Matthew Condon has interviewed author Susan Johnson, for "The Courier-Mail", as her new novel, Life in Seven Mistakes, becomes available.
"As I went along I realised I was going to be writing a whole life virtually from birth to death in various guises with members of this family," Johnson says. "I started to think about the whole notion of the seven ages of man and around the idea of life as a big mistake.(The novel has, as one of its epigraphs, the quote from Shakespeare's As You Like It: "And one man in his time plays many parts, His act being seven ages.")
"I had a notion very early that we all go through life and we make these choices and decisions and we're acting in a rational mode, but in fact my experience of existence is that our choices and how we live are acted out on a deeply irrational level and we don't know how we live.
"I kept the idea that life, in essence, is like one long series of mistakes in the sense that we bumble through and we really don't know what we're doing."
