The incredible true story behind Chloe Adams' historical fiction debut

Sydney Morning Herald

a day ago

Chloe Adams' debut novel, The Occupation, opens with a striking scene: in an elegant Collins Street foyer in 1949, two young women meet to discuss a deeply personal matter. Mary is newly returned from the reconstruction efforts in post-war Japan. She's unwed and pregnant. Tess is about to ask her to give her the baby.
Even more striking is the fact that none of this is fiction. It wasn't until Adams' mother was an adult that she learnt her 'Aunt Mary' was, in fact, her biological mother.
'About five or six years ago, I was having a conversation with my mum, and she told me about this moment where my adoptive grandmother and my biological grandmother met at this fancy hotel in Melbourne, and one of them was going to ask the other for the baby,' Adams says.
'It feels like that scene is so alien to our world. The idea of asking another mum: 'Can I have your child?' It says so much about how the world has changed in our lifetime.'
Adams was studying for a Masters in Creative Writing when she heard the story, and began exploring it for an exercise in class. 'While I was writing that, it dawned on me: 'Hang on. Mary was in Japan just before this, so let me ask a few more questions'.'
Those questions ultimately led to an expansive novel that won Adams the prestigious Penguin Prize for 2024, published as this month marks the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. It's a work that explores both world-shaking historical events and the most intimate of moments, weaving together historical facts and imaginative excursions.
The Occupation is divided into two halves. The first is set in Kure, a town not far from Hiroshima, where Mary arrives to take up a position as a dental nurse for the occupying forces only to find herself saddled with a job in the barracks cafe instead. Adams captures the dissonance between Mary's naïve fantasies and the reality of post-war life through sharply rendered moments: drunken soldiers flirting and cavorting in hot springs, young lovers using the din of rain on a tin roof to cover up their antics, Aussies making handsome money selling imported goods on the grey market.
All of these details play out against a backdrop that is admirably handled: the unimaginable devastation wrought on the peaceful seaside city of Hiroshima hangs over this section of the novel, but is hardly mentioned directly.
'It was important to not use someone else's suffering to prop up my book. That's absolutely what I did not want to do. But on the other hand, (Hiroshima) was a place that most of these Australians at the time went to and so to not write about it would have been remiss of me as well. Finding the balance is hard.'
A key tenet in Japanese aesthetics is the notion that what's left out is as important as what's included, and in this way Adams conveys the colossal effect of nuclear fallout without resorting to lurid or ghoulish tactics.
'At some point, it came to me that what I needed to convey was that the Japanese characters don't necessarily want to share all of their trauma with the white people who turned up in their city. There should be some clear indication to the reader that Mary's perspective of these people's experiences may not actually be precisely what their experience is.'
This was also the case regarding the archaic attitudes many Australians held towards the Japanese survivors they were ostensibly there to help. Many of the letters and reports Adams came across during her research were marked by implicit or overt racism, and she grappled with how to approach that problem.
'I felt it was important to be careful with my words. I didn't use certain slurs and that kind of thing. Any racism in the book is really a symbolic gesture of what was really happening because the books that I read at that time were just so shocking that they're unpublishable now.'
The Occupation 's second half details Mary's life after returning to Melbourne and the complex relationships that emerge after she agrees to let Tess raise her baby. As with the scenes set in Japan, much of the writing here plays with the line between biography and invention.
'This is the sad part of the story. Mary spent a lot of time wanting to see my mum. At one point, she broke her foot and my adoptive grandmother invited Mary to come and live with them for a few months. So my mum has lots of strong memories from her childhood of spending time with Mary. But it wasn't until she was in her 30s that she discovered Aunt Mary was actually Mum Mary.'
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO CHLOE ADAMS
Worst habit? Excitedly talking over people in conversation. (I know, it's the worst.)
Greatest fear? It's impossible to isolate just one. I'm a worrier from way back.
The line that stayed with you? ' Tell all the truth but tell it slant' by Emily Dickinson. In writing, we often talk about precision – but there's something about being adjacent to the truth, or edging towards it, that interests me even more.
Biggest regret? Not insisting on care and kindness from previous romantic partners.
Favourite book? The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard.
The artwork/song you wish was yours? Deeper Water by Paul Kelly.
If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? The day I met my husband in our shared workplace, so I could go back and savour that moment better. Maybe I'd also whisper to myself, see, it's going to be okay, just six years of friendship to get through first.
It might seem a big call to follow up the panoramic drama of post-war Japan with a close-up image of life in suburban Australia, but it's astonishing how Adams manages to make this latter half of her tale even more emotionally gripping than the first. Those earlier chapters are where we get to know Mary's inner life in great detail; it's only later that we can plumb the maelstrom of emotion into which she finds herself thrown when impossible circumstances push her to make an unbearable choice.
'One of the reasons why I felt more and more passionate about telling this story was to give her a voice because with everything that unfolded in her life after that, it felt like she could never really escape the loneliness of that moment.'
Adams has a long history as a journalist and media producer, and some of that experience probably made its way into her debut novel. 'I do have a tendency to juxtapose the sweeping grand collective experience against personal experience. Go to any event, fire, flood, war, whatever, and a journalist's job is not just to write about the collective experience, but also the personal experience.'
She finds it just as fruitful to allow space for the less analytic side of the creative mind during the writing process. Throughout The Occupation, there are subtle threads about lost children, not all of which were necessarily sewn into the narrative via conscious means.
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'I think the unconscious mind works with those things, playing with them and affecting them. One of my sisters died as a baby before I was born. So my whole life from birth, I think, was shaped by that sort of absence of a figure at the table. She wasn't spoken about very often, but it had a profound impact on me.'
As for the future, Adams says that her Penguin Prize win has brought with it more than just the material benefits of $20,000 and a contract with a major publishing company. 'The more profound thing on a personal level was this idea that, oh, I can tell people I'm a writer now ... I can tell people I'm a writer and not feel like an idiot.'