Elaine Chiew Chats With Catherine Menon about her startling debut Fragile Monsters

Photo Credit: Paul Emberson

Bio:  Catherine Menon is Australian-British, has Malaysian heritage and lives in London. Her debut short story collection, Subjunctive Moods, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018. She is a University lecturer in robotics and has both a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in Creative Writing. Fragile Monsters, published by Viking in April 2021, is her debut novel.

Synopsis: Mary is a difficult grandmother for Durga to love. She is sharp-tongued and ferocious, with more demons than there are lines on her palms. When Durga visits her in rural Malaysia, she only wants to endure Mary, and the dark memories home brings, for as long as it takes to escape. But a reckoning is coming. Stuck together in the rising heat, both women must untangle the truth from the myth of their family's past. In her stunning debut novel Catherine Menon traces one family's story from 1920 to the present, unravelling a thrilling tale of love, betrayal and redemption against the backdrop of natural disasters and fallen empires. Written in vivid technicolour, with an electric daughter-grandmother relationship at its heart, Fragile Monsters explores what happens when secrets fester through the generations. 

EC: Welcome to Asian Books Blog, Catherine. Congratulations on your startling debut, Fragile Monsters (Viking, 2021).  It literally begins with a bang, one revelation following another like a series of explosions through the book, keeping this reader on her toes. Every character has an incredible secret, even Karthika, the grandmother’s domestic helper. Tell us about the making of this book: was there a clear starting point and what was the process of writing it like?

 

CM: Thank you so much for having me, Elaine. The inspiration for Fragile Monsters came from the bedtime stories my father used to tell me about his own childhood in Pahang. It was only as an adult that I began to understand the context of these stories. Kuala Lipis, where he grew up, was the headquarters of the Japanese army in Pahang during the Occupation. 

 

I began to read memoirs and interviews with other people who’d lived through that time, and I was struck by the extent to which all of these speakers were taking ownership of their own narratives. They were describing what had happened to them, but with a focus on the emotional truth rather than the specific events. This was an amazing thing to realise: the sheer resilience that they had had to show in order to take back control of the past. 

 

I very much wanted to reflect this imperative – this need to own your own past – in the character of Mary. Mary understands the importance of stories and the power that they have over our memories. Durga, of course, is the exact opposite. She values logic, certainty, a kind of rigorous and exacting thought process that doesn’t allow for something to be “right, instead of true”, as Mary tells her. In writing the book I tried to keep their characters and perspectives distinct, even when they were, in effect, telling the same story. These two women are opposite sides of a mathematical equation – as Durga would put it!