Still Life
Still Life
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Sarah Winman on Still Life
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A restaurant wall and a flood she didn’t expectThe book began not with a plan but with a question asked over lunch. In January 2015, Winman was in Florence for ten days after completing a Renaissance art course at the National Gallery in London. She noticed photographs of submerged streets on a restaurant wall, assumed they showed Venice, and asked the owner. He brought out books and explained the 1966 flood, and the mud angels: young people who came from across the world to clean up the aftermath. The story arrived with the force of something she already knew she would resist.
Absolutely not, I said. (My usual response when a story finds me). Just you wait, said the voice.
Her resistance held for years. She finished Tin Man first and didn’t sit down with Still Life until 2018. By then, Britain had voted for Brexit, and the political mood had shifted the creative problem entirely. For the first time in her career, she made a deliberate choice about tone before she wrote a word.
The divisive rhetoric weighed heavy on me and as I sat at the desk, I made a decision that the tone of this new book had to be one of joy and entertainment. It was the first time I’d ever been so conscious of tone.
What had first pulled her toward the mud angels was something specific to her temperament. When the restaurant owner explained that strangers had crossed borders not only to rescue artworks but to participate in something collective, the story caught her at the point where aesthetics and solidarity overlap.
And of course I am an incredible romantic, and I thought that was one of the most romantic things I had heard: that there was this sense of togetherness, that people came, and not only did they want to help save art, they were helping society too.
There was also a literary argument embedded in the project from the start. Winman’s earlier novels had included gay characters, but those figures tended to carry tragedy or suppression as their defining weight. She wanted to write against that convention by pairing her central character, Evelyn, against E.M. Forster, whose own queerness remained hidden throughout his life.
And without really setting out to do this, I started to write scenes of Evelyn meeting up with Forster – this glorious young lesbian who was free and enjoying her first sexual adventure in stark contrast to Forster’s hidden queerness.
How she wrote it
An acupuncture table, two years with Stella, and 17,500 cut wordsWith eighteen months left before her deadline and still lacking a living model for Evelyn, the art historian at the novel’s center, Winman mentioned the problem to her Italian acupuncturist, Cristina, while lying on the table. Cristina texted a friend. By the end of the session a name came back: Stella Rudolph, art historian and one-time mud angel, living in Florence’s San Niccolò neighborhood. The character’s voice followed only after Winman learned to ask questions that bypassed scholarly habit.
‘Oh, he was an earthquake.’ And there it was – a sentence that could only have been spoken by someone with decades of knowledge and experience. And from that moment, Stella gave me my character Evelyn.
Winman followed Stella around Florence for two years. Stella died in May 2020, during the pandemic, while Winman was still finishing the book.
Winman does not plot in advance. She starts with one character doing one thing and accumulates from there, which means a book spanning decades and two countries grew from almost nothing on the page. She described the strangeness of that method to the Sydney Morning Herald when Still Life was already complete.
I’m fascinated I started with so little. There’s this whole book ahead and you start with one character doing one thing.
Sustaining a joyful tone across years of drafting required daily management, not a one-time decision. On days when the mood wouldn’t cooperate, she built a routine to reach the right register before touching the difficult material. [paraphrased from audio, Booktopia podcast]
Tone lifted the words and the story, and it lifted me too.
Three decades as an actor left a specific mark on the prose. Winman reads every page aloud to test rhythm, and her primary model for narrative structure comes not from other novels but from film. That explains the ensemble construction of Still Life, which builds its world through dialogue and scene rather than interior reflection.
I love cinema. I get a lot of my understanding of storytelling from the moving image and consequently write with that influence. That’s how I see all my books: filmic.
The final manuscript was shorter by 17,500 words than the draft Winman submitted, and one cut went further than the expected trimming of scenes. She told Booktopia’s written Q&A about it with a note of amusement that suggests she hasn’t closed the door on what was removed.
We did actually cut the narrator (!) but I won’t say too much about that, in case I put them in another book!
The personal thread
Coming out in the eighties and a habit of chosen familyThe novel’s central preoccupation, a group of unrelated people who build a life together across decades, is not an abstract theme for Winman. She came out in the early 1980s, when the AIDS crisis was beginning and institutional hostility toward LGBTQI people was open. The practice of assembling a second family grew from lived necessity during those years.
I’m a gay woman who came out in the early 80’s. A harsh climate for anyone different from ‘the norm.’ AIDS was beginning to decimate communities, the rhetoric against LGBTQI people was hateful and many young gay men and women were disowned by their family. I wasn’t. But the seeking of the ‘other family’ became so natural during that time.
That personal history also shaped what she refused to repeat in Still Life. Her earlier fiction had given gay characters stories defined by suppression or loss, stories she had lived near but didn’t want to keep writing as the only available model. The Forster strand gave her a way to show the contrast directly, placing Evelyn’s freedom against the constraints that had defined Forster’s life.
I wanted, instead of saying, ‘Now we’re going to have the tragedy of coming out and being not accepted’, (to show) that there are other stories around gay lives.
On what the book is wrestling with
Men, care, and a deliberate inversionThe male characters in Still Life, Ulysses, Massimo, Pete, and Cressy, are not peripheral to the book’s argument about gender: they are the argument. Winman built them to carry what she calls feminine energy, meaning tenderness and attentiveness in daily relationship, at a moment when she felt that quality was systematically missing from public life. She described her intentions to ABC Radio National in terms that go beyond the novel’s plot.
I feel what I’m trying to do is to show another way for men. I’m trying to get away from that patriarchal construct of what a man is to be, and to actually say, ‘Get into the feminine that’s in you’. Because that is the only thing that’s going to really turn this world around.
One structural choice makes the gender inversion concrete. The novel’s mother figure, Peg, is largely absent from her daughter’s daily upbringing, while the men around her fill that role. Winman drew attention to this arrangement in the ABC Radio National interview, because it carries her largest claim about what care actually means.
If you look at Ulysses, Massimo, Cressy and Pete … they’re all imbued with this feminine energy of care, of how they talk to each other, how they talk to women … it is predominantly the men … bringing up this girl child. And so, I’m flipping that whole idea of what the feminine means, and that it’s not about motherhood, but it is about mothering.
The London sections of the novel are set deliberately in a working-class East End pub community. Winman explained in the Booktopia podcast that the setting is inseparable from the book’s argument: class determines who gets to transform through exposure to art, beauty, and travel, and she wanted to put that transformation in the hands of people it was not supposed to reach. [paraphrased from audio, Booktopia podcast]
what people can do with opportunity and how people thrive with that kind of opportunity.
What she wants us to sit with
Joy as an answer, not a retreatWinman is consistent about refusing to let joy read as escapism. She told ABC Radio National that the emotion carries its own kind of force, one that gets underestimated precisely because it doesn’t announce itself as serious.
Joy is a very triumphant place to be – it’s often dismissed, but it’s very powerful. And so is empathy, incredibly powerful.
When Booktopia’s written Q&A asked what she hoped readers would find, she answered with a list that moves from mood to politics. The order matters: she places laughter first, then names the force it is pushing back against.
Laughter. Joy. A moment of lightness and belief in the world again after the ravages of the last year and the constant grip of right-wing politics. I like to think that my book is a re-charging of the batteries!
When the Matilda Bookshop asked her to describe Still Life in a sentence or two, she gave an answer that holds both the emotional register and the political one without letting either soften the other.
A story of found family and opportunity and love and the value of art. My answer to right-wing rhetoric and division.