CK: In this book you have several stories where parents are put on the spot by children asking those questions. You’re careful to make the point that parents haven’t got very far. As in the story, ‘The list of all possible answers.

PG: That’s a story I rescued from an earlier collection. I didn’t like the rest of the stories, but I liked that one. Also, it did strike me that it is basically in some sense a religious story in that the parents concoct this list of evasions or half answers which they number. One is no, two is maybe, three is because. And it becomes very easy whenever a child asks a question just to say, three, five, seven. It struck me later that it’s a nice little metaphor for the comforting beliefs that we concoct to handle those terrible voids the other side of the questions.

CK: These are all stories about families, and they are fairly conventional families. They are husbands and wives and they’re married and have jobs. They’re families in extreme situations, where the worst happens. Are you interested in the cushioning effect of conventionality where it is much more of a shock when the extreme intrudes?

PG: Certainly. I am. Also, I know that world the best. I think most Australians live like that and you don’t read a lot about that world in fiction in Australia, which is very weird, but it is a very interesting world. There’s the whole world in a country town is an Italian saying, but in fact there’s the whole world in a suburb. John Cheever, just to name a writer I like a lot, managed to extract a universe out of a couple of pretty affluent middle-class suburbs on Long Island. That fascinates me because it is the world I know and because these people can become heroes or villains very quickly if something creeps into that apparently safe world. It’s a world that is fun to shake around a bit and see what falls out.

CK: The story that it is obvious to talk about in that connection is ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam’, and what you seemed to have done there is toyed with making a mockery of the symmetrical coupledom of the ‘perfect couple’ involved. And then when the worst does happen to them it turns out that their self-absorption and self-enclosure as a couple is exactly what they need. It’s how they survive. You can’t imagine them surviving if they weren’t like that.

PG: I think that’s true. That’s a story I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I think a lot of the best stories often have a very simple core (I’m not saying that story belongs with them). You think of the great children’s stories or fairy stories, they often have a mythic core that speaks to some deep part of us. I always remember reading as a kid the story from the Arabian Nights of the genie in the bottle. The first year he promises rubies and diamonds to whoever sets him free, and at the end of the second-year gold and silver, but at the end of the seventh year – or thirteenth year, whatever – the genie vows to kill whoever sets him free.

I thought this was ridiculous as a child, but it stuck in my mind. I kept thinking about it at some unconscious level. It was only later, actually when I thought I’d won the Miles Franklin Award – the day before I’d been told I had and then I found out I hadn’t, and I wanted to go and make a speech anyway saying I’m sorry my book wasn’t bad enough to win the Miles Franklin Award! And I suddenly realised what that story is all about. It’s about human bitterness, and how we bite the hand that feeds us. A lot of the good stories that you remember speak to us on that deeper level. And I think the basic story in Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam is something that runs through human history on and off, the way we will take others with us, if we have a chance, when we go. I don’t want to be too pretentious about deep mythic symbolism – that’s just one level of the story.

CK: It’s almost a story that should have a warning not to read it in a public place in case you’re overwhelmed. It’s a parable of all the little griefs and losses that go with raising children.

 PG: I’m wary about that. I do know people who have lost children, and all of us at times have fantasised that and felt that horrible kind of empathy. As a doctor, the worse thing in medicine was the death of children, by far, if you can compare such things. I am a bit worried about some people reading it. I know the editor had just become a mother and she said she cried for a couple of days. So you worry about whether that’s good or bad.

CK: Well ... it’s true, isn’t it?

PG: Yes. That’s a good answer.