Latest news with #IWantEverything
Sydney Morning Herald
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
I lie and steal for a living, but what I did to my family shocked me
I stole from my family to write my debut novel, I Want Everything, or at least I thought I did. I told the dim myths of my relatives in broad strokes, their terrible deeds and those done to them, though I didn't probe for the particulars. This was not to protect the memories of ghosts I'd never met, rather I was worried real life would prove disappointing. But the truth was much stranger than I could have anticipated. It turned out I was not a thief but a liar. I Want Everything is about a literary parasite, a feckless writer who attaches himself to an ailing cult author, Brenda Shales, who reveals the secrets of how her sensational novels came to be. As one does in fiction, I grafted my family's stories onto Brenda and the characters in her orbit, hoping some of them would take, a way to better inhabit a time I knew little about, the political now personal. A few years ago, when I'd just begun the novel, my wife and I visited my paternal grandfather, Vincent, at his hospital bed. He was well over 90, and his heart was slowly giving out, though he was sharp enough to complete The Age crossword every day. He was sweet with my wife, talked with alacrity about his boyhood in St Kilda, an unruly place back then, his father's imprisonment at the Tatura prison camps during World War II, a story I'd never heard. Like many Italian immigrants, my great-grandfather was suspected as a fascist sympathiser, though he'd already naturalised as a White Australian, renouncing his motherland along with my chances of ever obtaining a European Union passport. As he talked about those war years in which he'd eaten city pigeons and kelp washed up on Elwood beach, I felt the sick inkling familiar to every writer, when a story begins to present itself. My grandfather died not long after our visit, cremated in a coffin draped in the St Kilda flag. Alongside the usual sadness and regret, my writer's self rubbed its hairy paws in anticipation, itching to draft my version of my relative's imprisonment. More than 15,000 people were held captive at the Tatura camps, one of whom was a stand-in for my ancestor. In my novel, I created a communist who'd fled Italy when Mussolini's Blackshirts swept to power. He braved the harsh camp conditions before I shaved his head and sent him home, to become a symbol of Australia's suspicion of difference. I had no idea how much he resembled Pasquale, my great-grandfather, nor did I much care. My maternal grandfather, Frank, died on the toilet, long before I was born. My mother and aunts had always described him as a chain-smoking workaholic, and part of B.A. Santamaria's 'Movement', a secretive group of crypto-fascist, Catholic activists who rooted out communism in Melbourne's body politic. I always remembered a story my mother had told me, of waking in the middle of the night as a young girl to find her parents in the kitchen, her mother holding a bag of frozen peas to her father's head, his shirt sheeted in blood from a gash on his forehead. She didn't need to ask who had done it, and neither did I. In my novel, I hung Frank out to dry. I made him Brenda's father, a valiant defender of Christendom, vigilant against reds under the bed and in the submarine that spirited away poor Harold Holt from the choppy waters off Cheviot Beach. So far, so novelistic. Left versus right. Mum v Dad. The Centre and the Periphery. Once the novel was written, and my book deal was signed, it was time to perform my due diligence. Find out precisely who these men were, and what further biographical nuggets I might extract. But once I started digging into my family's backstory, I was dismayed to discover I knew next to nothing at all. I emailed museums and local historians about the Victorian internment camps in Tatura, Murchison and Rushworth. The researchers checked the files and archives, but could find no record of a Pasquale Amerena at any of the camps. I surmised my grandfather had been losing the plot; maybe the story was a fantasy, or stolen from someone else. I asked my wife what she remembered from that afternoon at the hospital. She clearly recalled him talking about his childhood in St Kilda, but nothing about prison camps, nor a disappearing father. When quizzed, my own father hadn't the foggiest what I was talking about. Loading Somehow I'd made the whole thing up, attached a traumatic backstory to a man I'd never met, replete with fantastic details (kelp!). But at least I had my Catholic fascist. Or did I? My mother vigorously disputed that characterisation of her father, a kind man by all accounts. Later, my aunt confirmed he'd been staunchly anti-union, but was the furthest thing from a thug. Needless to say, the incident with the bloodied shirt was an utter fiction I'd convinced myself was real. I'd forced my family into a history that wasn't theirs, conflating them with something I'd read about camps, communists and Catholics, attaching strangers' experiences onto the names of relatives so abstracted from my life they may as well have been characters in a novel. Perhaps we're all inclined to make heroes and villains of people we've never met, especially if they share our names. I don't usually write non-fiction because I have trouble sticking to the facts. I'm an infamous exaggerator, and seldom let reality stand in the way of a good story. Some men are born liars and some have lying thrust upon them. Lying I'm fine with, it's what I do for a living. But in the future, it would be nice to know when exactly I'm doing it, especially to myself.
The Age
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
I lie and steal for a living, but what I did to my family shocked me
I stole from my family to write my debut novel, I Want Everything, or at least I thought I did. I told the dim myths of my relatives in broad strokes, their terrible deeds and those done to them, though I didn't probe for the particulars. This was not to protect the memories of ghosts I'd never met, rather I was worried real life would prove disappointing. But the truth was much stranger than I could have anticipated. It turned out I was not a thief but a liar. I Want Everything is about a literary parasite, a feckless writer who attaches himself to an ailing cult author, Brenda Shales, who reveals the secrets of how her sensational novels came to be. As one does in fiction, I grafted my family's stories onto Brenda and the characters in her orbit, hoping some of them would take, a way to better inhabit a time I knew little about, the political now personal. A few years ago, when I'd just begun the novel, my wife and I visited my paternal grandfather, Vincent, at his hospital bed. He was well over 90, and his heart was slowly giving out, though he was sharp enough to complete The Age crossword every day. He was sweet with my wife, talked with alacrity about his boyhood in St Kilda, an unruly place back then, his father's imprisonment at the Tatura prison camps during World War II, a story I'd never heard. Like many Italian immigrants, my great-grandfather was suspected as a fascist sympathiser, though he'd already naturalised as a White Australian, renouncing his motherland along with my chances of ever obtaining a European Union passport. As he talked about those war years in which he'd eaten city pigeons and kelp washed up on Elwood beach, I felt the sick inkling familiar to every writer, when a story begins to present itself. My grandfather died not long after our visit, cremated in a coffin draped in the St Kilda flag. Alongside the usual sadness and regret, my writer's self rubbed its hairy paws in anticipation, itching to draft my version of my relative's imprisonment. More than 15,000 people were held captive at the Tatura camps, one of whom was a stand-in for my ancestor. In my novel, I created a communist who'd fled Italy when Mussolini's Blackshirts swept to power. He braved the harsh camp conditions before I shaved his head and sent him home, to become a symbol of Australia's suspicion of difference. I had no idea how much he resembled Pasquale, my great-grandfather, nor did I much care. My maternal grandfather, Frank, died on the toilet, long before I was born. My mother and aunts had always described him as a chain-smoking workaholic, and part of B.A. Santamaria's 'Movement', a secretive group of crypto-fascist, Catholic activists who rooted out communism in Melbourne's body politic. I always remembered a story my mother had told me, of waking in the middle of the night as a young girl to find her parents in the kitchen, her mother holding a bag of frozen peas to her father's head, his shirt sheeted in blood from a gash on his forehead. She didn't need to ask who had done it, and neither did I. In my novel, I hung Frank out to dry. I made him Brenda's father, a valiant defender of Christendom, vigilant against reds under the bed and in the submarine that spirited away poor Harold Holt from the choppy waters off Cheviot Beach. So far, so novelistic. Left versus right. Mum v Dad. The Centre and the Periphery. Once the novel was written, and my book deal was signed, it was time to perform my due diligence. Find out precisely who these men were, and what further biographical nuggets I might extract. But once I started digging into my family's backstory, I was dismayed to discover I knew next to nothing at all. I emailed museums and local historians about the Victorian internment camps in Tatura, Murchison and Rushworth. The researchers checked the files and archives, but could find no record of a Pasquale Amerena at any of the camps. I surmised my grandfather had been losing the plot; maybe the story was a fantasy, or stolen from someone else. I asked my wife what she remembered from that afternoon at the hospital. She clearly recalled him talking about his childhood in St Kilda, but nothing about prison camps, nor a disappearing father. When quizzed, my own father hadn't the foggiest what I was talking about. Loading Somehow I'd made the whole thing up, attached a traumatic backstory to a man I'd never met, replete with fantastic details (kelp!). But at least I had my Catholic fascist. Or did I? My mother vigorously disputed that characterisation of her father, a kind man by all accounts. Later, my aunt confirmed he'd been staunchly anti-union, but was the furthest thing from a thug. Needless to say, the incident with the bloodied shirt was an utter fiction I'd convinced myself was real. I'd forced my family into a history that wasn't theirs, conflating them with something I'd read about camps, communists and Catholics, attaching strangers' experiences onto the names of relatives so abstracted from my life they may as well have been characters in a novel. Perhaps we're all inclined to make heroes and villains of people we've never met, especially if they share our names. I don't usually write non-fiction because I have trouble sticking to the facts. I'm an infamous exaggerator, and seldom let reality stand in the way of a good story. Some men are born liars and some have lying thrust upon them. Lying I'm fine with, it's what I do for a living. But in the future, it would be nice to know when exactly I'm doing it, especially to myself.
The Guardian
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Literary scandal', ‘joke-a-minute', ‘captivating': the best Australian books out in May
Fiction, Simon & Schuster, $34.99 This debut novel luxuriates in the lies it weaves. Dominic Amerena is a confident storyteller, jumping between the novel's two narrators with ease. One, a down-on-his-luck writer searching for a story. The other, a reclusive Australian novelist who disappeared from the public eye at the height of her career. When he recognises her at a local pool, he knows that if he can convince her to tell him the story of her brilliant, controversial work, it will be his one-way ticket to success. Literary scandal, feminist fury, love, betrayal – I Want Everything has it all and then some. – Bec Kavanagh Memoir, Picador, $17.99 Hannah Kent's newest work of memoir charts her Adelaide childhood, her first trip to Iceland as a 17-year-old Rotary exchange student, and her ensuing enchantment with the country, inseparable from her own artistic blossoming. The behind-the-scenes view of the creative processes that led to her award-winning 2013 novel, Burial Rites, is interesting reading in its own right, but especially moving is Kent's palpable tenderness towards the novel's subject – Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland. As with Agnes' voice in Burial Rites, Kent's narration is immediate, intimate, and never less than captivating. – Adele Dumont Fiction, UQP, $32.99 It's 1910: Florence Nightingale is 90 years old and on her deathbed, restlessly floating through dreams and memories. A mysterious young man, Silas Bradley, arrives at her bedside, claiming that they have met many times – in Crimea, Turkey and Scutari. But he's too young to have been there half a century ago, and a fearful Nightingale suspects he's hiding his true purpose. What follows is historical fiction that draws on the details of Nightingale's life both before and after she became the founder of modern nursing. Laura Elvery writes with a lyrical and elegiac voice, lovely and elegant in its restraint; a very atmospheric read. – Sian Cain Memoir, Allen & Unwin, $34.99 Food journalist Candice Chung's debut begins with a prologue that's more like a poem: 'What can I get you? And is everything OK? … Here – let me take these things away. At the restaurant, we hear all the things we want our lovers to say.' After Chung's 13-year relationship ends, she starts dating again – not just men but also her Cantonese parents, whom she reconnects with after a 'decade-long rupture', bringing them along to the restaurants she critiques. A thoughtful and compelling pastiche of fragments, lists, and literary reflections, Chung's memoir revolves around her personal history with food, family and culture, but also around writing: Deborah Levy, Nora Ephron, Helen Garner and Craig Claiborne are all name-checked, and their influence is felt throughout. – Steph Harmon Non-fiction, ABC Books, $34.99 This is not the war book John Lyons and Sophie de Clezio expected to write. On two trips to Ukraine as the ABC's global affairs editor, Lyons – the author of Balcony over Jerusalem – serviced the grind of breaking news. On his third trip – taken during his holidays with his photographer partner, de Clezio – there was time to find the real Ukraine at war, via its citizens. In this way, A Bunker in Kyiv is a tribute to the millions of Ukrainians who, as Lyons writes, wake each day with the credo: 'What can I do for the war effort today?' While it still maps the geopolitical elements of the three-year-old war – and the introduction of the new X factor, Trump - this story belongs to the extraordinary people of Ukraine, standing strong against an uncertain future. - Lucy Clark Non-fiction, Penguin, $36.99 Both authors of Broken Brains – who were my colleagues at Mamamia 12 years ago – have lived through incredibly difficult illnesses. This can make for tough reading at times, but Jamila Rizvi and Rosie Waterland's accounts of sickness, physical and mental, serve a purpose beyond gawking. The book contrasts Rizvi's experience with a rare brain tumour to Waterland's complex mental health issues to argue that the body-mind distinction is neither fair nor accurate. Waterland no more chose her traumatic childhood than Rizvi did her tumour. Mixing memoir with reporting, the book highlights gaps in Australia's healthcare system and offers patients and their carers new possibilities for navigating illness. – Alyx Gorman Fiction, Ultimo, $34.99 Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion I just loved Cadance Bell's memoir The All of It: A Bogan Rhapsody when it was released back in 2022; a humorous and moving account of growing up trans in rural New South Wales. 'I suspect we'll read a lot more from her,' I wrote then – and here is some more: an impressively ambitious left turn into science fiction. This heartfelt novel opens as a robot, Arto, wakes to find himself alone in a desolate future Australia, humanity seemingly long gone. He sets out to discover what has happened, his only company a cat and a certain movie star called 'Huge Jacked Man' whose adverts are still playing in the empty streets. Arto eventually stumbles on another robot, Indi, who may be his sister – and the reason Earth has been obliterated. - SC Fiction, Macmillan, $34.99 A group holiday goes terribly awry when an adult man is accused of groping a teenage girl. While this premise might sound a bit like The Slap, He Would Never is as much a bad man thriller as it is a multi-family drama. Wainwright's fifth novel centres on five women who met at a mother's group 14 years earlier, for whom camping has become an annual tradition. The book jumps between perspectives and time periods at a page-turning pace, and as the dynamics leading up to the incident unfold, the stakes of its aftermath get higher. That the book scored an endorsement from Liane Moriarty is fitting – it mines similar veins to Moriarty's work, with an echoing dramatic conclusion. – AG Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $34.99 Better known for his work on TV and main stages, Toby Schmitz's witty and fast-paced debut novel is tricky to summarise. A social satire set in the roaring 20s, a murder mystery on board a luxury ocean liner, and a book partly narrated by a fairly smug boat. On board is a smorgasbord of upper-class caricatures, which Schmitz absolutely revels in: landed gentry, socialites and social climbers, drowning in cognac, snappy retorts and horrifying racism. They're too caught up in themselves to much mind about the gruesome death of a Bengali deckhand – but the ship's detective is useless, and more bodies are piling up… – SH Memoir, UNSW, $34.99 In the opening chapters of this lyrical, trans-generational memoir, Micaela Sahhar poses a question: 'How do you tell a story you are reaching to understand?' The dilemma animates the rest of the book about her family, who were displaced by the Nakba in 1948 and resettled in far-flung corners of the world, including Melbourne and Adelaide. In dense but beautiful prose, Sahhar pulls together a story, full of gaps and questions, about her Palestinian family, their memories and their connection to home. – Celina Ribeiro Fiction, Pantera, $34.99 We open on a great misfortune. Ellie has just won a major painting prize, which means two things: more eyes than ever are fixed on her career, and she now has to carry a giant novelty check all night. The art world feels increasingly vampiric, her agent is breathing down her neck, and everything feels too much. Can you blame her for embarking on the deranged project that gives this book its title? In his hilarious debut, occasional Guardian contributor Joseph Earp (who moonlights as a painter himself) probes the pains of love and art. It's a joke-a-minute novel that captures the mannered rituals of any inner-city creative scene with stunning wit – and scathing accuracy. – Michael Sun Cookbook, Murdoch Books, $55 Chef Thi Le named her first cookbook after a term that refers to the Vietnamese diaspora. For Le, who was born in a Malaysian refugee camp and grew up in western Sydney, she is leaning into the experience of living between worlds by sharing 100-plus recipes that explore Vietnamese flavours and techniques. She celebrates Australian produce and US and Cajun influences in a spicy seafood boil-up; Cambodian rice noodles in her Phnom Penh egg noodles recipe; and French colonial history in her coconut flan. She wrote the book with her partner, Jia-Yen Lee, who also co-owns Le's celebrated Melbourne venues Anchovy, Ca Com and Jeow. – Emma Joyce
