Speaker 1: Back in twenty ten, and you'll have to bear with
Speaker 1: me here, Justin Bieber released a memoir for those keeping
Speaker 1: score at home. It was called Justin Bieber Colin First Step,
Speaker 1: two Forever, with the number two another colin my story.
Speaker 1: I think you'll agree that is an objectively awesome title.
Speaker 1: He was sixteen at the time, and you know there's
Speaker 1: no question he'd achieved a lot in those sixteen years,
Speaker 1: or that his fans were desperate to hear what was
Speaker 1: going on in his inner life. But sixteen seems young
Speaker 1: for a memoir. It's a topic on which people have
Speaker 1: strongly formed I was going to say views, but prejudices
Speaker 1: is closer to the truth. People don't think young people
Speaker 1: should write memoirs. Almost a decade ago, former read This
Speaker 1: guest Leslie Jamison debated with Benjamin Mosa about how young
Speaker 1: is too young to write an autobiography in this piece
Speaker 1: for The New York Times. They were debating a review
Speaker 1: from a memoirrist in their thirties, so the standard seems
Speaker 1: to be pretty variable. All of this came to mind
Speaker 1: late last year when Australian journalist and writer, the very
Speaker 1: talented Lech Blaine released his book Australian Gospel, a family saga.
Speaker 1: It was one of the hits of the summer on
Speaker 1: endless recommendation lists and one of those books that seemed
Speaker 1: near ubiquitous on beach tails everywhere I went. Now, before
Speaker 1: we go on, let me be very clear. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying Lech Blaine is justin Bieber. That's important to note.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. He turns thirty three this year
Speaker 1: and Australian Gospel is in a sense his second memoir.
Speaker 1: His first. His debut book, Car Crash, told the gripping
Speaker 1: story of his life in the aftermath of a horrendous
Speaker 1: road accident that killed several of his friends. It was
Speaker 1: powerful and compelling, beautifully written, and launched this talented writer
Speaker 1: into the world of publishing. He followed it with police
Speaker 1: essays and thoughtful journalism for the Monthly, for the Quarterly
Speaker 1: Essay and beyond. There is no question the guy is
Speaker 1: a crazy talent. But two memoirs by thirty three, what
Speaker 1: are the odds that such a relatively young life could
Speaker 1: hold enough material for a second book. As it turns
Speaker 1: out pretty good. Lek wasn't done with his own story
Speaker 1: in his childhood. For his parents and his siblings. There
Speaker 1: was this wild, outrageous, at times tragic story that was
Speaker 1: waiting to be told. I'm Michael Williams and this is Read.
Speaker 1: This a show about the books we love and the
Speaker 1: unlikely true stories behind them. I spoke to Leck at
Speaker 1: last year's Canberra Writers Festival. Like so many family sagas,
Speaker 1: Australian gospel is filled with a slew of unforgettable characters,
Speaker 1: each with complicated backstories. So let's pick up the conversation
Speaker 1: with Leck introducing us to some of the key players.
Speaker 2: So Michael and Mary Shelley were these incredibly beautiful socialites
Speaker 2: in Sydney. Michael was from the North Shore and he
Speaker 2: was blonde haired and blue eyed, and he went to
Speaker 2: Knox Grammar and his first love was the actress Jackie Weaver,
Speaker 2: and he was becoming seemed like he was on a
Speaker 2: fast track to incredible success and wealth in his twenties,
Speaker 2: and then suffered a nervous breakdown around the age of
Speaker 2: twenty eight, and he after an incredible amount of both
Speaker 2: drug use and sex outside of marriage because he was
Speaker 2: incredibly promiscuous. He went to a psychiatric hospital in near
Speaker 2: Botany Bay and met a woman named Carrie, who would
Speaker 2: eventually change her name to Mary Shelley. And she was
Speaker 2: also from incredible privilege that she was born in London,
Speaker 2: taken to Sydney when she was eleven, grew up in
Speaker 2: the Eastern suburbs. Her father was an incredibly successful restaurant,
Speaker 2: Her and King's Cross, and she subsequently suffered a nervous
Speaker 2: breakdown as well. And so this is how Michael and
Speaker 2: Mary as she would eventually be known, met in a
Speaker 2: psychiatric hospital and they fell in love with each other.
Speaker 2: And in the process of falling in love and then
Speaker 2: moving in with each other, they started reading the Bible,
Speaker 2: and essentially Michael began to believe that he was the
Speaker 2: archangel Michael in the Bible. And so they decided essentially
Speaker 2: to pack everything up, get rid of all their things,
Speaker 2: and hitchhiked to North Queensland and spread the Gospel of Jesus.
Speaker 2: And they had a son named Elijah in nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: and then to cut a long story short, because that's
Speaker 2: already dragging on a little bit, and that's the tip
Speaker 2: of the iceberg. They had three more children after Elijah
Speaker 2: saw Joshua, who would eventually be placed with my parents.
Speaker 2: Their names were changed to Stephen and John, and they
Speaker 2: later had my sister Hannah in the bathtub of a
Speaker 2: three star hotel in New Zealand where they were on
Speaker 2: the run from social workers and police, and Hannah was
Speaker 2: extradited at the age of one to pub in country Queensland,
Speaker 2: which my parents are running and had all these foster kids,
Speaker 2: and Mum felt pregnant with me about forty eight hours
Speaker 2: after Hannah's arrival, and I was born in nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 2: So that's where it all kind of like linked up,
Speaker 2: and that's why I'm here and how able to be
Speaker 2: a part of this story and be able to tell it.
Speaker 1: Leg I want to start in twenty seventeen when you
Speaker 1: went on conversations with Richard Fidler and you told a story,
Speaker 1: a story that ultimately forms the basis of Australian gospel.
Speaker 1: Before that interview, how often had you told different versions
Speaker 1: of that story?
Speaker 2: Funnily enough, very little. A lot of my closest friends
Speaker 2: had no idea about the scope of the story, so
Speaker 2: a lot of people who knew me well were hearing
Speaker 2: it for the first time. Because growing up in a
Speaker 2: family where all of my siblings were foster children, except
Speaker 2: for me, so I was born last. It wasn't something
Speaker 2: that I broadcasted publicly much growing up, and that was
Speaker 2: not so much because I was ashamed of it, but
Speaker 2: just because of how normal my upbringing seemed in the
Speaker 2: sense that my siblings had always been there. So I
Speaker 2: wasn't kind of going to school and talking about my
Speaker 2: foster siblings. I was always talking about my siblings. And
Speaker 2: then I think when the crux of the story in
Speaker 2: terms of the stalking of my family was happening when
Speaker 2: I was starting when I was ten, then it was
Speaker 2: kind of like a privacy issue, like I actually couldn't
Speaker 2: really talk about it in a way that might expose myself,
Speaker 2: but like you know, partly rationally, but partly just out
Speaker 2: of fear. And there probably was a bit of shame
Speaker 2: about the fact, you know, my family was being stalked
Speaker 2: by notorious Christian fanatics, and so that's not really water
Speaker 2: cooler talk at primary school or at high school, and
Speaker 2: after high school. I think it was something that I
Speaker 2: grappled with privately, and even with my siblings, like who
Speaker 2: were the biological children of these people? We weren't sitting
Speaker 2: around talking about the crazy thing that had happened. My
Speaker 2: mum was different. She was someone who probably leant on
Speaker 2: me in that respect because I wasn't the person directly
Speaker 2: exposed to the threat of these people, and so I
Speaker 2: think I became an important person for her to be
Speaker 2: able to talk to about it. And that's definitely drove
Speaker 2: my desire to tell the story. Because in twenty seventeen
Speaker 2: she was terminally ill, so she only had about a
Speaker 2: year left to live. I wanted her to be able
Speaker 2: to hear. I knew that the book was going to
Speaker 2: take a lot longer, but I wanted her to be
Speaker 2: able to hear the basis of that story told publicly
Speaker 2: before she died.
Speaker 1: I want to come back to your mum in a bit,
Speaker 1: just because she is the kind of crux I think
Speaker 1: of this book in many ways. But there's a decision
Speaker 1: very early on in the book that I want to
Speaker 1: ask you about, which is that you have a family
Speaker 1: tree has on one side the shelleys and on the
Speaker 1: other side your parents. What it doesn't have is you
Speaker 1: anywhere in it. You've made a decision to open a
Speaker 1: book about your family and about the many complicating factors
Speaker 1: in your family history, and you've deliberately decided to excite
Speaker 1: yourself from the family tree.
Speaker 2: Why. I guess everyone wants to do that occasionally, don't know.
Speaker 1: Oh oh yeah, I'm not in my family tree, I
Speaker 1: promise you.
Speaker 2: So that was something that I did think about a bit,
Speaker 2: and I made the decision to leave myself out because
Speaker 2: I had other foster siblings who were part of the family,
Speaker 2: and I thought it would be too complicated to include
Speaker 2: their biological parents and then it would have been like
Speaker 2: a mess, and I didn't know how to quite work
Speaker 2: that out. And I thought that the main thing that
Speaker 2: you needed to know from that family tree was the
Speaker 2: birth names of my siblings and their brother Elijah and
Speaker 2: what they were eventually known as, So just as a
Speaker 2: simple way throughout the story, because it can get quite
Speaker 2: confusing when you've got Michael and Mary who referred to
Speaker 2: their children as their birth names, and then my siblings Steven, John,
Speaker 2: and Hanna, who are referred to by their names when
Speaker 2: they were placed with the Blains. And so that was
Speaker 2: the main reason. It wasn't kind of to sum everything up.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I thought that I didn't want to leave
Speaker 2: my sister Rebecca out of that family tree, so I
Speaker 2: thought I'll leave myself out as well.
Speaker 1: There is, though you're assiduous in it, and it's there
Speaker 1: in the two different sets of names. But in the
Speaker 1: writing of the story, you take great care in a
Speaker 1: way that I find deeply moved to allow for different
Speaker 1: people's rationalization, justification understanding of the story. You have, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, the Shelleys, who, through a series of
Speaker 1: their own choices through incapacity, lose access to their own
Speaker 1: children they've conceived. And then you have your parents who
Speaker 1: are raising those children with love and care and support.
Speaker 1: How hard was it to give both those stories equal
Speaker 1: care in the writing of the book.
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting because when I first started thinking about
Speaker 2: it and researching it as a book, which was twenty thirteen,
Speaker 2: so eleven years ago, I was thinking about the book
Speaker 2: as basically the story of the Shelleys, with my family
Speaker 2: popping up, and so I sort of thought that Michael
Speaker 2: and Mary and all of their craziness was the crux
Speaker 2: of the story, and probably Michael really, because he's a
Speaker 2: source of so much of the book, and it was
Speaker 2: only through writing it. And this is a process over
Speaker 2: a decade where my parents were coming more and more
Speaker 2: to the forefront, and I was also thought of my
Speaker 2: father as kind of being the direct foil for Michael,
Speaker 2: and so that was a tango that I saw as
Speaker 2: at the heart of the book, and the mothers gradually
Speaker 2: emerged as I think the emotional heart of the book.
Speaker 2: And I tried to respect the trauma that Mary had
Speaker 2: suffered both in her previous life but also the trauma
Speaker 2: of losing her children. And I think that my mother,
Speaker 2: who had always said that she wanted to write a
Speaker 2: book about it, but I don't think she like similarly
Speaker 2: to me, I don't think she ever thought of herself
Speaker 2: as the main character of the book, but eventually she
Speaker 2: kind of became, I think, the main character in the book.
Speaker 1: It's funny that idea of main character like Michael is
Speaker 1: clearly someone who moved through the world believing himself to
Speaker 1: be the main character of not just every story you
Speaker 1: could think of, but something that you couldn't think of,
Speaker 1: Like he was definitely centering himself. But part of what
Speaker 1: comes through so beautifully in the book is the contrast
Speaker 1: between the two couples and your parents as a kind
Speaker 1: of counterpoint, not just a counterpoint to Michael and Mary,
Speaker 1: but actually the embodiment of everything that Michael held in
Speaker 1: disdain about Australia, about Australian culture, about modern life. Can
Speaker 1: you describe your folks.
Speaker 2: For us, Yeah, that's a pretty good summary. So Michael,
Speaker 2: his Christianity was a very weird thing because in all
Speaker 2: of his copious amounts of writing, and I'm talking like
Speaker 2: millions of words, like he was writing reports, and he
Speaker 2: was incredibly intelligent. He had a chemical engineering degree and
Speaker 2: an MBA and we started a PhD which he never
Speaker 2: finished because he had a disagreement with the head of
Speaker 2: the school, predictably, and so he didn't refer that much
Speaker 2: to theological stuff, like except for the basic fact that
Speaker 2: he was God's right hand man. A lot of his
Speaker 2: writing was about his hatred of Australian culture, his hatred
Speaker 2: of sport, his hatred of alcohol, his hatred of gambling.
Speaker 2: And he a very very fastidious obsession with weight because
Speaker 2: he was very slim and became even slimmer once he
Speaker 2: became a Christian, started fasting all the time, and so
Speaker 2: this was and then once his children were taken for
Speaker 2: being underweight, he was obsessed with wight. And then my parents,
Speaker 2: well Dad was a one hundred and thirty kilogram publican
Speaker 2: and country Queensland, who loved sport, loved gambling and loved alcohol. Ah, So,
Speaker 2: out of all the crazy things in the book, like
Speaker 2: that has got to be one of the craziest is life.
Speaker 1: Just like he's manifested. He's like Michael's worst nightmare come
Speaker 1: to life as your dad.
Speaker 2: But then in another way, dad was kind of perfect
Speaker 2: because he was probably one of the only people who
Speaker 2: would be completely unafraid of a Christian preacher potentially turning up.
Speaker 1: He says to a bouncer he hires at the pub,
Speaker 1: keep an eye out for, you know, undesirables, and the
Speaker 1: bounce is trying to get to the bottom of it,
Speaker 1: and he says, no, no, in particular, you're looking for a
Speaker 1: Christian as skinny as half past six.
Speaker 2: Is it skinnier than a minute to six?
Speaker 1: Skinnier than a minute to six. I'm like, that is
Speaker 1: just beautiful. I mean that portrait of your dad that
Speaker 1: comes through I love but the ways in which your
Speaker 1: parents are kind of demonstrated as a kind of formidable team.
Speaker 1: Your dad Tom is immediately loving but also just wants
Speaker 1: to get on with things, whereas your mom, your mum's
Speaker 1: level of care as evidence by the kind of notes
Speaker 1: she takes and the writing she puts together when thinking
Speaker 1: about what it is to foster damaged kids is incredibly moving.
Speaker 1: Tell us a bit about your mum.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they were similar in the sense that they
Speaker 2: both had quite traumatic upbrings, and that's something that I tried.
Speaker 2: That's why I retraced in the book the competing narratives
Speaker 2: of those four characters, because Dad might have seemed in
Speaker 2: his later incarnation as being fairly one dimensional. And then
Speaker 2: I think when you see what happened when he was
Speaker 2: growing up, he lost both his parents and had a
Speaker 2: horrific meatworks accident when he was sixteen and had left
Speaker 2: school at thirteen, I think that that you started to
Speaker 2: see that as being a coping mechanism for what had
Speaker 2: been a pretty hard life, and so he used humor
Speaker 2: as a way to cope with that. And I think
Speaker 2: Mum also had a very poor traumatic upbringing. She was
Speaker 2: kicked out a home at sixteen. There was always lots
Speaker 2: of alcohol in the house, and Mum had a number
Speaker 2: of nervous breakdowns. But she was blessed with this incredible
Speaker 2: intellect which wasn't really nourished in any formal way. She
Speaker 2: also left school at the end of grade ten. But
Speaker 2: she was just a voracious reader. Even when she was
Speaker 2: raising six or seven kids, she would read six books
Speaker 2: a week, and so she had an incredible brain which
Speaker 2: had never been able to be kind of encouraged during
Speaker 2: her upbringing. But she deployed all of that intellect to
Speaker 2: foster caring. And so she saw it not as just
Speaker 2: an emotional crutch because she'd had four miscarriages, but she
Speaker 2: saw it as like a vocation, and she did all
Speaker 2: the reading necessary across you know, the legal realm, the
Speaker 2: psychological realm, the literary realm, because she believed in stories,
Speaker 2: and she believed in redemption for people from circumstances like hers.
Speaker 2: And that's what made her the perfect foster care because nobody,
Speaker 2: in her view was ever beyond redemption. And so I
Speaker 2: think I was incredibly blessed to have that as a mother,
Speaker 2: but also as a source of material because she, like Michael,
Speaker 2: had just kept fastidious notes about and diary entries about
Speaker 2: everything that happened. And so even before Michael and Mary
Speaker 2: were in the picture, and so I was kind of
Speaker 2: handed this incredible trove of information, and yeah, I guess
Speaker 2: my job was to not be overwhelmed by the amount
Speaker 2: of detail that I've been given by these people and
Speaker 2: through my interviews, and really hone in on who they
Speaker 2: were as people and just let the reader see them
Speaker 2: and hear their voices, and just let them do their thing,
Speaker 2: rather than me or my writing being the start of
Speaker 2: the story.
Speaker 1: When we returned, Lek shares how his perception of the Shelleys,
Speaker 1: and in particular Mary Shelley, has changed over the years,
Speaker 1: and by writing this book in twenty twenty four made sense.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. So, as you said before, in
Speaker 1: primary school, growing up, the idea of having all these
Speaker 1: foster siblings was not unusual to you. That was just
Speaker 1: the nature of your family. But at the point at
Speaker 1: which the Shelleys lurched back into your lives and began stalking, harassing,
Speaker 1: became a very active presence, that does seem to me
Speaker 1: to be a fairly traumatic set of incidents for your
Speaker 1: family to kind of circle around from that age. Can
Speaker 1: you talk about the first time Mary came back on
Speaker 1: the scene.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember that whole period vividly because it was just,
Speaker 2: you know, there's that saying that there's decades where nothing
Speaker 2: happens and days where decades happens, and that was kind
Speaker 2: of how it felt. I was actually crickety training, and
Speaker 2: I remember getting back with Dad and there were just
Speaker 2: police cars everywhere, and you know, we sort of thought
Speaker 2: that someone had died, or that my brother John, who
Speaker 2: would have been in a bit of trouble with the Laura,
Speaker 2: had done something particularly crazy. And then it turned out
Speaker 2: that Mary Shelley had rocked up to the house, and
Speaker 2: so the Shelleys were allowed no direct contact with their children,
Speaker 2: and they had no idea where we lived, and we
Speaker 2: were kind of in witness protection in a way, and
Speaker 2: it was a like earth shattering moment, like it wasn't.
Speaker 2: It's hard to explain how viscerally afraid we were, because
Speaker 2: I look back now as an adult and I've done
Speaker 2: so much researching of the Shelley's and I see them
Speaker 2: in three dimensional ways. But when with Michael in town
Speaker 2: and with Mary and Tay like this is not long
Speaker 2: after September eleven, I literally saw Michael Shelley as being
Speaker 2: like I've been lard and rocking up to your house
Speaker 2: in a white robe, Like That's how much fear he invoked,
Speaker 2: both in me and my family, and I was the youngest,
Speaker 2: and I was a particularly anxious kid, which I was
Speaker 2: a trait that I inherited from my mother. Whereas my
Speaker 2: sister Hannah, who they were threatening to kidnap, she was
Speaker 2: much more like dad, and so she weathered that whole
Speaker 2: situation with a lot more stois than I did. But yeah,
Speaker 2: there was a very, very genuine view that they would
Speaker 2: attempt to kidnap Henna.
Speaker 1: One of the things that struck me reading this book
Speaker 1: is the ways in which Michael's marriage to Mary and
Speaker 1: their relationship we would understand through a very different lens
Speaker 1: now talking and thinking about it. I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: classic model of coercive control, a model of a kind
Speaker 1: of abusive relationship. How much was that something that was
Speaker 1: always clear to you or how much of that was
Speaker 1: a product of writing the book made you understand Mary's
Speaker 1: fragility and lack of agency and so much of the story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn't clear to me growing up at all.
Speaker 2: When it wasn't clear to I don't think the rest
Speaker 2: of my family. I think my mum had incredible sympathy
Speaker 2: for Mary. That was something that she I think that
Speaker 2: she understood even before maybe the more modern understanding of
Speaker 2: what was happening to her. But that was one of
Speaker 2: the beautiful things about writing the book, was giving Mary
Speaker 2: a sense of humanity which I did not see as
Speaker 2: a child or even as a teenager. And the level
Speaker 2: of control that Michael exerted over her wasn't clear to
Speaker 2: a lot of the people, even outside the Blains, who
Speaker 2: might have been connected to Michael and Mary from their
Speaker 2: previous lives. And so there were acquaintances and friends of
Speaker 2: Michael who thought that Mary had been the one that
Speaker 2: had brainwashed Michael into Christianity, which was just when you
Speaker 2: actually retraced the timeline of events and the different versions
Speaker 2: of events, was just completely clear that Michael was someone
Speaker 2: who had not just brainwashed Mary with a shared belief
Speaker 2: about the fact that he was an archangel sent to
Speaker 2: Earth by God, but at multiple times throughout their lives
Speaker 2: had derailed attempts by Mary to reach a compromise that
Speaker 2: would have enabled her to have a regular contact with
Speaker 2: her children, which is something that my parents definitely would
Speaker 2: have allowed, and it's something that my mum directly offered,
Speaker 2: and then Michael would come back in and when you
Speaker 2: retrace the letters and the timing of everything. You see
Speaker 2: just how poisonous of an effect he had on the
Speaker 2: lives of many people, but particularly on the life of
Speaker 2: his third wife Mary.
Speaker 1: If we can return for a second to your conversation
Speaker 1: with Richard Fidler in twenty seventeen. You know, at that
Speaker 1: point you've been researching and thinking about it as a
Speaker 1: book or thinking about it as a story you want
Speaker 1: to tell for some time. You have that conversation, and
Speaker 1: one of the things that happens is people come out
Speaker 1: of the woodwork in considerable numbers. They hear it, and
Speaker 1: they've all got stories of the Shelleys one way or
Speaker 1: the other.
Speaker 2: That was, Yeah, that was remarkable, and that added to
Speaker 2: my understanding of who these people were before they were
Speaker 2: the Shelleys, before they were these Christian fanatics. And that
Speaker 2: was an incredibly healing moment for a lot of the
Speaker 2: people that listened to it. Because while they were on
Speaker 2: the you know, they stage kidnappings, they'd threatened to kill premiers,
Speaker 2: they'd rocked up to Parliament, they've been kicked out, they'd
Speaker 2: stalked world leaders, they'd stalked priests. There wasn't kind of
Speaker 2: a publicly available narrative joining all that up, especially because
Speaker 2: at the center of the story was children in foster care,
Speaker 2: so it wasn't something that you could publicly identify. And
Speaker 2: so I think that people hearing that story and hearing
Speaker 2: an explanation for it, but also knowing that the children
Speaker 2: of the shelleys, at least my three siblings, had happy
Speaker 2: and stable lives, I think that that was something that
Speaker 2: provided a lot of relief.
Speaker 1: It does point to, though, what must have been one
Speaker 1: of the challenges of putting this book together, putting it
Speaker 1: down on paper, bringing it out into the world, is
Speaker 1: the number of people who have a sense of ownership
Speaker 1: over this story, or adjacency to the story, or direct
Speaker 1: you know, that thing about your responsibility to others. Again,
Speaker 1: part of what is so moving about this book is
Speaker 1: the care you take in not claiming for yourself anything
Speaker 1: that you feel uneasy about doing that with, but also
Speaker 1: allowing space for the other ways in which people's lives
Speaker 1: have been touched by their stories.
Speaker 2: How hard.
Speaker 1: Is it with your siblings and their role in the story,
Speaker 1: how much ambivalence do they have about the telling of it.
Speaker 2: I think when I first talked about researching the story,
Speaker 2: and I mean at the time, I kind of felt
Speaker 2: like I was forty or fifty, but I was in
Speaker 2: my early twenties, So I think that they were a
Speaker 2: bit puzzled I would be remotely interested in kind of
Speaker 2: researching it, let alone contacting their biological father. But even
Speaker 2: then they are always supportive of that and incredibly interested
Speaker 2: in the stuff that I've found out. So throughout that process,
Speaker 2: I don't think that they were you know, they weren't
Speaker 2: calling me up every day to check where I was at,
Speaker 2: but they were incredibly supportive of my decision to write
Speaker 2: about it. And now that I've finished it, and now
Speaker 2: that they've read it, like they couldn't be more over
Speaker 2: the moon, because partly because Michael and Mary have both
Speaker 2: passed away and so they're not living in fear of
Speaker 2: them anymore, and I've given them something which not only
Speaker 2: tells their story and provides details that they never had
Speaker 2: any knowledge of, which explains certain aspects of their personalities
Speaker 2: and life experience, but it also disabuses some of that
Speaker 2: fear in the same way that happened to me, And
Speaker 2: you lose some of that anger once you start actually empathizing,
Speaker 2: especially with Mary. And also because my parents have both
Speaker 2: passed away and I've got thirteen nieces and nephews, and
Speaker 2: I've kind of created this story which not in a
Speaker 2: historical way. It's not like a work of history, but
Speaker 2: it actually brings to life my parents in a way
Speaker 2: that my nieces and nephews who will never get the
Speaker 2: chance to meet them, will be able to meet them
Speaker 2: on the page and actually be able to see them
Speaker 2: and hear them, and they will also get the genesis
Speaker 2: story of their parents in a way that you don't
Speaker 2: necessarily sit around a kitchen table and tell a story
Speaker 2: like this with this level of detail. But when you
Speaker 2: read it, you feel it in a way that you
Speaker 2: don't if you just if you're just hearing it. So
Speaker 2: I think that for them, I think that's probably the
Speaker 2: best part about about it all.
Speaker 1: For you, though, I mean, in a eleven year run
Speaker 1: up to this book, and in the meantime, you've actually
Speaker 1: established a career for yourself as a published writer, and
Speaker 1: you found your voice and you found your craft. And
Speaker 1: I'm curious about how necessary those steps were to get
Speaker 1: to you to the point where you could actually finish
Speaker 1: this book, or you could conceive of the shape of
Speaker 1: it or know how to approach it. How different a writer.
Speaker 1: Are you now to the one you were when you
Speaker 1: started on this?
Speaker 2: I did do an essay based on it with the
Speaker 2: Griffith Review in twenty seventeen. But I remember when I
Speaker 2: first started writing in that summer in twenty thirteen, I
Speaker 2: was writing the story like in the voice of Tolstoy,
Speaker 2: and it was like going to be war in peace,
Speaker 2: and so it was. It was incredibly overwrought, incredibly overwritten.
Speaker 2: The shelleys were kind of monstrous figures. The fear interrepidation
Speaker 2: was like dripping from every page. Whereas I think, not
Speaker 2: just writing my first book, Car Crash, that was helpful,
Speaker 2: but I think writing political essays and interviewing people and
Speaker 2: just letting their voice shine through, which is it kind
Speaker 2: of taught me not just about the structure of the story,
Speaker 2: but how light of a touch you need to give
Speaker 2: to provide a narrative. That is, it isn't dripping with
Speaker 2: fear interrepidation, that actually has the subtlety and quietness. It
Speaker 2: isn't shouting at you, It isn't telling you what to
Speaker 2: think about anything. And so I think all those years
Speaker 2: of writing those different things and then publishing a book
Speaker 2: and then going through their editorial processes, and it got
Speaker 2: me to the point where I if I had written
Speaker 2: that book even five years ago, it would be a
Speaker 2: very different story.
Speaker 1: Let Blaine's incredible book, Australing Gospel, A Family Saga is
Speaker 1: available at all good bookstores now. I'm pretty sure Justin
Speaker 1: Bieber's memoir might have been remainded.
Speaker 2: Before we go.
Speaker 1: I wanted to let you know what I've been reading
Speaker 1: this week, and I've picked up the latest piece of
Speaker 1: Australian rural noir. It's a historical novel. It's set in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four in the River Arena, and it's called Guanawah.
Speaker 1: It's by Ronnie Salt, a local writer, very talented Seceue
Speaker 1: so I don't know much about them, but the book
Speaker 1: is a really terrific read, lots of fun and has
Speaker 1: a mystery at its heart. If you love rural noir,
Speaker 1: this is a good one. You can find Ganawa and
Speaker 1: all the other books we have mentioned in this episode
Speaker 1: at your favorite inde been bookstore. That's it for this
Speaker 1: week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends,
Speaker 1: rate and review us all the usual things. Put read
Speaker 1: this out there in the world. Next week I'm sitting
Speaker 1: down with award winning writer Michelle Deekretsa to discuss her
Speaker 1: new book, Theory and Practice.
Speaker 2: I would say that when I have finished the book,
Speaker 2: I really felt a sense of axhilaration. I felt I
Speaker 2: had made something different.
Speaker 1: Read this as a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
Speaker 1: the generous support of the AR Group. The show is
Speaker 1: produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis
Speaker 1: Evans and original compositions by Zaltman Fetcher. Thanks for listening,
Speaker 1: See you next week.
Speaker 2: S