Many readers will be familiar with Bri Lee from her acclaimed nonfiction books, Eggshell Skull, Beauty, and Who Gets to Be Smart. Our events and programming manager Chris Gordon asks Lee about her debut novel, The Work, which is published this month and takes the reader into the art world, exploring the tensions between art and money, love and power, work and privilege.

First of all, thank you for writing this wonderful novel that talks about art and ambition – and love. I enjoyed reading it so much. Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. We have to be careful not to give away too much of the plot … It is a plot-driven novel after all, and we would hate to give away any of the twists that occur in this story.

You are known for your nonfiction work, so why fiction writing now?

A book of any genre is such a huge undertaking – years of work – so for me it has to be really deeply driven by a question I want to ask or some significant issue I want to explore. I think my first three works are pretty clearly (in hindsight) a coming-of-age trilogy. They each had questions and issues that were best answered and explored in different types of nonfiction. But this time around I had questions about art! And questions about love! And I wanted to explore how money affects art and love … and there’s no way I’m writing nonfiction about art and love. Are you kidding? That trifecta – money, art, and love – that’s the stuff the novel is built to handle.

The Work is an epic tale of ambition. I don’t think we talk about ambition as much as we should and if we do, it’s often considered fraught. Why is that do you think?

I think it’s a particularly Australian thing. Tall Poppy is real. And in the artistic world, an immature and frustrating adoration of the perpetual ‘Starving Artist’ mythology endures. If you try hard then you must be a sell-out, right? Well, the only people that attitude helps are the people with secret trust funds. And there are so many of those in the creative industries! I suppose it’s one of the key tensions I explore in this book – with different characters and in different ways – when money really actually does start to compromise artistic pursuits. Is it possible to be ‘ambitious’ for your art in a way totally separate from the industry? Depending on your personality, it can be a slippery slope, it’s true.

What real-life experiences drew you to write about the art world? And is it as bonkers as we imagine?

My mother is a fantastic artist – mostly painting, but also some sculpture and mixed media – and when I was growing up she ran a small art supplies store. I used to take days off school and stand on an empty milk crate to be tall enough to serve people at the checkout. The smell of turps and the wall of coloured pastels was so thrilling. The store was in a small, suburban art school, nothing like Lally’s world in The Work, but obviously something lodged in my brain. I’ve always loved visiting art galleries. As a writer I get a lot of excitement and inspiration from visual art, especially photography.

The two main characters have vastly different backgrounds. Why was that important to the storyline?

They’ve been with me for so long now it’s a little difficult to think back to how I created them and why I made them the way I did. They’re whole human beings. I knew I wanted to make a heterosexual couple where the man was in his late 20s and the woman was in her early 30s, in particular because I was so tired of reading fiction in which a young(er) woman was with an old(er) man and it so often means the same power dynamics and same unsatisfactory sex keeps happening. They had to have different attitudes towards money, because that was obviously a theme I wanted to feel a little push-n-pull with throughout. And I also knew I couldn’t make the woman character the Australian one with a family in regional Queensland, otherwise people would just presume that her content was autobiographical. Ocean Vuong talks about ‘inviting, but ultimately rejecting’ an autobiographical reading. That’s what I thought about doing. I know what it feels like to live certain parts of both people’s lives. Enough to have a clear way into them.

I have heard that writing sex scenes is the most difficult for any author. True or false for you? Given that you also teach writing, is writing sexy scenes a teachable skill?

Some people say writing sex is about writing what turns you on. I disagree. For me, writing a convincing and good sex scene is about really, truly knowing who your characters are. What do they want? What are they afraid of or insecure about? What would surprise them? What are they thinking about when they’re having sex and what sex are they thinking about when they’re doing other things? In my opinion, as a reader, I can tell when sex on the page is okay, but not quite real for the particular character whose perspective we’re supposed to be sharing. It was important in The Work to have Lally’s sex scenes feel like hers, while Pat’s feel like his. Articulating on the page what differences that meant really helped me understand what would make it work. And, to answer the second part of your question, I think of myself as a person who teaches great reading technique: I teach people approaches and attitudes and tools they can then take away with them for the rest of their lives, and apply to any work. So, I’d teach a class on identifying great dialogue, for example, as an extension of real and believable characters. I’d teach sex writing in the same way.

Which character in the novel is the most like someone you know?

Ha! Not telling.

What do you hope your reader will take away from The Work?

Honestly, of the dozen or so people who I’ve had meaningful conversations about the book with so far, they have all taken completely, almost wildly different things from this novel. That has been the ultimate joy. I wrote the story I wanted to. I worked out those questions and issues for myself. I loathe it when I’m reading a novel with a clear ‘invited reading’. I don’t want to be told. It’s a privilege, as an author, to hear what a reader figured out for themselves. That’s the magic.

And my two final questions:

Are you writing another novel? (Please do say yes!)

Yes! Last year I spent a month in Antarctica. My novel is about two scientists working in a (fictional) Antarctic seed vault. They are geniuses with strong opinions, but I am pushing them into a corner; I’m interested in how all absolutes can become relative under pressure.

And because I’m a bookseller, I’d love to know what you are reading now.

Caoilinn Hughes’s latest novel, which is also out this month, and is her best yet, and is totally and utterly brilliant! It’s called The Alternatives and follows the lives of four sisters when one of them decides to, sort of, exit her life and leave it all behind. Hughes is brilliant, this book is crackling with energy and I’m in awe of her sentences.