As her new novel, The Biographer, is out in the bookshops, Virginia Duigan is interviewed in "The Australian" by Rosemary Sorenson.
The most Duigan will concede is that the characters in The Biographer are "faintly, just a touch, inspired by" people in her life. "It would be exceptionally misleading to say they are based on anyone I know, as even if it's there at the start, they very quickly race off in their own directions," Duigan says. "One doesn't really know where these things come from, and all aspects of your life throw things up, but yes, I guess people would think that all these (her life and the novel she's written) are connected."The Biographer is Duigan's second novel. Her first, Days Like These, just released in paperback, is a novel about a heart-sore journalist who flees to London, where Duigan began her career as a writer at the end of the 1960s. ... "I wanted to leave the question about biography and ethics deliberately open," Duigan says. "One could say biography has reached an intrusive point, and I'm looking at one particular case. In the past, the problem might never have arisen. ... "I think we wonder, is this legitimate, are there still boundaries, and where are they? The biographer's approach is calibrated the whole way through. He knows what he wants to happen in the end and I think a writer might not think about the kinds of intrusions made into people's lives, the unsuspected areas they might go into.
"I'm not talking from any personal experience," Duigan hastens to add.
