‘I Wanted To Write Something For Younger Women’
Crafted from her journal entries of decades ago Nikki Gemmell’s non-fiction work, Dissolve, traces the swooning ecstasy of sexual love, the agony and confusion of rejection and explores how that experience of love stymies female creativity.
The “sex writer” label has stuck to Gemmell since the publication of her 2003 book The Bride Stripped Bare. In 2011, when she was asked why her books focus on women’s sex lives, she said that she wants to write with “excruciating honesty” about the visceral rawness of a woman’s sexuality. And a decade later, that aim has only intensified.
When I talk to Gemmell, Sydney is in lockdown 2.0 and it’s the first morning of home schooling. “I’m all over the place,” she cries as her youngest son, Jago, who’s 10, breaks for “recess”. It was during Sydney’s previous lockdown that she punched out Dissolve.
The author, columnist and mother of four won acclaim for her first novel Shiver in 1997 and has gone on to write 12 novels, works of non-fiction as well as children’s books. Her oeuvre has attracted controversy with The Bride Stripped Bare, an account of a young wife’s sexual escapades, whipping up a storm of publicity (and sales). In 2017 she wrote After, a memoir dealing with her mother’s tragic suicide. Her work has continued to be personal, unflinching and dogged in its exploration of what it is to be a woman. And Dissolve is no different. It was triggered by an intense love affair which soured spectacularly and continues to haunt her.
“Dissolve came strongly through the 2020 lockdown, over four months. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, the voice felt very strong and sure,” she says. “I went through a traumatic break-up in my mid 20s – I got jilted, not at the altar, but almost at the altar – and it’s taken me years to process this and write about it.
“Everything I went through with this relationship was written down, so when I started thinking about it, I not only had it in my memory – because it’s haunted me my whole life – but I was able to go back to a written record of it.”
She says the title is self-explanatory. “It’s me, as a woman of a certain age, now 54, looking back at how I was dissolved as a younger woman … and I never felt this more than when I fell madly in love.”
She agrees with me when I say that a woman’s 20s is a rite of passage and a huge learning process; a time often fraught with painful life lessons connected to sex and relationships. But the book is not just about what happened to her back then.
““It’s me, as a woman of a certain age, now 54, looking back at how I was dissolved as a younger woman … and I never felt this more than when I fell madly in love.””
“Dissolve is also about female creativity [and what happens] when it comes up against the dominating energy of male creativity.
“It’s about creative women who’ve been in partnerships with creative men – Sylvia Plath, Camille Claudel, Charmian Clift – and how those women have been dissolved in some way creatively within that relationship.”
Alongside the story of the man who jilted her, a writer who she calls “W”, she recalls the times, as a young woman, she was the victim of “unwanted male intrusion” and reflects on how she accepted this as somehow being the natural way of things.
“Dissolve is a cautionary tale. I wanted to write something for younger women around me, [I wanted to] to say, this is what can happen to us because often we don’t realise this is happening to us. But it’s also a manifesto of womanhood. The MeToo movement got me thinking and I saw what I had gone through several decades ago in a different light.”
She says The Bride Stripped Bare seems a distant memory although there have been lingering regrets. “For years, I thought I’d shot my literary career in the foot, but the more that life goes on, people have short memories [and] it just becomes another book.
“What I don’t regret is the searing honesty of it – it’s timeless and still connects with women, and I’m proud of that. I’m not proud of the brouhaha around the book but as it has aged, I still have people coming up and saying, ‘The book changed my life’, and that’s a good thing for a writer.
“The process of womanhood is about finding your voice and your honesty and now in my 50s, even more so.”
She says she’s found that sweet spot many middle-aged women talk about – that place where you don’t really care any more about what people think and say about you. “I’m liberated from all of that angst about presenting a certain image to the world. This is just me. I feel more authentic and more honest than what I’ve ever felt in my life.”
And unlike the vanguard of menopausal women who rail against “invisibility”, Gemmell feels invisibility contains a positive energy. “It's not all bad because with invisibility comes liberation, we are liberated from the male gaze and I think that’s incredibly powerful.
“I am still learning in so many ways. I'm just going on the journey … the process isn’t over yet. I’m a great supporter of doubt, doubting yourself and the orthodoxy, and what is around you. It gives you an open mind and that is where I am as a person.”
Dissolve, published by Hachette, is out now.