Literary Studies

Ring the bell

Item: In So Many Words
Author: Gillian Dooley

by Gillian Dooley •

February 2014, no. 358

In So Many Words: Interviews with Writers, Scholars and Intellectuals by Cassandra Atherton

Australian Scholarly Publishing, $29.95 pb, 151 pp, 9781925003062

Literary Studies

Ring the bell

by Gillian Dooley •

February 2014, no. 358

I have often thought that a large part of achievement is just fronting up; having an idea and acting on it, however unlikely success might seem. What you need is a resolution (or the disposition) not to be discouraged by failure and to be pleasantly surprised by success. If it doesn’t work, you try something else. You make the most of any opportunity. You should also jettison a conventional sense of the social niceties. You’re going to Boston for your honeymoon. Hey, why not ask Noam Chomsky for an interview?

Gillian Dooley

By this contributor

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at Flinders University, and a Visiting Fellow in the Music Department at Southampton University. Her publications include an edited book of interviews with Iris Murdoch (2003), V.S. Naipaul, Man and Writer (2006), J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative (2010), and journal articles on a range of literary topics including music in the life and work of Jane Austen. In 2005 she co-edited Matthew Flinders’ Private Journal and in 2014 she published an edition of the correspondence between Iris Murdoch and the Australian radical philosopher Brian Medlin. She has been a regular reviewer for ABR since 2002. She is founding editor of the online journals Transnational Literature and Writers in Conversation.