Bri Lee is always working. It is obvious in the deeply confessional books she has written: using her law degree and story of being molested as a child to explore how the law handles sexual crimes (2018’s Eggshell Skull); her own eating disorder to examine body image (2019’s Beauty); and her anxieties about her own intelligence driving an investigation into the sexist, racist, classist history of education (2021’s Who Gets to Be Smart?).
But there is also the mini empire she has built in a startlingly short time: the Walkley-nominated investigative journalism, the keynote speeches, the newsletter, the podcast, the PhD in law she is completing while also lecturing. She’s the sort of cool girl author who can campaign for reforms to defamation law and sex education while also featuring in campaigns for Mimco and Camilla and Marc. She runs writing workshops for those keen enough to spend thousands on learning just how Lee does it; when we speak, she has just held one in Egypt and another in Sydney (no spots left for Sri Lanka in September – $5,000 a pop, flights not included). Oh, and last year she went to Antarctica for a month to research her next book.
When people heard I was interviewing Lee, they all asked me variations of the same question: how did she do all of this, in less than a decade? And after meeting her it’s clear: hard work, powered by a deeply deliberate (some would say cynical) drive to do what is needed to get exactly where she is.
“I think work will probably define my entire life,” Lee tells me. “When your art is so informed by your life, everything is potential material. When I’m on holiday, I see or hear things that would be great to write about and I have to actually visualise letting them go. It is both my greatest asset and my greatest weakness that I almost never switch off.”
Rather fittingly, her latest book is titled The Work. Her first novel, it follows two young people whose lives are dominated by the crossovers in money, power and sex. There is Lally, a gallery owner in New York who is flush with cash and praise when one of her artists dies suddenly, making him very collectible. And across the world in Sydney is Pat, an art auctioneer struggling to pay his rent, who begins blurring lines with a rich client. It could all be ripped from today’s headlines – the vagaries of the art world, #MeToo, cancel culture, millennials in the property market and deep fake pornography – though Lee began working on it five years ago. It will most likely storm bestseller lists.
The Work was always going to be a novel for Lee, who has only written nonfiction previously. Part of the inspiration came from her own social circles: watching brilliant young people move from their 20s to their 30s, from bad share houses into bad one-bedroom apartments, and how their ability to make art was determined by “whether they had family money – or whether their debut was an unexpected success”, she says drily.
Neither Pat nor Lally are artists themselves, but they shape how art is seen, which is what Lee is most interested in. “It’s how the sausage gets made: all the people whose jobs exist in between the artist and the person who steps into a gallery space to look at art or buys a book,” she says. “All those people who invisibly shape the perception of how that art is received, priced, documented, collected, archived, remembered, elevated or lost to obscurity. And so much of that has little to do with the work.
“One of the driving questions for me over the years is how to be very cynical and very clear-eyed about the creative industries, whilst staying very romantic about the art itself. And I realised, from the beginning, that what is required of me to actually make the work, versus what is required of me to sell the work, are two entirely different versions of Bri Lee.”
Certainly, part of Lee’s success comes from her willingness to – to use her analogy – be the sausage meat. But that doesn’t mean there is no personal cost to being put through the meat grinder, of getting up at festivals and on television and talking about the deepest darkest parts of oneself that she has, admittedly, chosen to sell and that the publishing industry so loves selling.
“I cried in front of crowds as I talked about what I’d survived, and the messages started pouring in,” she wrote in Beauty of her time promoting Eggshell Skull. “My inbox was screaming at me to read and reply to people’s outpourings of pain. In the signing line I was asked for advice, unloaded on, praised, and questioned. There was minimal sleep, maximum drinking, and a growing feeling of being permanently on display.”
“It is not lost on me that the success of the book I wrote about getting molested is the reason I now enjoy artistic freedom,” she says now, bluntly. “That’s cooked. I have thought about it a lot, as you can imagine. And there’s no way to make it make sense.
“The only closure I could come to is that I really think that our human fascination with each other’s pain is the best thing, and the worst thing, about us. We are moved to action and altruism, we are moved to help and change, by other people’s stories. But we also have this 21st century media churn of trauma narratives and if you have some identity that has made your life more difficult, that is more appealing to the media.”
Does she feel that she has complete agency? “I have control over the words I write,” she says, carefully. “I do not have control over the words other people write. I was forced to come to terms with the fact I can’t control other people’s perception of me.”
She stopped reading reviews “a long time ago”, as well as the “nasty comments on Instagram, on Goodreads”. She has a small group of people “whose opinions I value very, very highly”, though she is keen to stress that she values criticism: “Hand on heart, it’s A-OK if people don’t like my work. What is much harder to stomach is the people who deliberately misrepresent my work.”
Lee’s repeated use of her personal experience, to pick over the invisible societal and political forces that shaped that experience, rankles some as solipsistic. “Perhaps Lee’s true subject is self-worth,” one critic wrote of Who Gets to Be Smart, in which Lee examines enormous topics like eugenics and also recalls crying after a dinner party in Oxford because she felt stupider than everyone there. It wasn’t an unfair observation. But, aside from her obvious smarts, Lee’s awareness that what she does can be bought, packaged and sold goes some way to explain how she arrived where she is.
It may sound strange, given how much of her life has been pored over by readers, but Lee considers herself a private person. She sees a lot of parallels between artists and writers when it comes to public personas: “The thing that makes you a good artist is your ability to sit for five years at a time in your studio by yourself and just do your fucking work. And the thing that makes you good at selling that work is being the complete opposite, being someone who loves being in the limelight.”
“I love my job,” she adds. “I want to write until I die. But if you want to be able to pay your rent in the 21st century as an artist, you have to be a cynic about the industry.”
While she always feels nervous before her books are published, this is the first time she feels no dread: “With the others, I had this sinking feeling in my stomach that is just not there any more.”
Is that because she doesn’t have a traumatic subject? “Yeah. People will find things to complain about but it is just not the same. You know, the last time I went on talkback radio to talk about Who Gets to Be Smart, some woman phoned in and she’d pulled over to the side of the road just to yell at me. There’s just no way this book can be as much of a fucking exhausting grind of constant personal disclosure, or make people yell at me.”
She wonders if it will still be a problem for her fiction, which has less “her” in it: “I believe it is impossible to make great art that everybody likes. I would rather some people adore my books and some people loathe them, than everyone go ‘meh’ – that’s the nightmare.
“The people being shitty on the internet about me – what they don’t see are the 20 versions of this manuscript and what it took to make what is in your hand now. That is years of work.
“I love doing it. But it is work.”
The Work by Bri Lee is available from 3 April
