Gina Rushton’s Shelf Life
Gina Rushton is an editor, reporter and author living and working on Gadigal land. Her first book, The Most Important Job in the World, was published in Australia and New Zealand in March 2022 with Pan Macmillan. The international edition, The Parenthood Dilemma, was published in September 2023 in the UK with Indigo Press and in the US with Astra Publishing House.
Gina is currently editor of independent news and analysis website Crikey. She has worked as a journalist for a decade holding reporting or editing roles at Nine, Australian Associated Press, AAP FactCheck, The Australian and BuzzFeed News. She has also been published in The Guardian, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, The Monthly, The West Australian, Business Insider Australia, O&G Magazine and The Saturday Paper.
She is an Our Watch fellow, Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists media excellence award winner and Australian Human Rights Commission media award finalist for her coverage of reproductive rights.
How and where are you?
I’m at home but I'm about to head out for cocktails and pasta with my mates! It’s jacaranda season here in Sydney and out of my apartment window I can see lilac constellations dotted around my suburb. So I’m personally pretty dandy… but I think it would be weird not to acknowledge that like most people, especially those of us working in newsrooms, I’ve been glued to my screens watching the horror of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza unfold this week. Every day we wake up to more slaughtered children, flattened hospitals and murdered journalists — their press vests as ineffective as international law. Like many people I’m wondering how many more civilians need to die before our politicians can articulate quite uncontroversial words and phrases like ‘ceasefire’.
What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Killers of the Flower Moon as it’s been on my to-read pile for o long an entire film was made in the meantime. My next fiction read will likely be Green Dot by local author Madeleine Gray, which seems like it will be a popular beach book for our upcoming summer here. The last few novels I read that I can’t stop thinking about are Candalaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (thrilling!), Lazy City by Rachel Connolly (thoughtful!) and Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (charming!). I’m also reading a few books for potential endorsement which I find a singular reading experience because you’re actively reflecting on what the author is getting right which is kind of lovely.
And, of course, watching or listening to?
I’ve barely been watching TV lately but I’m listening to a lot of boygenius, Remi Wolf and Car Seat Headrest. I consume a few podcasts a day but I guess the best book-related things I’ve heard in the past week are this steamy conversation with K Patrick (author of Mrs S) on Literary Friction and Zadie Smith’s Talk Easy interview.
What did you read as a child?
I read voraciously as a kid. I was really into this random spy series by a local author about an androgynous child spy which I’ve since discovered, via a group chat, was a beloved text of other Australian bisexuals. The first book I can remember sobbing over was Jane Eyre. It isn’t a unique experience but it was the first self-possessed woman protagonist I’d encountered. I liked that her interior life expanded beyond her romantic interests. Until these questions I’d never really thought about the fact that as a child I loved Jane Eyre for her refusal of victimhood only to become a writer and avid reader at the height of that confessional essay, first person trauma industrial complex era that defined the early 2010s. Anyway I was also besotted with Helen Garner!
Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you?
Well, I’m a 31-year-old woman who writes non-fiction so you best believe I spent my early 20s obsessing over Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson, Leslie Jamison, David Foster Wallace, Rebecca Solnit, Renata Adler and Jia Tolentino. The essay collections that made me want to write my own one day were Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and Thick by Tressie McMillam Cottom. More recently the non-fiction that springs to mind in shaping my writing is Notes From the Apocalypse by Mark O’Connell and some of the books about labour like Do What You Love by Miya Tokumitsu or Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe. As a journalist I’m also equally inspired by profilers and feature writers. I began my career cherishing profiles by people like Caity Weaver and Taffy Brodesser-Akner or longform journalism from people like Rachel Aviv.
On a more personal note when I think about what qualities I admire in other writers it is people who live the politics they profess on the page, people who understand how much success in writing is due to sheer dumb luck and people who resist underbaked non-fiction publishing timeframes. I don’t know that I embody many of those qualities — I wrote my book in nine months because I’m silly.
What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
I guess when you write about reproductive rights it’s hard to side-step the steady flow of anti-choice correspondence but I’m lucky enough to have avoided negativity from actual book critics. There’s an amazing one-star review on Goodreads from a marriage therapist called Jeff who returned The Parenthood Dilemma to the store and warned married couples against it because the book didn’t promote religion and happens to mention patriarchy. Sorry to the storeperson who processed that refund.
Tell us a little about your creative process.
I love following writers who have chic post-it notes and big wooden desks but nothing about my process is cool or aesthetically satisfying. I wrote my book hunched over my laptop like a prawn. I email myself random phrases or thoughts. I don’t even open a lot of those emails, which to be honest read like they were authored by a hostage, but something about the act of sending them has been useful. I get a lot of momentum from the interviews I do both because I find other people’s reflections more interesting than my own and because an obligation to do justice to their experiences can be a very motivating force in getting your word count up. I love deadlines. In fact something I’ve realised after becoming better friends with more writers is I don’t really get writer's block. I think journalism has gifted me the practice of writing a lot of words on an extremely tight deadline but so I’m not cursed by perfectionism — you just can’t fret about stuff when you’re publishing it a couple of hours after you start writing it. One of the (many) reasons why I would make a terrible novelist is I would find it hard to invest in the redrafting process.
Tell us about your experience of the publishing industry.
I am an annoying person to ask because I had an incredibly fortunate foray into publishing. I developed a chunky proposal with my talented agent, Rach Crawford at Wolf Literary, and she sold the book in a seven way auction so I had the blessing of getting to meet with a bunch of publishers and learning more about their processes before choosing a home for my book. My experience taking the book across oceans to the UK (with Indigo Press) and then to the US (with Astra Publishing House) has been exciting. The editing process was funny. I didn’t think there were many words people only used in Australia but I had to remove the following: skerrick (the smallest bit), spruik (to promote), sook (a terrific insult akin to crybaby) and to ‘arc up’ (to get upset and angry).
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
In terms of writing it was from a teacher who told me to “write where the heat is”. It can be a clarifying prompt when you’re working on a big project to just direct your attention to a section or chapter that feels warm when other bits feel frozen and impenetrable. I think when that fails you can also read where the heat is.
What are you working on right now?
A serendipitous week to ask! I just had a rambling call with my agent in which we attempted to untangle a few extremely loose threads regarding what my next book could be. In the more immediate future, however, I’m very keen to create an interview podcast based on the key themes in The Parenthood Dilemma. And then even more immediately I’m going to bake a pie this week.