Leila and Virginia

I created Diving, Falling’s Leila Whittaker, like any character, by giving her a very specific set of circumstances, relationships, past experiences, personality traits, influences, and even genetics. She is a fiction, and she is her own particular self.

Sometimes, she is of similar water to Virginia Woolf.

Leila looking up at the ghost gums under the moon, and secretly smoking a cigarette on her front steps in Melbourne, like a shadow, a mirror, of Virginia smoking in the sun in a garden in the old photos.

Leila writing.

Suicide slices through both lives, though my Leila gets to move away from that river, to the sea. The drownings that surround her.

Mrs Ramsay and her husband’s arm raised over her mind, still.

Her falling flower. The Waves. The sound of the sea.

Leila sees her own life, at moments, in the light of this other, English, one. The blue hour, Proust and the stones for her pockets.

She says that Woolf’s books moved with her, to Ken Black, when she was a young woman. Woolf must have moved with her again, when she was older, to Sydney, as that city called her away from Ken’s bunker. For Leila lets her own prose move close at the end, a creative shift; writing in the beach house, the place of Jungian return to (or capture in) the dynamics of the childhood home, where she and Marian perhaps hope to do it better.

The room of her own, and of her own making.

Leila talks about Virginia Woolf making a bridge between the Victorian and the modern. That’s a very Leila image, from this woman who makes literary connections. Who studied feminist literature at Melbourne University. It was almost from Woolf’s diaries. Life’s tragedy. The strip of pavement over the abyss. It makes her dizzy, Woolf writes. The distance is long, she does not know if she will make it to the end.

While I was writing Diving, Falling I dreamed a bridge. A narrow suspension bridge over a huge, sprawling valley. I walked across and its span was so long, but there, as it finally reached the other side, was a statue of Virginia Woolf. Luminous and marble white, it gestured to me, as if inviting me step off, to safety. It glowed as I passed it.