Spotlight: Attraction by Ruby Porter
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Genre: Women’s Fiction
The present reckons with the past in Attraction, Ruby Porter’s atmospheric debut novel.
Three women are on a road trip, navigating the motorways of the North Island, their relationships with one another and New Zealand’s colonial history. Our narrator doesn’t know where she stands with Ilana, her not-quite girlfriend. She has a complex history with her best friend, Ashi. She’s haunted by the memory of her emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend. And her period’s now weeks late.
Attraction is a meditative novel of connection, inheritance and the stories we tell ourselves. In lyrical fragments, Porter explores what it means to be and to belong, to create and to destroy.
Excerpt
That kind of drowning feeling. The air is all around your face, if you could only breathe it. Ilana said, —The first breath you take again always hurts.
She is an experienced drowner and I am just starting out.
—This wave, she says. Yelling, —Come, no, here by me.
She gets it right. Knows exactly where to stand for the wave to pick her up and throw her. Carry her. She can surf some right back to the shallows. I keep getting hurled below. See the Gisborne sun rippling through all that green. And I’m not sure whether I’ve opened my eyes underwater, or if I never had a chance to shut them.
Ilana grabs my arm but I duck when the wave comes.
Then she tells me about the first time, when she was seven.
Her mum’s dinghy capsized and whenever she came up for breath she hit the hull instead. She says the sea was holding her down, not ready to let her go. And then it turned and it pushed her up, shot her face first, full of air. She’s the one who keeps pulling me up today.
When I look at her, I think: the ocean will never again be so in place. It shudders and slurps and turns—no two molecules will be together for long. No two molecules will find each other again. Or at least, it’s unlikely.
Then Ashi joins us.
Ashi doesn’t catch as many waves as Ilana, but she catches some. I keep surfacing to see them tumbling into the spray together. Sometimes, Ilana puts her hand on Ashi’s arm as they wade back out deep.
—What is it? Ilana says to me.
Water is furling itself on the horizon, creeping forward.
—Stay here, she says. —It’s a big one.
I’m sucked in before it’s even broken. This time I can hardly see. The ocean floor has been tossed into the wave—I blend with the sand and the seaweed and the dappled sun. Then I feel the break, and know I’m being pushed deeper.
For me it isn’t slowed down, like Ilana said, but sped up. A flash of light, greeny brown, something above the surface. The whir. The spin. The sea gasping, in and out, one giant lung that expands and compresses. When you’re beneath it, the ocean is the only thing that breathes.
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About Ruby Porter:
Ruby Porter is a prose-writer, poet and artist. She tutors creative writing at universities and high schools. Ruby was the winner of the Wallace Foundation Short Fiction Award in 2017, and the inaugural winner of the Michael Gifkins Prize in 2018, with her debut novel Attraction. Attraction was written during her Masters of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland under supervisor Paula Morris, and published in May by Melbourne-based Text Publishing. It is distributed throughout Australia and New Zealand.
