Debut Spotlight: 5 Questions

Can you tell us about your journey to publication? 

I had written The Passenger Seat, but I had parted ways with my old agent, and I really had no idea of how it would ever go from being a file on my laptop to an actual book. But then very happily I was shortlisted for The Novel Prize which is a fantastic global prize run by three independent presses: Giramondo in Australia, New Directions in the US and Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK.

Through that I was able to get a fantastic new agent who believed in the book and then I found Ultimo Press, where my editor Brigid Mullane really understood the unconventional form of the book, especially what happens in the last 40 pages or so, and the way in which I didn’t want to give the reader any easy answers to the questions I was asking about masculinity. She really helped me get the most out of the manuscript.

As a short fiction writer, and author of a children’s book, how did your writing practice differ for this longform novel?

Well, with my children’s book, it was really about voice. Writing was an act of listening; I was essentially just listening to the voice of my mother when she would read to me when I was a child. I guess one big difference between short stories and the novel is that you can pretty much hold an entire short story in your head while you’re writing it. I’m not sure you can do that with a novel so you have to sort of trust that the things you can see—the section or the chapter or whatever it is—will somehow link up to the things that are beyond your horizon at the time.

But practice is really just something you do and it’s kind of always the same—you get up, you go to the library, you open your computer, and you try to write sentences that you’re not ashamed of. That’s basically what I’m always doing no matter where I’m at.

Tension is a driving force in this book—both in terms of plot and character relationships. Can you tell us about your process for building that tension?

I think it was Hilary Mantel who once said that ‘the hardest thing for a writer to do is to make something happen suddenly.’ I was really trying to work in the space in between what’s sudden and unexpected, and what’s so inevitable that it’s almost already happened before it happens on the page. One of the guiding ideas for me with The Passenger Seat was just how ubiquitous male violence is – how it just happens over and over again, and when we hear about it or read about it, we’re often shocked but rarely surprised.

 

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