Ep 38 How to survive an earthquake with Michelle Tom

‘I went on a post-mortem enquiry. How did we end up here? We were five and now we’re two.’

Michelle Tom began her writing career as a print journalist in her native New Zealand. Michelle was selected for the ACT Writers Centre HARDCOPY 2019 program and for a Varuna Memoir Masterclass in 2017. Michelle lives in Melbourne with her husband and two youngest children.

Her vulnerable and cathartic memoir, Ten Thousand Aftershocks, explores two key traumas – the multifaceted abuse she experienced during childhood, and her survival of the 2021 Christchurch earthquake.

Together, we discuss how she began writing the memoir, the process of re-examining trauma, and her choice to tell the story in fragmented vignettes.

The fragmented narrative style wasn’t her initial choice. When she attend a one-week masterclass with one of Australia’s best-known memoir authors, she realised a lot of her early draft wasn’t working.

‘I’d gone to Varuna thinking that week was going to clarify everything and I went to Patti Miller who was running the course and basically said, Tell me how to structure this and she said, Darling, you’re going to have to figure that out for yourself.’

This episode also features a record-breaking What Are You Reading segment, in which James recalls the time someone recommended he read Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series because the main character is 6’9, the same height as James, and we determine that main character height may be the worst motivation for reading a book we’ve encountered.

Plus, is it going to be just James from now on?! Join us for an emotionally turbulent episode of James and Ashley Stay at Home!

Books and authors discussed in this episode:
– Memoir Writing For Dummies by Ryan Van Cleave
– Trespasses: A Memoir by Lacy M Johnson
– The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
– Lee Child’s Jack Reader series
– To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
– The Return by Rachel Harrison
– It by Stephen King
– Girl, 11 by Amy Suiter Clarke
– Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon (of course!)

Plus Michelle’s fellow 2021 debut authors:
– Girl, 11 by Amy Suiter Clarke
– The Last of the Apple Blossom by Mary-Lou Stephens
– Echoes by Shu-Ling Chua
– What Does it Feel Like Being Born? by Jodie Miller
– The Sentinel by Jacqueline Hodder
– Eye of a Rook by Josephine Taylor (who we interviewed in episode 20)
– Smokehouse by Melissa Manning
– Sha’Kert by Ishmael Soledad
– Modern Marriage by Filip Vukašin
– The River Mouth by Karen Whittle-Herbert