Interviews with Creatives: Author Emma Hardy on writing memoirs

This interview features writer Emma Hardy on her debut literary memoir Periodic Bitch, the structure that held it all together and why knowing whether you’re a holder or a sharer might be the most useful thing a writer

This post is part of the Interviews with Creatives series

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Interview with Emma Hardy

EH: My name is Emma Hardy. I am a writer, first and foremost, and I work across both fiction and non-fiction, but I have my first book coming out very shortly, which is a non-fiction literary memoir.

MD: And what is this book called?

EH: It is called Periodic Bitch.

MD: What a great title.

EH: Thank you. I had some help with coming up with the title. We spent ages and ages thinking about it. Nothing quite felt right, and then my agent texted me that at 10pm on a Saturday, and we went, yeah, done.

MD: I feel like maybe you need to give us that little one-liner. What is this book about? Because it’s got such a great title.

EH: Totally. So, this is a memoir. The tagline is that it’s a memoir of menstruation, madness and monsters. I would say that it’s a literary exploration of premenstrual illness, told through my own experience of PMDD during Melbourne’s lockdowns, and I use that as a way to circle through the different ways that women’s illnesses have been treated throughout history. There’s a big blend of memoir, archival research, lots of that kind of hybrid non-fiction form. Criticism as well.

MD: Fantastic. I want to say up front, we know each other from a little way back. I decided to do improv at some point, I think it was during COVID.

EH: It might have been I think either right before COVID or during COVID.

MD: I went there because I wanted to shake up my writing a bit. I wanted to inject a bit of risk-taking, and thought improv would be a good way to develop a bit of that. And it turned out Emma was my teacher. I think of that time very fondly, because I think also because I laughed pretty much for two hours once a week.

EH: It was such a good class. I also started improv for that same reason, maybe not shaking up my writing routine, but definitely balancing it out. The writing is a really, really solitary activity and a lot of the things that you do when you’re writing—sitting down by yourself, writing, editing, taking forever to show anybody because you’ve got to workshop it to a good enough state before you put it in front of somebody—it’s the complete opposite of improv. In improv you’re collaborating with people straight away, there’s absolutely no editing. Whatever you put down is done and out there, and you’re showing it to people immediately. So, it really balanced out that creative impulse, and I think it’s quite a good thing for writers as well.

MD: There’s so many lessons that I took from improv that I have taken into my writing, and I think about this quite often. Things like, if a character is this, then what else? If they believe this, then what else? And it enables me to go, alright, so what else could be going on? I think this works really well with fiction, in particular. And also that building up, like, turn up the dial, just keep turning it up. And the other one is the yes and. So, if my character gives me something, then I go, okay, what else? And I just go with it, rather than fighting back against it.

Has improv taught you anything for writing this book?

EH: For this book, I mean, it teaches you a lot about writing and about character. There are some improv things that I think I’ve gone against in this book, now that you’re bringing it up.

There’s that idea of the simplest answer being the right answer in improv. There’s no need to overcomplicate things sometimes. Your first thought is the right thought. And this book definitely takes that first thought and turns it around and around and around, and maybe overcomplicates it, and then comes back to a state of understanding. So that first thought is, what is this illness? Is it even real? And your first response to answer that question might be, well, yes, of course it is. But I spend time overcomplicating it.

I don’t know if improv has taught me so well for non-fiction. I think there are definitely elements of character that you can maintain. There’s this great quote from, I think it’s Tobias Wolff in a letter to Mary Karr when she was writing Cherry, her first memoir. And, paraphrasing ,he says, have absolutely no care for your dignity. He’s like, be cruel to yourself, don’t have any pity for yourself, don’t have kindness or graciousness for the character that you’re creating of yourself, just be ruthless, essentially.

And I think that is easier to do when you have been vulnerable in front of a stage. You are very aware of the fact that the self that you’re crafting in a book isn’t necessarily you. It obviously is you, but it’s still a crafted version of that. So, when you’re doing improv or performance, that’s not you on stage, that’s a character that you’re playing, but there’s always going to be an element of you in there as well, maybe, as you said, dialled up. So yeah, I think there’s some kind of combination of those two thoughts. Does that make sense?

MD: Yeah, that makes absolute sense. I often think that with writing memoirs, the author becomes a character. I’m going to follow this pathway, because I’m curious about it. Do you become a curated version of yourself in the writing of the memoir?

EH: I mean, yes. For even the very fact that you’re not going to write about every day. You’re curating the days and the moments in which you write, and therefore you’re curating your reactions and yourself as a consequence of that. I thought about that quite a lot when I was writing it, because I think I am quite hard on myself in this book, but I think it wouldn’t work if I wasn’t.

And similarly, the only other character in the book is my partner, Pavan. I think he’s quite a curated character as well, because you need to have enough engagement between the two of us that people can see the relationship, or understand why you two might be together, but also have conflict, without creating a detestable villain. So, I think there are definitely some moments of lightness that were curated. And in a book that’s quite dark, those moments of lightness were quite important to show the breadth of humanity as well.

Creative Routine

MD: Thank you for sharing that. Can you tell me a little bit about what your routine is for your writing?

EH: I have had a few different routines over my writing life. The one that I keep coming back to is from that famous book, The Artist’s Way, which is to first thing in the morning. Get up, 3 pages, handwritten stream of consciousness, whatever comes out, you never look at it again. Doing that first thing in the morning is ideal for me, although often now that’s replaced by walking the dog, because she’s really needy and asks for that first. But trying to do that first thing in the morning, then moving into the writing practice and getting something done first thing is really good for me. It’s especially better if I can do it with somebody else. When I was living in the United States, I had a friend, Aurel, who was our next-door neighbour. I would go over to his place first thing in the morning, and we’d write together. Sometimes we might go to a cafe. I have another friend at the moment, and we’re meeting at the library some mornings to do writing. I’ve even tried to move my workday around so that I can start work a bit later and do that writing first thing in the morning.

MD: Body doubling, I’ve heard some people…

EH: Body doubling is the idea. I’m very bad at attention, so I have all of the hacks. I have an app on my phone where if you don’t touch your phone, it plants a little tree in a forest. Pomodoro, which is just another version of the Pomodoro technique. I do the bullet journal as well, so I know what I’m going to do. I write in Scrivener, so I can kind of just get it all out and then move it around later. Anything that stops that block or makes it difficult to start, is what I’m trying to get rid of as well.

MD: On the days that you’re not body doubling, do you have a routine that helps you get into your writing?

EH: Sometimes it’s just forcing myself to sit down and do it. I’m a strong believer that the way to write a book is quite simply to sit down and write a book. We overcomplicate it and think of all of these craft things or ways that are blocking us. Even right now, when I’m working on book two, a part of me is…maybe there is a block … no, it’s just sitting down and doing it. So, the routine is not make myself a coffee, or do this stuff. It might be that I have to walk the dog, and then as soon as she’s done and I’ve put the food in her bowl, I have to sit down and stare at that screen until something comes out.

Creative Process

MD: Tell me about your process with putting a story together, you know, where you go from the start to getting it actually done.

EH: Do you mean, like, from ideation?

MD: Yeah.

EH: I tend to work more with themes or ideas that I’m interested in. I’m not a plotter in any way, so I might start with an idea or an image. I find that it’s better to just write a lot, and then not use much of what you’ve written, so I tend to work it out on the page. And then you get quite a bulk of material. Then hopefully, ideally, at some point, a structure will emerge. There was a great book on structure that I read while I was writing this book, which is called Meander, Spiral, Explode, and it’s by Jane Alison. Have you heard of it?

MD: I have. Steve Capone, who was on an earlier episode, mentioned that to me.

EH: It’s so good. I really, really recommend you get it. For a craft book, it’s quite beautiful to read as well.

MD: I’m going to put a link to that in the show notes so that people can find that book as well.

EH: Let me talk about it, because I love to talk about this one.

One of the premises behind it is that the structures that we see in story are structures from nature. The arc that we see, the traditional story arc, is like a wave or a swell, and it’s quite a natural form, but she equates it to a male orgasm, where it kind of peaks and then it’s over. She went on this mission to look for different story structures that might inhabit different feelings or emotions. So that could be wavelets, where you have lots of smaller waves and smaller peaks, which might mirror more of a female orgasm. One of them is spirals, which we see all through nature, vortexes, weather patterns, and she thinks that that can be quite a good way of taking an idea and turning it around and looking at it from different angles, as well as through time. Because if you’re looking at the orbits of the planets, which look pretty circular as you’re moving through time, they’re actually creating these spirals. So, a spiral is an interesting way of looking at a story structure as, like, you’ve got one central dilemma, and you’re circling it, and your position and view of it changes as you move forward through time. She also talks about honeycomb, which you might see in a novel like Bluets (by Maggie Nelson), where you have smaller, fragmented pieces that together combine to create something bigger as a whole. And meanders, so just kind of these desire paths, where you’re following a story but it’s not necessarily adhering to a really tight structure.

I just love this book, and for me when I read it, it was just so obvious to me that my book had to be a spiral. It had to be obsessive. It had to be this tension holding itself in, and everything revolving around this one question or dilemma, as well as that kind of frenetic energy that you have in a spiral. Once that structure became clear to me, it was really easy to take all of the fragments and the bits that I had dumped on the page and go, okay, where am I in this spiral, and how do I position these together to make this narrative make sense. To create this sensation of both being trapped in a kind of vortex, but also there’s progression, and you’re looking at things from different angles. For me, it’s a lot of dumping stuff down on the page at first, then once that structure became clear, and I knew what I was doing with the shape of the story, then it was just a lot of editing, restructuring, and moving things around until I could feel like that was working. I don’t know if it’s even visible when you’re reading the book, that you’ll see that it is a spiral, but for me, that was really helpful in writing it.

MD: Did you have to draw that out? I’m always curious about the way people do things. Did you have printed out parts, and then put them around the floor, stuck them on the wall?

EH: Yeah, all of those different things. I did a bunch of different exercises. I did one where I was drawing the different threads and trying to see how they spun together. I did all the cards and the moving them around. I printed the whole thing out and then moved it around as well. I actually put more time into those exercises than I thought I would, but I just remember deeply wanting to be able to see the whole book at once. And wishing that I just had this enormous screen or something where I could move it all around. But you can’t read everything at once, so that didn’t really help.

MD: You said you’re writing the next book. Is the process different for this next one?

EH: The process is slightly different because this is fiction, so I don’t have the same sense of, well, if I don’t know what to write today, I can just write about that period of time. So it’s a little bit more, perhaps, I’m thinking with more of a plot brain than I would like to.

MD: And how is that sitting with you?

EH: Not, I’m not loving sitting with a plot brain. I don’t know, I like sitting with themes and images more than with overarching plot, at least at this stage of the writing process.

MD: Yeah, I’m curious, because I’m much more of a pantser than a plotter, and last year I was with some screenwriters, so I’ve plotted out this next one, and the rebel in me is wanting to push against that plot continuously.

EH: So why don’t you, or do you?

MD: I am, yeah. I’m like, don’t you tell me what to do.

EH: But is that better? Do you like that more?

MD: I do. I think that’s where I get to have fun, especially in first drafts. To me, that’s the playful draft. That’s where I get to play and be delighted and surprised by what is coming up.

EH: Do you feel like your characters are reacting to the plot that you had written before?

MD: Yep, definitely. I mean, they were definitely telling me, this is not the story that I want to be telling. For all those non-writers out there, yeah, this is how writers think. Our characters are telling us things.

EH: Do you find that it’s their reactions that surprise you, or there might be a whole arc that you’re just like, actually, that’s not gonna happen?

MD: Well, in this next one, it’s the arc. They have pushed against it and said, no, that’s not the story. That’s not the story we’re telling. But I’m always surprised by my characters’ reactions to things, and I really like that. I love to be surprised. I’m one of those writers where I can suddenly burst out laughing, because they have surprised me in a funny way, or cry, because it’s sad, and I did not expect something to happen.

So, Emma, with this one that you’re writing now, are you still in the getting-to-know-you phase?

EH: I’m still in the getting-to-know-you phase. On what you were just saying, though, one thing that I’ve kept in mind, and maybe this is the same as my quote about memoir earlier, a writing teacher in the US for one of my short stories said it feels like you’re holding back from having your characters experience the full consequence of their actions. And I think that can be sometimes a bit of a protective impulse. That is so fun to get rid of. Instead of protecting them, or shying away from their cruelty, or whatever, just let them experience the full consequence of their actions. Don’t have them almost get caught, have them get caught.

MD: I think often fiction writers are trying to protect, and we don’t want our characters to have the worst thing happen, but that’s actually where the best thing happens. Where we get to see them put under that pressure cooker and squeeze them until they pop. Toni Jordan, years ago, when I was doing RMIT, she said, stick them up the tree and throw rocks at them.

EH: Well, also, if that’s too much, which you rarely find that it is, if that’s too much, it’s much easier to pull it back in than it is to have a very boring story where everyone gets away with everything and then try and push that further.

MD: And yeah, I think it actually relates to real life as well, that when we are under that intense pressure, that’s where we get to see people’s true selves come out and see how they will behave.

EH: I’m not going to advocate for putting actual people in trees and throwing rocks at them.

MD: Let’s not do that.

Creative Inspiration

MD: Can you tell me from who, what, or where do you get your inspiration?

EH: Lots of movies, I think. Movies can be a really fun way of just getting story into your body, really fully understanding story. I mean, obviously I read a lot. But when you are actively writing, it can be difficult to read really good books and not want to mirror their voice in some way. So sometimes, when you’re still establishing that book’s own voice, or a character’s voice, it can be good to turn to a different medium than writing. But some inspiration things that have really stuck with me, like, Ali Smith. The way that she plays with language, I just think about that all the time. Like, if I’m not having as much fun on the page as it seems like she’s always having, then I’m doing something wrong. I’m really into people who are super playful, who are having fun, who have heart still. I think that sometimes we can be experimental for the sake of it, and we can lose the heart of the story.

And another thing was Joy Williams, in her differences between a short story and a novel. She said that a story should have an animal within it to give its blessing. And I am always thinking about that when I’m writing. It’s like, who’s not human in the story?

MD: Tell me, do you play with other forms of writing other than long form?

EH: Like, poetry?

MD: Hmm.

EH: No. I will be a hypocrite, and at some point, someone will say, but Emma, you wrote this poem. But isn’t it fun to say no?

MD: How do you inject playfulness into your writing?

EH: I’ll think of a tangible example. I was reading By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño and it’s all from the perspective of this dead man, and it’s a monologue. And for this class, we were doing an imitation of that book and taking inspiration from my two joys in life, which are the idea of having an animal in a story to give its blessing, and imitating this dead narrator. I wanted to write the story from the perspective of a dead cow and just thinking about the ways that language might work differently for this character. What might they know? What might they not know? But then there’s also just a bunch of playfulness of when it’s nighttime and there’s a moon, well, that’s one word that the cow can definitely say. And don’t we have cows jumping over the moon in our nursery rhymes? It was just fun. I’m not saying it’s a fantastic story, but it was definitely fun to write, and I feel like when people read something that’s really fun to write, you can sense that.

EH: How do you find play as well?

MD: I’m always looking for play and I do it in a bunch of different ways. I draw and I paint. For me, that is just being playful, because I’m not making anything to sell or exhibit, it’s just seeing what happens. I’m constantly fascinated by how marks on a page can make something look like a thing. And poetry, I do just for playfulness, playing with words and seeing what words can do. And again, not for … you know, I did get some poems published a number of years ago, and it shocked me, because I just played with these words and thrown them together, they were a poem, and then these three poems got published in a book.

EH: That’s awesome. My aversion to poetry, it’s not a real aversion, I’ve made it up as a character thing. It’s partly because I only like poetry where the person is having fun. I don’t really enjoy serious poetry. And then I’ll be a hypocrite saying that as well.

MD: Then there’re be a serious poem you love.

EH: I love it, yeah. I’m finding joy in just making absolute statements that I’ll take back later.

MD: Yeah, exactly. That’s being human, isn’t it?

EH: But I do like poems as a language play. Or even, actually, because apparently one of my favourite books is The Monkey’s Mask by Dorothy Porter. It’s a lesbian detective noir, written entirely in verse, with this lesbian detective who hates poetry. I feel like whenever I talk about poetry, I’m embodying her, where this detective obviously does love poetry, because every thought that she has is a poem. But it’s also really scathing of the poetry scene, and really critical at the same time as it’s really playful. Don’t watch the movie. The movie’s … yeah, anyway.

I love that idea of genre as play as well. When I was writing this book, I also wrote a superhero short story where this superhero has PMDD and what does that look like. And so you’re just thrown out of your comfort zone. I don’t usually write genre, but it can teach you a lot about having fun with a story when you do. So, I think of poetry as almost being genre sometimes.

MD: Yeah. I actually think back to our improv days, and the word play that we always had in there as well. That is a playfulness. I think as adults we do get a bit serious about what we’re doing and forget to play, because play’s where it’s at.

EH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s funny.

MD: But even about serious topics, like your book. To still get playful with that, I think it helps it shine on the page.

EH: Well, I also think that we are, as writers, in many ways also entertainers. We might write without thinking of an audience, because it helps to not think about the audience as you’re just sitting down and doing it. But at some point, you’re writing to entertain an audience. Or, if not entertain, affect them in some way. And so you have to be thinking about play, or thinking about tension, or thinking about that.

MD: Yeah, well, we’re the storytellers. The first moment I realised storytelling was a thing, other than in a book, was I was with my dad. He’d had a car accident, a very minor car accident, but anyway, he was telling the tale over dinner, and he spun it, and I was like, hang on! You just changed that! Like, that did not happen like that. So he was, in a way, teaching me how to tell a story. How to make it more interesting.

EH: Yeah, that’s so shocking when you’re a kid as well.

MD: I was like, oh, but I trusted you, and now, what?

EH: Yeah, I mean, that’s what comedians are always doing. Might start with the truth. But never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

MD: That’s right.

Creative Wisdom

MD: Tell me, if you were to be caught in a conversation with someone who is like, oh, I don’t know what to do next with my writing or my creative work, or is just at the beginning of it, what wisdom would you want to pass on to them?

EH: I think, and this is quite specific, I think as a writer, when you’re starting your career, it’s really good to identify whether you’re a holder or a sharer. Some people really like to hold onto their work and not show anybody until they think it’s absolutely perfect. Some people make sense of their work by showing it to other people. They go, I just wrote this down, have a look at it, tell me what do you think it is? I don’t know what this is yet. Help me figure it out. I think it’s really good to identify which one of those two you are. And follow the opposite instinct when you need to. So if you want to hold onto everything, show people. If you want to show everyone, hold on to it for a bit.

MD: That is such a great pearl of wisdom! And I’ve not actually heard anyone else say that, but it’s so true.

EH: Are you a holder or a sharer?

MD: I used to be a sharer and now I hold on much more. I think also that kind of evolved, because when I started really doing it, I was doing it at RMIT, and we had to share everything. That gave me validation of words, like, yes, it worked or didn’t work. But getting to that point of learning to trust myself with it a bit more, I’m letting it sit. Which I think everyone who’s been through any kind of writing program will be nodding their heads at the moment, because you can end up with a lot of conflicting opinions about a sentence.

EH: One of the things that I was told in my program as well is that sometimes workshops will edit out the good parts too, because they stand out. People will read things through once, and it’ll stand out, and then they’ll read it through again, and on that second read-through, they’ll go, oh, maybe get rid of this, it stands out a bit too much. But actually, that needed to be there, and it stood out for a good reason. Yeah, if you are a holder, I think you should show, but that doesn’t mean you have to change based on what everyone says.

MD: And based on my experience running writing group, when you are showing, know what you’re asking for. So, go into it very intentionally to go: I need to know does this make you laugh? Or does this make sense? Or I want to know what feeling you’re getting from this writing. Go into it thinking about what you want to learn about it. Rather than just getting someone to say, oh, it’s great, because that’s not so helpful.

EH: It doesn’t actually help you at all. But also, when you find someone who is a really good reader, who has honest, insightful criticism, treat them really nicely.

MD: Hold onto them forever.

EH: Never forget their birthday.

MD: Yeah. I will never forget the first time I showed my husband my writing, and I really wanted some feedback, and I got an okay.

EH: Oh, how did you feel getting that?

MD: Oh, I was like, what? Have some opinion. Sorry Matt, if you’re listening.

EH: It makes me feel a bit insane getting that but I also don’t think I’m always the best reader. You’re not the best reader for everything. My partner and I can be quite different readers. I think we can both be quite helpful to each other, because we are quite different, but you need to know when it’s the right time to ask for that person’s opinion. He’s really, really good with ideas, with plot, with play, with absurdity. But if I’ve just written a really tender, intimate scene, and it’s fresh, I’m probably not ready to have his critical eyes on it yet.

MD: I think that’s such a great extra piece of wisdom. To know when to ask who for certain bits of feedback. I’ve got my people, I know what each of them will give me. Knowing who are good readers for you is really good.

What Home Means to Me

MD: Tell me, Emma, what is home for you and your writing? What does that mean for you?

EH: This is a question that I don’t think I have a good answer to, but I did move to the United States for three years to do a Master of Fine Arts there and I left during one of the lockdowns in Melbourne. The lockdowns had delayed me leaving for a year already and during that year of being delayed, I came to this kind of realisation that as a writer, it is quite important to be connected to a place and a time. You can’t just write abstractly about everything, anywhere. Or maybe you can, but I think it’s important that idea that everything’s connected to something, but nothing’s connected to everything. So, take care and understand where as a writer, you are connected to things.

But then the idea of getting support to go to the United States and be able to put writing at the centre of my life when I wasn’t getting any funding like that here. There are all these arts cuts, like Writers Victoria has had funding cut as well. Sometimes Australia can be quite loathsome of the arts. I ended up going to the United States, which was very good for my career, and I got support as an artist. But I was very angry about that. I was quite angry about the fact that I didn’t feel like I had that here. So I do feel like Melbourne is home, and that is a place, and I know that there are many more abstract answers to the question of where is home for you as a writer, but for me, it definitely is Melbourne, and I’m quite angry about the way that Melbourne and Victoria and Australia can treat its artists.

That’s a home, but not always a nice home.

MD: Yeah, yeah, it’s almost an abusive home. I saw earlier today that Writer’s Victoria have nearly got to 10,000 signatures for the petition. If you are a Victorian and you love reading, or writing, or just the whole lit scene, please sign that petition. I can put a link to that in the show notes too.

EH: Hopefully by the time this airs, we’ll already be past it.

MD: We’re already past it and it will have been reviewed by Parliament, and the funding has been reversed. [The petition has been lodged with Parliament].

Thank you so much for your time, Emma.

EH: Oh, so good to have a chat with you, Meg, I really appreciate you inviting me to do this.

MD: Oh, my pleasure and I wish your book well, that it will help others to be able to see themselves and find their way through that. I think it’s a very poignant discussion at the moment.

EH: Yep. Lots of relatable moments in it, I’m sure, while also being quite relatably angry, maybe.

MD: Yeah, yeah. When I saw the title, just before we finish, it reminded me of Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch. Such a great, angry novel. I related to that so, so much.

EH: That came out, I think, while I was writing it as well, and I was like, damn. I’ve always been really interested in female anger, but also the ways that women are often equated to animals when they are angry. So that book fully embraces that comparison that’s often made. Like the idea of a dog being a domestic thing, a woman being supposed to be domestic, and the anger that comes through when you feel pushed into that position as the protagonist of that book is.

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Connect with Emma Hardy

• Instagram
• Website
• Buy Periodic Bitch book
• Emma’s Substack ‘Hot Mess’
• See Emma at Melbourne Writers Festival
• Join Emma at her book launch at Readings on 14 May 2025

Books mentioned on this interview

• Cherry by Mary Karr
• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
• Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison
• Bluets by Maggie Nelson
• By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño
• The Monkey’s Mask by Dorothy Porter
• Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

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