Debut Spotlight: 5 Questions

Can you tell us about your journey to publication?

I Want Everything began as a side plot for a longer and much more complicated novel which was doing my head in for the better part of half a decade. Eventually I binned the rest of it and drilled down into the story of what eventually became I Want Everything, which is about authenticity, ambition and a literary parasite who will do anything to become the next great Australian writer.

Once I found out what my novel was about, everything fell into place quite quickly. In the space of a couple of months I got an agent and a book deal with Summit Australia, both of whom have been the dreamiest of dreams to work with. I can see now that all this tinkering and revising was necessary for me to find the story that I needed to tell and to learn to write a novel. I’m deluding myself that the next one will be a bit easier—and who knows, perhaps it will!

Australia has a long history of literary hoaxes—were there any in particular that inspired you in writing this book?

In Australia we are obsessed with authenticity and hoaxes, literary lies and truths. To take a few prominent examples you have the Ern Malley affair, Helen Dale (or Demidenko), Norma Khouri, John Hughs. All of these characters who pretended to be something other than they were. That’s without mentioning the numerous co-option’s of First Nations identity, like the Wanda Koolmatrie scandal of the 1990s. I think that there’s something going on in the settler unconscious of Australia, maybe a deep seeded feeling of fakery and not belonging. I think that’s why so many of our beloved stories and notorious literary scandals involve fraudulence, lies and deception. And certainly, this literary lineage was at the forefront of my mind when I was writing I Want Everything.

I Want Everything was so fun to read! Was it fun to write? What was the most enjoyable part of the process?

Always, yeah! I think that the fun energy and joy of writing is a sort of virus that’s transmitted from the author to the reader. I tend to find that the more fun that I take in writing something, the more likely it is that I’ll get a response from a reader. Of course, that doesn’t mean that my novel is all sunshine and puppies! I think at its core, I Want Everything is about the lies that we tell ourselves to satisfy our drives and desires, which is seldom pleasant stuff. I really want to write something repulsive where there’s an ever-present risk of the characters’ bad deeds and ugly feelings being exposed. My characters really wince when I sit down at the writing desk because they know what they’re in for.