The Independent is looking back at our best feature stories of last year, and this is one of them.
With a career spanning nearly 20 years and backlist of over 35 titles, Geelong author Fiona Lowe is a well-established figure in the Australian literary landscape. She spoke to Matt Hewson about her love of the written word, her evolution as an author and her upcoming book, the Money Club.
Best-selling author Fiona Lowe began her career in nursing, working as a midwife, a sexual health counsellor and a family support worker.
But while she grew up loving books and reading, she never saw herself becoming an author.
“No one decides they’re going to write a book without being a keen reader, but I didn’t actually ever grow up dreaming about writing books, per se,” Fiona said.
“I remember thinking in my head that I didn’t like how a book finished, so I’d weave a different story in my head. And I still hate ambivalent endings, even today; I want to know how it finished.”
For Fiona, who spent her early years living in Papua New Guinea, reading was one of her prime sources of entertainment, as it was for her mother.
“My father worked for Shell Oil, so we went (to PNG) and I started school there and learnt to read there,” she said.
“There were no televisions, so books were the entertainment. And my mother was a keen reader, she would always go to the library and bring back books.
“It’s always been my relaxation; I love to lose myself in a good book, in a good story. I’m not a huge autobiography reader, I want to be taken somewhere different.”
When Fiona grew up and began travelling the world, writing became an important part of life.
“And then when I travelled overseas, I would always write letters home, every week,” she said.
“People would say, oh, you string a good yarn, you should write a book. “
But it’s just one of those things that you think, oh yeah. And it isn’t until something happens in your life and you think, maybe I might have a go at this.”
And then something did happen in Fiona’s life; she gave birth to her first child and decided to try her hand at writing medical romances.
“When I started writing I knew nothing,” she said.
“People say there’s a book in everyone. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I do know you wouldn’t try to fix a toilet or wire a house without having done an apprenticeship in that.
“Writing a book is the same; there are very, very few people who can just sit down and write a book and sell it.
“And I didn’t realise this. There were things I had to learn, like points of view, scene and sequel, stuff like that.“
After engaging in a series of short courses, going to conferences and attending book clubs, she managed to sell her first romance novel to Harlequin Mills and Boon in 2005.
Fiona won a swag of gongs for her romances, including the prestigious American RITA award and the Australian RuBY award, but after the merger of Penguin and Random House and the subsequent loss of a contract, she decided to reevaluate her writing goals.
“After all that I thought, I want to write something completely different,” Fiona said.
“All those books were set in the States, and I thought, I want to write something in my own backyard where I don’t have to second guess the right words.
“I had been to an event at the Geelong Club and I remember reading all the honour boards and seeing all the names. I’d moved here from Melbourne, and I realised all the streets in my little suburb, Manifold Heights, had been named after these guys on the honour board; Strahan, Bostock, Manifold.
“So I went off on a binge about the local history, then the history of the Western District. I found myself visiting open gardens and big bluestone mansions
“I remember thinking, what if these walls could talk? And that was the impetus for Daughter of Mine.”
In 2017 Fiona released Daughter of Mine, a modern drama exploring issues of lineage, generational wealth and power, and the secrets and lies that infest families of privilege.
While still involving romantic themes, Daughter of Mine was most certainly not a romance novel, Fiona said.
“In genre fiction, there are rules; in crime fiction, you normally have to have a dead body, in romance you must give the reader a happy ending,” she said.
“There are genre conventions. And I don’t have to satisfy any conventions in the books I’m writing now.”
“I write about men and women, I write about relationships. I write about complex social issues that affect us.
“My books are no longer romances. They don’t specifically have happy endings.”
But Fiona said writing romances had allowed her to hone skills that were valuable in any type of writing.
“What I did learn when I wrote romance fiction was emotion,” she said.
“I believe that I learned how to write deep emotion, that I can really take people into the characters’ shoes and make them walk that road.”
Since Daughter of Mine, has released five more novels, writing stories revolving around topics such as inheritance issues and elder abuse (Birthright), the impacts of bushfires (Home Fires) and racism, prejudice and displacement (A Home Like Ours).
Her upcoming novel, The Money Club, explores modern greed through the lens of Ponzi schemes.
It follows the story of Izzy, who we find with bags packed, waiting for Brad, her fiance and partner of three years, to return home so she can leave him.
But Brad never appears; instead angry men knock on her door, followed by police looking for her erstwhile partner.
Izzy’s small community begins to unravel as clues come to light suggesting Brad has taken everyone for a ride.
“The Money Club is a little bit different because the plot really drives it,” Fiona said.
“The media always focuses on the scammer, on the lifestyle, the millions of dollars, the yachts, the houses, the luxury cars.
“I wanted to explore the massive breach of trust and what happens to the people who’ve lost everything.
“Geelong has suffered from a few of them, and I think one of the reasons is that we’re a small regional city and you’re never more than a few handshakes away from anybody. We trust, perhaps, more than other places.
“And so you get drawn in because you trust people, and then whole families go down, extended families, workplaces, community groups.”
In writing The Money Club, Fiona had to ask herself the difficult question: where is the line between need and greed?
“Is it greedy to want to buy your own home?” she said.
“Is it greedy to want to educate your children? To want a Lamborghini? Where’s the line, and who decides on the line?
“It’s really easy for people on the outside who are not in that network of trust to say ‘they must have been greedy and stupid to fall for that’. But that’s hindsight.
“We’re all very quick to judge, we do it all the time. So it’s a feature in the book, because it’s human nature.”
The Money Club is out May 3. To preorder or for more information visit fionalowe.com.
