PANMACMILLAN INTERVIEW with GAIL BELL March 2004

Gail Bell was born in Sydney in 1950. She graduated from the University of Sydney in pharmacy and education. She has published short stories and articles, and her first full-length work, The Poison Principle won the NSW Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction in 2002.

The basis for Shot is your own traumatic experience of being shot in the back when you were 17. What compelled you to write down this experience for the first time after all these years?

Part of my way of dealing with the shooting was to shut the door on any ongoing relationship with the event itself and to discourage others from speculating on the “what ifs”. I spent about 12 months after I was shot in a kind of dazed anxiety, finding ways to cope, telling myself I was over it, and trying to believe that keeping busy would keep me off the path of morbid introspection. And in many ways that
worked. The experience lost its scary glow and I got on with my life.

Then a couple of years ago the remembering started. Snapshot images of me at 17 walking home in
the dark, the feel of the bullet as it struck. They were very brief sensations and I let them pass through instead of willing them away. Why? I was older, a bit wiser and, for the first time since it happened, I was beginning to feel curious about this girl and her experience.

Once I allowed the memories in, I couldn't stop remembering. It was chaotic and disturbing and had a vivid quality that seemed to belong to now, not the past.

This, of course, is the nature of what I now realise is my own unacknowledged long-standing posttraumatic stress disorder, and it took me some time to admit to myself that I might be disordered in some way. I spent two years finding out how extensive my wounds were.

Looking back now, what were the signs that you were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder?

I seem to live my life in a state of hyper-awareness, as if my dials are turned up to 10 all the time. I now
know that this represents a compensating vigilance, that in some strange illogical way my mind is on permanent alert against the possibility of being attacked again. In real terms, it means that I jump at loud noises, I have a lot of trouble falling (and staying) asleep, I try not to sit in exposed positions or to stand at lighted windows, and I react badly to the physical sight of guns (as carried by policemen for instance). This collection of relatively minor symptoms have been with me since the shooting but hasn't stopped me being enthusiastic about life and change and challenges. I've been coping so long I've stopped thinking about it as coping. I'm perceived as a strong woman and I like to keep the perception alive, for myself and others, mainly because I've never wanted to be labelled a victim.

I believe that the symptoms of long-standing stress disorders persist indefinitely; that is, they are nonerasable from the parts of the brain where fear memories are stored. What changes is how well we deal with, or work around, them. Or what sort of help we get in the form of therapies and/or medication regimes.

Has writing down your experience been a kind of therapy for you?

Writing Shot has been first and foremost a literary undertaking. I wanted to move through my topic and themes with as much grace and style as I could achieve, and I chose my path through the book's terrain with a respectful awareness of the reader at my side. Shot wasn't conceived as therapy for me or anybody else, but as a completed piece of work I find it's been deeply affecting for readers and, in an unexpected way, profoundly transformative for me. By standing still long enough to get the words on the page I've allowed the full impact of being shot and traumatised to work its way through my internal machinery. I've filled in some blank spaces and re-storyed the experience for myself. I've built a narrative framework for my ordeal, a bit like a house for it to live in, and there's a degree of satisfaction for me in giving that part of my life a new address in a new part of town.

In your book, you delve into the experiences of other people who have been shot. What did you hope to find through these interviews?

I was looking for differences and commonalities of experience. I wondered if there was some kind of “core” experience shared by people who’ve been shot (and survived). Obviously I spoke to a very small
sample group, but across that small group I found things we had in common: for instance, the surprise factor. Even soldiers in combat situations were unsure of what had happened to them when the bullet(s) struck; just as unsure as I was when a sniper’s bullet came out of nowhere. We all felt "something" at
the instant of impact, a feeling of being pushed or shoved, but no-one had that "aha" mental click that registered "I’ve been shot". The people I spoke to all got over their physical wounds, as I did, but each of us carries some or all aspects of a traumarelated stress disorder.

The differences related to magnitude: how big was the bullet, how many times were you hit, where were you hit, how good was the medical treatment, how much support did you receive. Magnitude issues will always differ. The interesting find for me was how I could draw connecting lines between myself (shot once with a small calibre bullet) and a war veteran (shot 6 times with serious high calibre bullets) via the shared experience of physical and mental violation.

You also experienced what it was like to handle a firearm. Did the encounter offer you any kind of insight into the psychology of an assailant?

I can’t say that it did, except to make me wonder all over again how anyone could shoot another person “in cold blood”. When you hold a gun or rifle in your hands you get a sense of its capabilities. I imagine that it’s empowering to some people to know that one small press of the trigger can create such an expanded, explosive response. I imagine that feeling the recoil, smelling the gunpowder and hearing the noise might exercise their senses in some satisfying way; and that seeing their target struck by a bullet might provide some sort of instant feedback, like a kapow moment in a cartoon, but I can never get inside the mind that shoots at living things for pleasure.

When I handled guns it was at a shooting centre where the targets were red bullseyes on bits of white cardboard and every possible way to protect and preserve life was in place. I didn’t enjoy the experience, but I came to see how you could gain satisfaction from improving your aim, in other words, I could see how this type of shooting qualifies as a sport, and I came away thinking that if that was where the activity stayed, that is, inside a bunker inside a shooting club, then I had no quarrel with sporting shooters.

Your writing is characterised by a mixture of introspection as well as forensic research. What do you believe makes good non-fiction writing?

Honesty, with yourself and with the reader. No fudging, no hiding behind clever walls of words. I’m a huge admirer of Janet Malcolm’s work. I read and re-read and try to learn from her. She has a talent for asking the hard questions, and the intellect to back up her analyses. When I read non-fiction I like to feel as if I’m in the company of a wise companion who’s done all the hard work and now wants to bring me the news, without condescension. I also like warmth and signs of human fallibility. Helen Garner is superb in The First Stone. Her interior journey is the beating heart of that wonderful book.

Both Shot and Poison Principle have been based on personal accounts. Do you have an idea of what you would like to write about next?

Some time in the future I plan a big book on addiction. I’ve made some preliminary notes and have begun collecting bits and pieces that might be useful, but after the huge emotional journey of Shot I want to have a rest from heavy research-based writing and finish a novel I’ve been working on in the background. During the Christmas break I’ve given this novel some space to breathe and now it seems to be getting bigger. We’ll see.