchtime and I would look like I’d been beaten up, and he would look like he’d just beaten someone up. (Laughs) And we’d just chat, like, ‘oh my God, how is that okay?’ And then I would go for a walk or a nap or something, and then we’d do the paid work, because we’re consultants and I’m a funeral director, and then we’d get on with that stuff, and then do it all again the next day. So it was really good to have someone else in the house, like, following the same kind of pace and time. You know, literally after one hour I’d come out, I’d get a cup of tea, you know, I’d give him a kiss or he’d give me a kiss and then we’d go back and we’d be like, ‘see you on the other side’. (Laughs) That was really beneficial.

Ellen Cregan: So the book of course is tragic, but there’s also, we kind of got onto this earlier, that there are funny moments and there’s quite a lot of funny dialogue in the book that you put in there. So what was it like to write such a sad, generally sad story, but also include those moments of humour?

Jackie Bailey: Oh, it’s more about just getting the balance right. Like I could have written this whole thing as a satire of my family, because my family’s pretty funny—especially because half of them are in the medical profession. Like, I’ve got a lot of nurses and doctors and stuff in my family, as most Asian families probably do, and they’re funny, you know? Especially nurses have hardcore gallows humour. And you know, when you go through all this stuff, and it’s very laconic humour as well on my dad’s side of the family, the kind of the Aussie Bloke humour. So it’s almost hard not to be funny—or my vision of funny anyway, which hopefully other people find funny. (Laughs) And especially with my husband, the stories are dark, but they do have their moments of lightness, and you’ve got to grab them and see them all the time. And in my work as a funeral director as well, humour and laughing, and that’s just the other side of crying—so you know, might as well do that as well.

Ellen Cregan: Something that I think I connected with a lot in this book is I’m from a, well, my mum’s from quite a big family, sort of similar to the family in The Eulogy, eight kids. And whenever there’s a funeral they’re always up the front laughing about something or other, in a very, like, celebrating the life of the person kind of way. Not in a, obviously not in a mean way, but just the shock from the rest of the church is always something that I’ve noticed, and they’re very happy to cackle away at an unflattering photo.

Jackie Bailey: Yeah, good on them! Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s true of big families as well, like, it’s always about who can take the piss the best.

Ellen Cregan: Yeah, absolutely. I saw a lot of my family in this book, actually, in some strange ways. So you just mentioned before that, as well as being a writer, you’re also a funeral director, an ordained interfaith minister and a trained death walker. Can you talk a little bit about what those roles mean, and also kind of how that sort of manifested in the book?

Jackie Bailey: Yeah, so that sort of happened after my sister died. I took a bit of time off writing, as you can imagine, it was probably, it was too close for a little while, and I just went and trained, I did this Masters of theology through the New Seminary, which is like, it’s the world’s oldest interfaith seminary, which—interfaith just means not religious. So it means people who, like me, think you know, we want to have a spiritual dimension to our lives, but we don’t want to belong to any religion and we don’t believe in God. But we still want to be of service, sort of, and be able to offer what the Church used to offer as pastoral care to people in the community. So I did that, and I trained as a funeral celebrant and director and death walker, sort of did all those things kind of in parallel over the next couple of years. And then I finished the manuscript, and then I started working in the funeral space, very much in the death positive sort of grassroots movement of trying to bring death out of an industry model, and back into the community. So yeah, so the funeral homes that I work with are either totally not for profit or social enterprises, which is really important to me, just from an ethical point of view. So that’s all about—I mean, there’s a lot of storytelling in that, too. Like, when you are a celebrant at a funeral, you meet with the family, and sometimes it’s the first time that that family has, like, narrated their person’s life in a different context to actually, you know, interacting with them in their lives. And it’s a really interesting transition for them. And you’re kind of the guide and the witness and the journey person, I guess, with them. So that’s what ‘death walker’ really means as well, it’s like, you just walk with people through the process of getting ready. It could be getting ready for death, or for me it’s mostly about afterwards.

Ellen Cregan: I’m really interested in the death industry, and I’ve read a few books about, you know, natural burials and things like that. And I love that in The Eulogy, it’s not super explicit, but you can see what your, like, your-Jackie, views of the death industry are, like about how some funeral directors act or, you know, the cost of a coffin, a cardboard box coffin or whatever. And I loved that that was just this little subtle thing throughout that you can see, this is something that’s so important to you as a person, yet it’s subtle, but still present. I really enjoyed that.

Jackie Bailey: (Laughs) That’s good. I’m glad. Yeah. I think my fellow deathies will really appreciate that, too—you know, because people who get into this line of work, who are like me, it’s largely because they’ve experienced the death of someone close to them and they’ve had a bad experience with a funeral home. Not necessarily, like, terrible, but just not very healing, not very helpful, not warm, like, very commoditised. And even when you and others use the term ‘industry’, it shouldn’t be an industry.

Ellen Cregan: Exactly.

Jackie Bailey: Yeah, it’s a community thing. It’s really just an intrinsic part of the human cycle. So how do we bring it back to that? So anyway, there’s quite a strong grassroots movement in that space in Australia, which I’m really happy to be part of.

Ellen Cregan: I think having a storyteller such as yourself, as you said before, would be such a beautiful experience for people going through a difficult death—as they all are, because death is something that we’re all going to face in the end, but we never really think about it that much until it’s right in front of us. And yeah, having someone like you to help is, as a writer and someone who’s qualified in that space, just must be really lovely for people.

Jackie Bailey: Oh, I don’t know. I hope so. In The Eulogy, in the book, I do kind of pepper it with sort of tips, in a way? (Laughs) Like, if you’re in this situation, here’s some of the things that you can do. And don’t let the funeral directors tell you otherwise, because there’s actually quite a lot of latitude for you and your person. You know, like, I talk about how you can wash and dress them, and take in oils, and do all sorts of things that they won’t encourage you to do, because—I’m talking about the more commercial end of things—like the community end of things they will absolutely encourage you, and I would always encourage people to do those things if they want to, because it’s so healing to spend time with your person if you’ve got the opportunity, to overcome the initial kind of discomfort. I just think it really helps in the whole grieving process.

Ellen Cregan: I love the image of Annie’s—I think it’s her niece decorating the cardboard coffin with all the pink flowers, because Annie loves the colour pink, I thought that was so beautiful.

Jackie Bailey: Thanks, Ellen. Yeah. And that’s pretty much straight from my niece did do that for my sister Alison. My niece is an artist, yeah, and so that was her thing. And because we do have a ridiculously large family, there were jobs for everybody. So someone does the slideshow, and some of the kids do the decorating or whatever it might be, which was really good. And it’s also really good because then different people—you know, often you think about a funeral and think, oh, but I don’t want to get up and say anything. So you feel like, kind of, you might feel bad because you don’t feel like you can get up and say anything, but then I haven’t done anything for the person, and what can I do? But just like in life, there’s all sorts of acts of service that you can do for your person in death. And if you’re artistic or whatever, it might be like, I have one sister who’s very good with her hands, and good with craft and all that sort of stuff, but she absolutely wasn’t going to get up and speak. And that’s okay. Like, you can always find a way to contribute to the person’s funeral that is meaningful to both the person who’s died and the person who’s trying to say farewell.

Ellen Cregan: So my last question is a little bit of a big one. (Jackie laughs) What impact do you hope—(Laughs) sorry to throw you that. What impact do you hope your book will have on the world, or on the readers? (Both laugh). The world and readers.

Jackie Bailey: (Laughs) Well, I mean, I hope—I’m just going to narrow that down to the readers, (Both laugh) and then, you know, maybe they will go and change the world. I just hope, well hope—I really hope that this book is an experience like of hope and a lived experience of hope, if I can put it in such corny terms. Because I think it is about overcoming intergenerational trauma. And I just hope people—I hope people like me, Eurasians and Asians and people of colour, see themselves in the book, or people from different class or background, or—whoever needs to see themselves, I hope they see themselves and feel seen, and that they can take just really small steps. Like the protagonist takes really small steps towards a hopeful outcome, but it is in that direction. So that’s what I, that’s my hope. I mean, I have other sort of less grandiose—or probably still grandiose hopes, that people will also take away a greater understanding of the issues facing people with disabilities put into aged care, you know—young people in aged care, that’s a pet concern of mine. So there’s that sort of thing. But yes, mostly I just want you, Ellen or whoever else is reading the book to think, yeah, I mean, okay, I can do this. I can keep going.

Ellen Cregan: And there’s truly so much that I didn’t get to ask you about, because we only had a limited amount of time. But if you haven’t read this book yet, get a copy and read it, because it’s just such a beautiful book about death, and love, and life and all of those things. So thank you so much for chatting to me today. Jackie, it was really nice to talk to you.

Jackie Bailey: Thank you, Ellen.

Ellen Cregan: That was the June First Book Club edition of the Kill Your Darlings podcast. We’ll be back soon, but while you wait for our next episode, you can find commentary, criticism, memoir and more on our website. You’ll also find information about our range of writing courses. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time.