Interview with Holly Lipman

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In the literary arts space, authors even around the age of 40 are often considered budding or emerging. How do you think your age has impacted your success as an author?

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I think Sally Rooney has completely changed the literary fiction space - we’re in this phase at the moment where everybody’s looking for literary fiction by young women about young women. So I think that my age made me more marketable, because that’s kind of what’s trendy at the moment. But when I was doing press, people were very reticent to talk about my age. I think that’s partly because there’s an implication that if you say someone’s young, then maybe you read it with lower expectations. On the one hand, it’s kind of frustrating, because when you are young you want to benefit from people’s lower expectations. But then also, I understand that people try to do it as a mark of respect and taking the work seriously, so that’s nice too. But I feel like I’m only young once and I kind of wish people would talk about it more.

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I think there’s a gendered aspect to being confident in your field and asserting dominance in a way. How do you think being a woman intersects with this aspect of age?

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I do think that it is harder to present as self-serious, as a novelist, without people kind of thinking that you’re arrogant. I find that if I’m talking about books that have inspired me, or literary references, I feel like I almost have to apologize for it. Like, you don’t want to present as too nerdy or whatever. Whereas I think that men are afforded more space and people get less alienated when men take their work seriously.

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I think there’s a lot of pressure these days for young people to go to university and do these massive degrees mostly for the future job opportunities and the money that they can provide, rather than for the enjoyment of the education. You studied Law & Philosophy and are now doing something different. What’s your take on this societal pressure debate?

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It sounds so lame, but I think I just felt pressure to do a degree that would reflect well on my intellect, regardless of whether or not that was actually what I wanted to do. I think it can be really damaging, because these degrees are so expensive, they take so long, and you start when you’re very young. I do think there are also lots of people, like me, who chose their degrees because they thought of them almost like an accessory. So yeah, I guess I would say I’d be wary of doing degrees just because you think they say something about who you are as a person.

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When did you figure out you wanted to do something creative?

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I always had aspirations to do something creative. I’d written scripts at uni and then a play that we put on at an independent theater in Sydney. But I mean, I didn’t really think about being a novelist because I just didn’t think it was something that people could do.

I’m also so lucky that I’ve been able to do this full time and I think that for a lot of people, they’re just not afforded that real privilege. It’s always so hard to balance the pragmatism of money and stable work, and then also making sure that you carve out enough space for your creativity. I mean, to be honest, the real answers are structural. I think that the government probably just needs to invest more money in us and there needs to be grants more readily available. I think that trying to solve it at an individual level is so hard.