‘If you are going to tell a story, you must be prepared for criticism’ – Fiona Snyckers discusses her new novel, Lacuna
More about the book!

Fiona Snyckers chatted to Polity SA about her new novel, Lacuna.

Lacuna is a response to JM Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace, written from the point of view of David Lurie’s daughter, Lucy Lurie.

In the interview, Sane Dhlamini asks Snyckers whether a male writer has the authority to write about a female rape survivor, as Coetzee did in Disgrace.

‘That is a very difficult question and it’s something that I really wrestled with in this book,’ Snyckers says.

‘I started off thinking, no, what gives you the right as a male writer to talk about such an intimate female experience in this way. But in the end I couldn’t stick to it, I had to come down on the side of, anybody can tell any story. I can’t say, “you can only tell this story and you can only tell that story”.

‘But if you are going to tell a story, you must be prepared for criticism, and you must be prepared for somebody to set up a counter-narrative to your story.’