Everything I write is about my dad: Stan Grant

I don’t want to talk to Stan Grant. I don’t think he wants to talk to me, either. His ninth book When Words Fail Us, derived from a series of 2025 lectures, lets me off the hook lightly: “I have grown bored with my language, bored with my voice, bored with my writing,” Grant reflects. “I need places where I can hold the world at bay [and] linger among those who speak more slowly, more softly.”

Wondering how soft-spoken I am, I begin to imagine: Grant and I, sitting in a Taiwanese restaurant, sharing a pot of oolong. That was the plan. But Grant had to cancel; a virus affecting his inner ear was causing a sense of brain fog.

“It’s the most debilitating thing,” he explains. Grant tells me he underwent exercises designed “to send conflicting signals to your brain”. I wonder if his ailment speaks to his book’s sense of our contemporary world: plenty of conversation and overlapping signals but vanishingly little dialogue.

“Yes!” he says, laughing. “We find ourselves, in late modernity, living at such intimacy, at scale, with extraordinary diversity, and our capacity to communicate across that diversity and at that scale is collapsing.” It’s vintage Grant: macro-lensed, big-voiced, grand-scaled. His sentences form paragraphs. Those paragraphs conclude – 10, 15 minutes later – as prose. He doesn’t need a profiler; he needs a transcriber.

In When Words Fail Us, Grant describes himself as seeking refuge and “a place of withdrawal that is not retreat”. He is “soul sore” and “yearning for repose”.

This is not the Grant I meet in person. Narrating almost every passage and reference of the book to me during our conversation, he moves from Estonian composer Arvo Part to Simone Weil, the French philosopher who affected him “more than any other thinker”. Grant’s fondness for intellectual armour helps him, he says, “know where the hits are coming from – and how to respond”.

“Modernity is a tradition that I found myself plunged into – that was done unto us, that I am formed by. I don’t think you ever get over bracing yourself. So much of my own work, foolishly, intellectually, tries to bridge a gap I can’t bridge intellectually,” he says. “There’s a resistance I don’t think I’m ever going to overcome. That’s the paradox. I’m knocking on a door that will never open.” In this, Grant is a living embodiment of the Beckett adage “fail again, fail better”. The ideas others have of him – even the ideas he occasionally forms about himself – are always parrying in the ring with him.

When Words Fail Us came, in part, from frustration, following his principled decision to walk away from journalism and the result of the Voice referendum. The book invites readers to be still, to have a cup of tea, to “sit awhile”.

“Something I’m critical of in my own work is that, when I get close to those points of revealing part of my soul, I probably retreat behind enemy lines. Because I don’t trust what’s going to happen next,” Grant says. “I don’t trust what people will do. We take the language other people use and have used against us to speak back to them, and find that it’s not heard even when we do speak back.”

Perhaps this is why, especially in Grant’s later work, the tone sometimes grows suspicious. At one point in When Words Fail Us, having repeatedly invoked “we”, he grants himself a conditional “or most of us” before doubling down: “We love categories. When I say ‘we’, I do not mean all of us – likely most of us don’t live such straitened lives. But outside in the noise there’s someone waiting to label us.” Maybe so – but it’s Grant invoking the label here.

When I ask what stops him giving himself permission, Grant invokes the public, the outside gaze, the gossip. Being the eldest son, he recalls, his father was always teaching him “to survive a world he thought I was going to have to combat”.

“He would run at me with great force and teach me to stand there and tackle him and not flinch. I know from overhearing him talk to Mum that he thought I was too soft for the world. He sensed a vulnerability that he had to harden.”

Before our conversation I read Gravity and Grace, underlining a passage from Simone Weil’s reflection on spiritual tenderness in which she writes, “Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the ‘I’ from outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.” To let oneself be destroyed by others before one has the chance to do so oneself: for the artist, it’s a profound loss. One kind of annihilation an artist might seek is the annihilation of one’s fearful self. What grace is there, after all, when the armour you wear stops you being kind to yourself?

“When I think back to the intimate times my father and I shared,” Grant says, “I don’t think of a hug. I can’t remember that. I remember him putting the gloves on, teaching me to fight. Trying to get past that, trying to have a relationship that was more jocular, intimate, affectionate – that wasn’t going to happen. There was no time. He’s just trying to help us survive and doesn’t have time to be close to me.”

When Grant speaks about his father he uses the present tense. Returning to his childhood, he re-enters its rooms, its hallways, the long periods of silent watching. His father is there, just trying to help us survive. There was another side, though: later in life, while listening to music, a little transformation.

“He’d go into himself. My mother would place her hand on the back of his neck. That allowed him to soften. There was always part of my Dad the necessity of survival would never allow him to express.”

As a child, Grant remembers changing schools 14 or 15 times before he was a teenager, “turning up at a new town where no one knows you, walking into classes where you don’t have friends and will never stay long enough to have them”. A lot of the people Grant grew up with, he says, did not survive. Always there was resistance, an obstacle to overcome.

“The novel is probably where I’m really trying to explore vulnerability,” Grant says of his next project. “In writing I get closer to the possibility of freedom than I do in any other part of life.”

It’s his first, and he’s giving nothing away. It partly concerns Bennelong, a key figure in the meeting between England’s invaders and Wiradjuri civilisation after 1788. “I was hoping to have it finished this month but every time I sit down to write I feel I’m looking at three screens. Every word is jumbled – which may just be my writing. I think about that beautiful Seamus Heaney poem Digging, where he talks about his father working the land. Heaney contemplates the pen in his hand and says, ‘I’ll dig with it’.”

It recalls, I say, his father’s sawmill work. “Everything I write is about my dad,” he says. “Having a wall full of books gives me an armour that can allow me to intellectually excavate things. But it’s at the expense of revealing the hurt little boy hiding at the heart of it. The boy who’s been hurt and who doesn’t want to hurt anyone else. I’ve plunged myself into a world of ideas and reading and travelling and reporting, all trying to understand what it’s like for that little boy to look and see his father sitting in the bath with his eyes closed, the water black from blood and sap, willing away all the pain of the world. The tips of three of his fingers are gone. He’s got a stab wound in his shoulder. He’s got jail tattoos on his arms. Everything that he has in his body is all we have to survive. That desire to find my own place in the world – I’ve armed myself for that. It’s a lonely place to be. But to embrace that loneliness, I think, has been part of this journey.”

It’s as close as Grant gets, and close enough for me: soon he is again duking it out with Camus and Weil. But this, I think, is who I arranged to talk to. Who I want to talk to. This is Stan Grant.

“The best writing,” Grant tells me as we finish speaking, the sun having set, “sits in a space just out of the corner of your eye.”

There are glimpses of something intimate, precarious, hidden there. I hear it now and again – as if Grant is watching his family prepare for another day, unaware their eldest son is still present, still waiting, looking for those moments when they might relinquish their armour.

When Words Fail Us (NewSouth) is out now.

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