What’s love got to do with it? Everything, when it comes to Victoria Hannan’s first novel – although not in the way you might anticipate.
She was last year's winner of the Victorian Premier’s award for an unpublished manuscript, the influential prize that has seen previous winners such as Peggy Frew, Graeme Simsion, Carrie Tiffany, Jane Harper and Maxine Beneba Clark publish their work both to acclaim and sales.
Victoria Hannan says writing her prize-winning novel helped her work out her own ideas about love.Credit:Elize Strydom
Hannan won for Kokomo, which begins with her main character, Mina, interrupted in an up-close sexual encounter by the news that her apparently agoraphobic mother has left the confines of her home for the first time in 12 years. Mina – living in London and working at an advertising agency and at that moment working on one of her colleagues – hops on the first plane back to Melbourne.
And so begins an ironic, smart and witty look at what love and what different sorts of love offer to a thirty-something woman struggling to find a meaningful relationship with people her age and her own mother.
Hannan has, she says, long been fascinated by the idea that we are compelled to believe that love has to take certain forms, be it romantic or familial love or simply strong friendships. But things don’t always turn out the way we expect, often taking on different shapes, and it’s then that we often feel we have failed or at least are not very good at it.
"But with this story I wanted to explore an unconventional love story and that the love you find in a friendship can often be longer lasting or more important than romantic love or at least serve a different purpose. They should all complement each other and they can all change and evolve over your life too," she says. "I think there’s something quite powerful in understanding that love doesn’t have to be one thing."
We initially meet Mina expressing love in what Hannan calls a very conventional way. "But every so often she is reconsidering what that idea of love is and towards the end she gets real shock news from her mother and everything is completely blown out of the water."
When Mina returns home, she turns to her best friend Kira for support; re-encounters another old friend; and finally learns the secret at the heart of her mother’s life.
Hannan had herself been living in London for 10 years and writing copy at an agency and working as a freelance photographer. But for the entire time, she had wondered what would be the nature of the phone call that would bring her dashing back to Australia. (In the end it was her father’s diagnosis with Parkinson’s.)
One day she went to a karaoke party and one of her friends sang the Beach Boys song Kokomo: "Off the Florida Keys, there’s a place called Kokomo / That’s where you want to go to get away from it all/ Bodies in the sand, tropical drink melting in your hand/ We’ll be falling in love to the rhythm of a steel drum band/ Down in Kokomo."
She was struck by the lyrics and subsequently discovered that far from a tropical paradise, Kokomo was actually an unprepossessing town in Indiana notable for its now-demolished gas tower, a significant crime rate and a Starbucks outlet destroyed by a tornado a few years ago.
"I was fascinated by this idea that we readily and happily believe things to be truths and often don’t challenge them. When those two ideas – the push and pull (of leaving and staying) and the challenge of who we think people are and who they actually are – came together, Kokomo really started to form in my mind."
And she was intrigued by the all-too-common tendency for people to ignore the inescapable fact that their mothers had lives, desires and ideas of their own before they had children.
When Mina returns to Australia, she goes on a rapid voyage of discovery that brings her to what Hannan calls rock bottom.
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"That’s the point where she knows she finally has to talk to her mother. They can dance around it no longer because she’s so unsatisfied by all these encounters she’s had and what she is really missing is an understanding of her relationship with her mother and how her mother’s relationships have affected her."
Hannan is another Australian novelist who has done time in advertising – think Carey, Courtenay and, more recently, Robbie Arnott. She found it well-paid but creatively unfulfilling and, at times, morally compromising. She turned to fiction because she wanted to write something on her own terms.
"I felt incredibly lucky to be able to work and write for a living every day and I became so much better at my craft because of it. Robbie Arnott is right about the discipline: you go to work, you have a brief you have to meet, you write a certain number of words to a very strict deadline. I have carried some of that discipline over to my fiction writing, so I have a kind of crazy spreadsheet or word-count targets that I like to hit every day."
When I ask whether Jack, the character Mina is intimately involved with in the opening, is based on a real person – he plays a significant albeit distant role in Kokomo – she says she has to plead the fifth amendment.
"A lot of those advertising stories have come from real things I either heard about or witnessed in my agency life in London. I’d better not say which ones are true because I might get in trouble, but there’s definitely some truth in them."
Hannan grew up in Adelaide. "I feel like the two places where we spent most of the time as a family were the library and the art gallery and maybe the botanical gardens. I used to get so bored at the time, but now I’m incredibly grateful that my mum would drag us around to those places."
Her mother apparently knew her daughter was going to be a writer when Hannan was only five: "It took me a lot longer to work that out. Maybe she’s just saying that now because it’s happened."
I wondered whether writing Kokomo had changed Hannan. She concedes she did use it to work out her own ideas about love.
"We’ve all made mistakes in love and try to understand how those mistakes have made us who we are and how they affect how we love other people too. I think I just became more grateful for the love that I do have in my life, whether that’s my family or my friends and it has just made me start to think differently about what I do actually want and need."
Kokomo is published by Hachette at $32.99. Victoria Hannan is a guest at the online Melbourne Writers Festival, August 7-16. mwf.com.au
Jason Steger is Books Editor at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald
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