Introduction

My doctoral dissertation was an interrogation of the writing of my fifth novel and seventh book, Neem Dreams (Baranay, 2003), a novel set in India. Neem Dreams' four main characters are Pandora, an Australian feminist scientist, Andy, an English lawyer, Jade, an Australian buying products for a New York store and Meenakshi, an Indian running a women's development project. They meet as a result of their separate quests related to the uses of neem, India's 'miracle tree', used since pre-history for medicine, agriculture and household purposes and, in the 1990s, also at the centre of an intellectual property dispute.

In part an examination of the relationship of yoga practice to writing practice, in part an examination of representations of India by non-Indian writers, and in part an examination of issues in writing fiction, my work led me to re-read my six previously published books: Between Careers (1989a), The Saddest Pleasure (1989b), Pagan (1990), The Edge of Bali (1992), Rascal Rain (1994) and Sheila Power (1997). I examined in turn questions raised by this re-reading: in terms of memoir (how the re-reading stimulated memories of each book's composition), of stages (how a writer develops a body of work through stages that might be seen as analogous to the stages of yoga practice) and finally of the way a writer's earlier work might be read as prefiguring her latest. In this case the six texts revealed concerns that were re-visited or developed in Neem Dreams.

The effect of this was to find that it was impossible to ever assign a definitive interpretation to these texts.

The act of writing is an act of production whose result, writing, continues to produce, independent of its 'author'. Through unlimited readings and rewritings, it defers meaning.