In lockdown our worlds became smaller – and the possessions we lived with became main characters. Toilet paper was suddenly precious. Our nicest clothes began to taunt us. Plants were now our friends. Passports were our enemies.
But perhaps our things were alive all along.
For Nic – a main character of Emily Maguire’s gripping new novel, Love Objects – they are imbued with so much life and memory she can’t bear to get rid of them. And she begins to rescue the bits and pieces discarded by others, too.
Nic, in her 40s, has kept her hoarding disorder a secret from everyone around her, until the piles of “junk and tat” – things that call to her, mean everything to her – almost kill her in a fall. When Lena discovers her beloved aunt half buried and bleeding in her tiny Sydney home, the immensity of the shock almost overtakes her own crisis: a sex tape filmed without her consent is going viral, and her phone number along with it.
Meanwhile, outside, a backdrop familiar to many Australians: a raging bushfire season, choking smoke, and the very visible threat of environmental collapse.
That’s a lot of ground to traverse in one novel – which you’ll be able to discuss with Maguire in the next edition of Guardian Australia’s monthly book club, which will take place over Zoom at 1.30pm on Friday 30 April.
Her seventh novel, Love Objects follows her 2016 Miles Franklin and Stella shortlisted book An Isolated Incident. It came about as a result of a $100,000 fellowship with Sydney University, charging her to respond creatively to how class divisions play out within families and throughout culture.
Love Objects, then, isn’t just a story about a hoarder and a sex tape. It’s a deeply empathic and researched observation about cycles of poverty, gendered violence and inherited trauma, and the intersection of class with the depersonalised institutions that govern our very personal lives.
Would social workers take charge of her life if Nic was a wealthier woman? If Lena came from money, would she have seemed so disposable to the college boy who filmed her? And if her brother Will could afford the healthcare he needed, would he have been in a better position to help?
