'What could drive a mother to do the unthinkable?
'Before: Emma Cormac married into a perfect life but now she's barely coping. Inside a brand new, palatial home, her three young children need more than she can give. Clem, a wilful four year old, is intent on mimicking her grandmother; the formidable matriarch Pat Cormac. Arthur is almost three and still won't speak. At least baby Robbie is perfect. He's the future of the family. So why can't Emma hold him without wanting to scream?
'Beyond their gleaming windows, a lake vista is evaporating. The birds have mostly disappeared, too. All over Shorehaven, the Cormac family buys up land to develop into cheap housing for people they openly scorn.
'After: The summers have grown even fiercer and the Cormac name doesn't mean what it used to. Arthur has taken it abroad, far from a family unable to understand him. Clem is a fragile young artist who turns obsessively to the same dark subject. Pat doesn't even know what legacy means now. Not since the ground started sinking beneath her.
'Meanwhile, a nameless woman has been released from state care. She sticks to her twelve-step program, recites her affirmations, works one day at a time on a humble life devoid of ambition or redemption. How can she have an after when baby Robbie doesn't?' (Publication summary)
Epigraph : 'They fear, they suffer, they strike, they are struck, they fall under the blows of the closest to them, each of them suffers in their place in the family scene, each man and woman in their name and in the name of the parent.' - Hélène Cixous, The Communion of Suffering
'A horror story of motherhood and mundanity in the throes of climate change.'
Live Recording : Briohny Doyle in Conversation
2021
23474429
2021
single work
podcast
interview
'A conversation between authors Ronnie Scott and Briohny Doyle. Together they discuss Doyle's latest novel, Echolalia.' (Production summary)
At Home with Briohny Doyle
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2021
23448440
2021
single work
podcast
interview
'Briohny Doyle is the author of The Island Will Sink, Echolalia and Adult Fantasy. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Monthly, Meanjin, Overland, The Griffith Review, The Good Weekend, The Guardian, and the Sunday Times. She is a lecturer in writing and literature at Deakin University and a 2020 Fulbright Scholar.' (Production introduction)
'I closed the pages of Briohny Doyle’s Echolalia with a sigh of satisfaction at its beautiful construction and timeliness. The actions of her protagonist, Emma, seem a pertinent reaction to our zeitgeist: a world in which our flaccid government cannot mount a response to the recent IPCC report, which warns that ‘with further global warming, every region is projected to increasingly experience concurrent and multiple changes in climatic impact-drivers’. At the same time, I experienced a spell of disquiet at the way the novel mobilises disability to symbolise something that everyone, whether abled or disabled, should be able to recognise: the impact of our actions on the future.' (Introduction)
The new novel from Briohny Doyle, author of The Island Will Sink and Adult Fantasy, explores motherhood and capitalism.
'I closed the pages of Briohny Doyle’s Echolalia with a sigh of satisfaction at its beautiful construction and timeliness. The actions of her protagonist, Emma, seem a pertinent reaction to our zeitgeist: a world in which our flaccid government cannot mount a response to the recent IPCC report, which warns that ‘with further global warming, every region is projected to increasingly experience concurrent and multiple changes in climatic impact-drivers’. At the same time, I experienced a spell of disquiet at the way the novel mobilises disability to symbolise something that everyone, whether abled or disabled, should be able to recognise: the impact of our actions on the future.' (Introduction)
At Home with Briohny Doyle
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2021
23448440
2021
single work
podcast
interview
'Briohny Doyle is the author of The Island Will Sink, Echolalia and Adult Fantasy. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Monthly, Meanjin, Overland, The Griffith Review, The Good Weekend, The Guardian, and the Sunday Times. She is a lecturer in writing and literature at Deakin University and a 2020 Fulbright Scholar.' (Production introduction)
Live Recording : Briohny Doyle in Conversation
2021
23474429
2021
single work
podcast
interview
'A conversation between authors Ronnie Scott and Briohny Doyle. Together they discuss Doyle's latest novel, Echolalia.' (Production summary)
