ALEX MILLER

Tuesday, 17 November.

I’m just home from another wonderful author event at Fullers. Novelist Alex Miller spoke brilliantly about his new book, Lovesong, telling stories that both showed and told us his credentials as a storyteller. From his first sentence I was hooked. He’s as good a teller as any I’ve listened to, and that includes Alice Kane and Joan Bodger. At the end of his telling and reading I had to shake myself free of the story he’d woven of the novel and its genesis.

Miller’s choice to present the novel by telling stories, about himself, about it, about storytelling, was apt, since one of the novel’s concerns is the relationship between a writer and a story, one which he hears and is unable to resist going on to write it. So being taken over by it and then taking it over in turn.

Stories are everywhere around us, in the world, Miller said, we swim in them. They go on all the time. He wrote this particular book, unlike his other novels, entirely to please himself. I was taken over by his talking and wanted to buy every one of his books—but then I have to get them back to Canada. So I’ll do a little searching to see if they are available there before I carry an armload up to the sales desk.