Speaker 1: Hi There. It's Ruby Jones and it's time to settle
Speaker 1: in for another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly
Speaker 1: books podcast, hosted by editor of The Monthly Michael Williams.
Speaker 1: It features conversations with some of the most talented writers
Speaker 1: from Australia and around the world. In this episode, we're
Speaker 1: going to hear from writer and journalist Leck Blaine, whom
Speaker 1: Michael spoke with late last year at Camera Writers Festival.
Speaker 1: As always, I'm joined by Michael to tell me a
Speaker 1: bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2: Hi Michael, Hi Ruby.
Speaker 1: So, Michael leck Blaine's new book, Australian Gospel A Family Saga,
Speaker 1: is a memoir and it traces this incredible story of
Speaker 1: Lex's family and his foster siblings. He is only thirty
Speaker 1: three years old, but this is actually his second memoir,
Speaker 1: isn't it.
Speaker 2: Yes? When you put it like that, Ruby, it does
Speaker 2: seem like the most precocious thing in the world to
Speaker 2: have two memoirs by thirty three. But to be fair
Speaker 2: to let Blaine, he has lived a life and then some.
Speaker 2: The first book that he brought out up was called
Speaker 2: Car Crash and it was the story of his life
Speaker 2: in the aftermath of this horrendous road accident that killed
Speaker 2: several of his friends. It was a very powerful debut.
Speaker 2: It got a lot of critical acclaim. Since then, he's
Speaker 2: mainly written political journalism stuff, a couple of quarterly essays,
Speaker 2: some writing for the Monthly and for elsewhere. But the
Speaker 2: second volume deals very much with a family story and
Speaker 2: the story of his parents and his foster siblings. And
Speaker 2: it's this wild, outrageous, irresistible story. So I don't begrudge him.
Speaker 2: Two memoirs by thirty three.
Speaker 1: And a lot of people I know have been talking
Speaker 1: about this book. There's been a lot of praise for
Speaker 1: it over the summer. Why do you think it has
Speaker 1: had this really strong response.
Speaker 2: Look, people love a charismatic cult leader type and that
Speaker 2: does appear here. There are all kinds of twists and turns.
Speaker 2: It reads like a kind of incredible true crime story
Speaker 2: in a way. It follows Michael and Mary Shelley, who
Speaker 2: were these missionaries who grew up in privileged North Sydney
Speaker 2: families and then after various challenges with both drugs and
Speaker 2: mental illness, dropped out and became roving Christians who would
Speaker 2: go around the countryside picking fights with people in all
Speaker 2: kinds of extraordinary ways. They had a number of kids,
Speaker 2: and three of those kids were adopted by the Blaine family,
Speaker 2: Le's parents, and the story follows what happens when the
Speaker 2: birth parents and the foster parents collide, and the ways
Speaker 2: in which that was a kind of shadow across Lex's childhood.
Speaker 2: It's an extraordinary story.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment. The tangled branches of
Speaker 1: Lech Blaine's family tree, like.
Speaker 2: So many family sagas Australian gospel, is filled with a
Speaker 2: slew of unforgettable characters, each with complicated backstories. So let's
Speaker 2: pick up the conversation with Lek introducing us to some
Speaker 2: of the key players.
Speaker 3: So Michael and Mary Shelley were these incredibly beautiful socialites
Speaker 3: in Sydney. Michael was from the North Shore, and he
Speaker 3: was blonde haired and blue eyed, and he went to
Speaker 3: Knox Grammar and his first love was the actress Jackie Weaver,
Speaker 3: and he was becoming seemed like he was on a
Speaker 3: fast track to incredible success and wealth in his twenties,
Speaker 3: and then suffered a nervous breakdown around the age of
Speaker 3: twenty eight, and he after an incredible amount of both
Speaker 3: drug use and sex outside of marriage because he was
Speaker 3: incredibly promiscuous. He went to a psychiatric hospital in near
Speaker 3: Botany Bay and met a woman named Carry, who would
Speaker 3: eventually change her name to Mary Shelley. And she was
Speaker 3: also from incredible privilege. She was born in Lund and
Speaker 3: taken to Sydney when she was eleven, grew up in
Speaker 3: the Eastern suburbs. Her father was an incredibly successful restauranteur
Speaker 3: and King's Cross and she subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown
Speaker 3: as well. And so this is how Michael and Mary
Speaker 3: as she would eventually be known, met in a psychiatric
Speaker 3: hospital and they fell in love with each other. And
Speaker 3: in the process of falling in love and then moving
Speaker 3: in with each other, they started reading the Bible, and
Speaker 3: essentially Michael began to believe that he was the archangel.
Speaker 4: Michael in the Bible.
Speaker 3: And so they decided essentially to pack everything up, get
Speaker 3: rid of all their things, and he chiked to North
Speaker 3: Queensland and spread the Gospel of Jesus. And they had
Speaker 3: a son named Elijah in nineteen eighty. And then, to
Speaker 3: cut a long story short, because that's already dragging on
Speaker 3: a little bit, and that's the tip of the Iceberg.
Speaker 3: They had three more children after Elijah saw Joshua, who
Speaker 3: would eventually be placed with my parents, and their names
Speaker 3: were changed to Stephen and John. Later had my sister
Speaker 3: Hannah in the bathtub of a three star hotel in
Speaker 3: New Zealand where they were on the run from social
Speaker 3: workers and police, and Hannah was extradited at the age
Speaker 3: of one to pub in country Queensland, which my parents
Speaker 3: are running, and had all these foster kids, and Mum
Speaker 3: felt pregnant with me about forty eight hours after Hanna's arrival,
Speaker 3: and I was born in nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 4: So that's where it all kind of like linked up,
Speaker 4: and that's why.
Speaker 3: I'm here and how able to be a part of
Speaker 3: this story and be able to tell it.
Speaker 2: Leck I want to start in twenty seventeen when you
Speaker 2: went on conversations with Richard Faidler and you told a story,
Speaker 2: a story that ultimately forms the basis of Australian gospel.
Speaker 2: Before that interview, how often had you told different versions
Speaker 2: of that story?
Speaker 4: Funnily enough, very little.
Speaker 3: A lot of my closest friends had idea about the
Speaker 3: scope of the story, so a lot of people who
Speaker 3: knew me well were hearing it for the first time.
Speaker 3: Because growing up in a family where all of my
Speaker 3: siblings were foster children except for me, so I was
Speaker 3: born last. It wasn't something that I broadcasted publicly much
Speaker 3: growing up. And that was not so much because I
Speaker 3: was ashamed of it, but just because of how normal
Speaker 3: my upbringing seemed in the sense that my siblings had
Speaker 3: always been there. So I wasn't kind of going to
Speaker 3: school and talking about my foster siblings.
Speaker 4: I was always talking about my siblings.
Speaker 3: And then I think when the crux of the story
Speaker 3: in terms of the stalking of my family was happening
Speaker 3: when I was starting when I was ten, then it
Speaker 3: was kind of like a privacy issue, like I actually
Speaker 3: couldn't really talk about it in a way that might
Speaker 3: expose myself, but like, you know, partly rationally, but partly
Speaker 3: just out of fear.
Speaker 4: And there probably was a bit of shame about the fact,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 3: My family was being stalked by notorious Christian fanatics, and
Speaker 3: so that's not really water cooler talk at primary school
Speaker 3: or at high school, and after high school, I think
Speaker 3: it was something that I grappled with privately and even
Speaker 3: with my siblings, like who were the biological children of
Speaker 3: these people. We weren't sitting around talking about the crazy
Speaker 3: thing that had happened. My mum was different. She was
Speaker 3: someone who probably leant on me in that respect because
Speaker 3: I wasn't the person directly exposed to the threat of
Speaker 3: these people, and so I think I became an important
Speaker 3: person for her to be able to talk to about it.
Speaker 3: And that's definitely drove my desire to tell the story
Speaker 3: because in twenty seventeen she was terminally ill, so she
Speaker 3: only had about a year left to live, and I wanted.
Speaker 4: Her to be able to hear.
Speaker 3: I knew that the book was going to take a
Speaker 3: lot longer, but I wanted her to be able to
Speaker 3: hear the basis of that story told publicly before she died.
Speaker 2: I want to come back to your mum in a bit,
Speaker 2: just because she is the kind of crux I think
Speaker 2: of this book in many ways. But there's a decision
Speaker 2: very early on in the book that I want to
Speaker 2: ask you about, which is that you have a family
Speaker 2: tree has on one side the shelleys and on the
Speaker 2: other side your parents. What it doesn't have is you
Speaker 2: anywhere in it. You've made a decision to open a
Speaker 2: book about your family and about the many complicating factors
Speaker 2: in your family history, and you've deliberately decided to excite
Speaker 2: yourself from the family tree.
Speaker 4: Why. I guess everyone wants to do that occasionally, don't know.
Speaker 2: Oh oh yeah, I'm not in my family tree.
Speaker 4: I promise you.
Speaker 3: So that was something that I did think about a bit,
Speaker 3: and I made the decision to lead myself out because
Speaker 3: I had other foster siblings who were part of the family,
Speaker 3: and I thought it would be too complicated to include
Speaker 3: their biological parents, and then it would have been like
Speaker 3: a mess, and I didn't know.
Speaker 4: How to quite work that out.
Speaker 3: And I thought that the main thing that you needed
Speaker 3: to know from that family tree was the birth names
Speaker 3: of my siblings and their brother, Elijah and what they
Speaker 3: were eventually known as. So just as a simple way
Speaker 3: throughout the story, because it can get quite confusing when
Speaker 3: you've got Michael and Mary who refer to their children
Speaker 3: as their birth names, and then my siblings Stephen, John,
Speaker 3: and Hannah, who are referred to by their names when
Speaker 3: they were placed with the blains. And so that was
Speaker 3: the main reason it wasn't kind of to sum everything up.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I thought that I didn't.
Speaker 3: Want to leave my sister Rebecca out of that family tree,
Speaker 3: so I thought I'll leave myself out as well.
Speaker 2: There is though You're assiduous in it, and it's there
Speaker 2: in the two different sets of names. But in the
Speaker 2: writing of the story, you take great care in a
Speaker 2: way that I find deeply moving to allow for different
Speaker 2: people's rationalization, justification understanding of the story. You have, on
Speaker 2: the one hand, the Shelleys, who, through a series of
Speaker 2: their own choices through incapacity, lose access to their own
Speaker 2: children they've conceived, and then you have your parents who
Speaker 2: are raising those children with love and care and support.
Speaker 2: How hard was it to give both those stories equal
Speaker 2: care in the writing of the book.
Speaker 3: Well, it's interesting because when I first started thinking about
Speaker 3: it and researching it as a book, which was twenty thirteen,
Speaker 3: so eleven years ago, I was thinking about the book
Speaker 3: as basically the story of the Shelleys, with my family
Speaker 3: popping up, and so I sort of thought that Michael
Speaker 3: and Mary and all of their craziness was the crux
Speaker 3: of the story, and probably Michael really, because he's a
Speaker 3: source of so much of the the book, and it
Speaker 3: was only through writing it and this is a process
Speaker 3: over a decade where my parents were coming more and
Speaker 3: more to the forefront. And I was also thought of
Speaker 3: my father as kind of being the direct foil for Michael,
Speaker 3: And so that was a tango that I saw as
Speaker 3: at the heart of the book. And the mothers gradually
Speaker 3: emerged as I think the emotional heart of the book.
Speaker 4: And I tried to.
Speaker 3: Respect the trauma that Mary had suffered both in her
Speaker 3: previous life but also the trauma of losing her children.
Speaker 3: And I think that my mother, who had always said
Speaker 3: that she wanted to write a book about it, but
Speaker 3: I don't think she like similarly to me. I don't
Speaker 3: think she ever thought of herself as the main character
Speaker 3: of the book, but eventually she kind of became, I think,
Speaker 3: the main character in the book.
Speaker 2: It's funny that idea of main character like Michael is
Speaker 2: clearly someone who moved through the world believing himself to
Speaker 2: be the main character of not just every story you
Speaker 2: could think of, but something that you couldn't think of.
Speaker 2: He was definitely centering himself. But part of what comes
Speaker 2: through so beautifully in the book is the contrast between
Speaker 2: the two couples and your parents as a kind of counterpoint,
Speaker 2: not just a counterpoint to Michael and Mary, but actually
Speaker 2: the embodiment of everything that Michael held in disdain about Australia,
Speaker 2: about Australian culture, about modern life. Can you describe your
Speaker 2: folks for us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a pretty good summary.
Speaker 3: So Michael, his Christianity was a very weird thing because
Speaker 3: in all of his copious amounts of writing, and I'm
Speaker 3: talking like millions of words, like he was writing reports,
Speaker 3: and he was incredibly intelligent.
Speaker 4: He had a.
Speaker 3: Chemical engineering degree in an MBA and he started a PhD,
Speaker 3: which he never finished because he had a disagreement with
Speaker 3: the head of the school, predictably, and so he didn't
Speaker 3: refer that much to theological stuff, like except for the
Speaker 3: basic fact that he was God's right hand man. A
Speaker 3: lot of his writing was about his hatred of Australian culture,
Speaker 3: his hatred of sport, his hatred of alcohol, his hatred
Speaker 3: of gambling, and he a very very fastidious obsession with
Speaker 3: weight because he was very slim and became even slimmer
Speaker 3: once he became a Christian, started fasting all the time,
Speaker 3: and so this was and then once his children were
Speaker 3: taken for being underweight, he was obsessed with weight, and
Speaker 3: then my parents, Well, dad was a one hundred and
Speaker 3: thirty kilogram publican and country Queensland who loved sport, loved
Speaker 3: gambling and loved alcohol. So out of all the crazy
Speaker 3: things in the book, like that has got to be
Speaker 3: one of the craziest is life.
Speaker 2: Just like he's manifested. He's like Michael's worst nightmare come.
Speaker 4: To life as your dad.
Speaker 3: But then in another way, Dad was kind of perfect
Speaker 3: because he was probably one of the only people who
Speaker 3: would be completely unafraid of a Christian preacher potentially turning up.
Speaker 2: He says to a bouncer he hires at the pub,
Speaker 2: keep an eye out for undesirables, and the bounce is
Speaker 2: trying to get to the bottom of it, and he says, no, no,
Speaker 2: in particular, you're looking for a Christian as skinny as
Speaker 2: half past six.
Speaker 4: Is it skinnier than a minute to six?
Speaker 2: Skinnier than a minute to six.
Speaker 4: I'm like, that is just beautiful.
Speaker 2: I mean that portrait of your dad that comes through
Speaker 2: I love but the ways in which your parents are
Speaker 2: kind of demonstrated as a kind of formidable team. Your
Speaker 2: dad Tom is immediately loving but also just wants to
Speaker 2: get on with things, whereas your mom. Your mum's level
Speaker 2: of care, as evidence by the kind of notes she
Speaker 2: takes and the writing she puts together when thinking about
Speaker 2: what it is to foster damage kids, is incredibly moving.
Speaker 2: Tell us a bit about your mum.
Speaker 3: Yes, so they were similar in the sense that they
Speaker 3: both had quite traumatic upbringers, and that's something that I tried.
Speaker 3: That's why I retraced in the book the competing narratives
Speaker 3: of those four characters, because Dad might have seemed in
Speaker 3: his later incarnation as being fairly one dimensional. And then
Speaker 3: I think when you see what happened when he was
Speaker 3: growing up, he lost both his parents and had a
Speaker 3: horrific meatworks accident when he was sixteen and had left
Speaker 3: school at thirteen, I think that that you started to
Speaker 3: see that as being a coping mechanism for what had
Speaker 3: been a pretty hard life, and so he used humor
Speaker 3: as a way to cope with that. And I think
Speaker 3: Mum also had a very poor traumatic upbringing. She was
Speaker 3: kicked out a home at sixteen. There was always lots
Speaker 3: of alcohol in the house, and Mum had a number
Speaker 3: of nervous breakdowns, but she was blessed with this incredible intellect,
Speaker 3: which wasn't really nourished in any formal ways. She also
Speaker 3: left school at the end of grade ten. But she
Speaker 3: was just a voracious reader. Even when she was raising
Speaker 3: six or seven kids, she would read six books a week,
Speaker 3: and so she had an incredible brain which had never
Speaker 3: been able to be kind of encouraged during her upbringing.
Speaker 3: But she deployed all of that intellect to foster caring.
Speaker 3: And so she saw it not as just an emotional
Speaker 3: crush because she'd had four miscarriages, but she saw it
Speaker 3: as like a vocation, and she did all the reading
Speaker 3: necessary across you know, the legal realm, the psychological realm,
Speaker 3: the literary realm, because she believed in stories, and she
Speaker 3: believed in redemption for people from circumstances like hers. And
Speaker 3: that's what made her the perfect foster care because nobody.
Speaker 4: In her view was ever beyond redemption.
Speaker 3: And so I think I was incredibly blessed to have
Speaker 3: that as a mother, but also as a source of material,
Speaker 3: because she, like Michael, had just kept fastidious notes about
Speaker 3: and diary entries about everything that happened. And so even
Speaker 3: before Michael and Mary were in the picture, and so
Speaker 3: I was kind of handed this incredible trove of information,
Speaker 3: and yeah, I guess my job was to not be
Speaker 3: overwhelmed by the amount of detail that I've been given
Speaker 3: by these people and through my interviews, and really hone
Speaker 3: in on who they were as people and just let
Speaker 3: the reader see them and hear their voices, and just
Speaker 3: let them do their thing, rather than me or my
Speaker 3: writing being the start of the story.
Speaker 2: When we returned, Lek shares how his perception of the Shelleys,
Speaker 2: and in particular Mary Shelley, has changed over the years,
Speaker 2: and by writing this book in twenty twenty four made sense.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back. So, as you said before, in
Speaker 2: primary school going up, the idea of having all these
Speaker 2: foster siblings was not unusual to you. That was just
Speaker 2: the nature of your family. But at the point at
Speaker 2: which the Shelleys lurched back into your lives and began stalking, harassing,
Speaker 2: became a very active presence, that does seem to me
Speaker 2: to be a fairly traumatic set of incidents for your
Speaker 2: family to kind of circle around from that age. Can
Speaker 2: you talk about the first time Mary came back on
Speaker 2: the scene.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I remember that whole period vividly because it was
Speaker 3: just you know, there's that saying that there's decades where
Speaker 3: nothing happens and days where decades happened, and that was
Speaker 3: kind of how it felt. I was actually cricket training
Speaker 3: and I remember getting back with Dad and there were
Speaker 3: just police cars everywhere, and you know, we sort of
Speaker 3: thought that someone had died, or that my brother John,
Speaker 3: who would have been in a bit of trouble with
Speaker 3: the Laura, had done something particularly crazy. And then it
Speaker 3: turned out that Mary Shelley had rocked up to the house,
Speaker 3: and so the Shelley's were allowed no direct contact with
Speaker 3: their children, and they had no idea where we lived,
Speaker 3: and we were kind of in witness protection in a way,
Speaker 3: and it was a like earth shattering moment, Like it wasn't.
Speaker 3: It's hard to explain how viscerally afraid we were because
Speaker 3: I look back now as an adult and I've done
Speaker 3: so much research into the Shelleys and I see them
Speaker 3: in three dimensional ways. But when with Michael in town
Speaker 3: and with Mary and Tye like this is not long
Speaker 3: after September eleven, I literally saw Michael Shelley as being
Speaker 3: like a sa I've been lard and rocking up to
Speaker 3: your house in a white robe like, that's how much
Speaker 3: fear he invoked, both in me.
Speaker 4: And my family.
Speaker 3: And I was the youngest, and I was a particularly
Speaker 3: anxious kid, which I was a.
Speaker 4: Trait that I inherited from my mother.
Speaker 3: Whereas my sister Hannah, who they were threatening to kidnap,
Speaker 3: she was much more like dad, and so she weathered
Speaker 3: that whole situation with a lot more stoicism than I did.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it was a very very genuine view that
Speaker 3: they would attempt to kidnap her.
Speaker 2: One of the things that struck me reading this book
Speaker 2: is the ways in which Michael's marriage to Mary and
Speaker 2: their relationship we would understand through a very different lens
Speaker 2: now talking and thinking about that, I mean, it's a
Speaker 2: classic model of coercive control, a model of a kind
Speaker 2: of abusive relationship. How much was that something that was
Speaker 2: always clear to you, or how much of that was
Speaker 2: a product of writing the book made you understand Mary's
Speaker 2: fragility and lack of agency in so much of the story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it wasn't clear to me growing up at all.
Speaker 3: When it wasn't clear to I don't think the rest
Speaker 3: of my family. I think my mum had incredible sympathy
Speaker 3: for Mary. That was something that she I think that
Speaker 3: she understood even before maybe the more modern understanding of
Speaker 3: what was happening to her. But that was one of
Speaker 3: the beautiful things about writing the book was giving Mary
Speaker 3: a sense of humanity which I did not see as
Speaker 3: a child or even as a teenager. And the level
Speaker 3: of control that Michael exerted over her wasn't clear to
Speaker 3: a lot of the people, even outside the Blains, who
Speaker 3: might have been connected to Michael and Mary from their
Speaker 3: previous lives, and so there were acquaintances and friends of
Speaker 3: Michael who thought that Mary had been the one that
Speaker 3: had brainwashed Michael into Christianity, which was just when you
Speaker 3: actually retraced the timeline of events and the different versions
Speaker 3: of events, was just completely clear that Michael was someone
Speaker 3: who had not just brainwashed Mary with a shared belief
Speaker 3: about the fact that he was an arch angel sent
Speaker 3: to Earth by God, but at multiple times throughout their
Speaker 3: lives had derailed attempts by Mary to reach a compromise
Speaker 3: that would have enabled her to have a regular contact
Speaker 3: with her children, which is something that my parents definitely
Speaker 3: would have allowed, and it's something that my mum directly offered.
Speaker 3: And then Michael would come back in and when you
Speaker 3: retrace the letters and the timing of everything, you see
Speaker 3: just how poisonous of an effect he had on the
Speaker 3: lives of many people, but particularly on the life of
Speaker 3: his third wife Mary.
Speaker 2: If we can return for a second to your conversation
Speaker 2: with Richard Faidler in twenty seventeen. You know, at that
Speaker 2: point you've been researching and thinking about it as a book,
Speaker 2: thinking about it as a story you want to tell
Speaker 2: for some time. You have that conversation and one of
Speaker 2: the things that happens is people come out of the
Speaker 2: woodwork in considerable numbers. They hear it, and they've all
Speaker 2: got stories of the Shelleys one way or the other.
Speaker 3: That was, Yeah, that was remarkable, and that added to
Speaker 3: my understanding of who these people were before they were
Speaker 3: the Shelleys or before they were these Christian fanatics. And
Speaker 3: that was an incredibly healing moment for a lot of
Speaker 3: the people that listened to it, because while they were
Speaker 3: on the you know, they stage kidnappings, they'd threatened to
Speaker 3: kill premiers, they'd rocked up to Parliament, they've been kicked out,
Speaker 3: they'd stalked world leaders, they'd stalked priests. There wasn't kind
Speaker 3: of a publicly available narrative joining all that up, especially
Speaker 3: because at the center of the story was children in
Speaker 3: foster care. So it wasn't something that you could publicly identify.
Speaker 3: And so I think that people hearing that story and
Speaker 3: hearing explanation for it, but also knowing that the children
Speaker 3: of the shelleys, at least my three siblings, had happy
Speaker 3: and stable lives, I think that that was something that
Speaker 3: provided a lot of relief.
Speaker 2: It does point to, though, what must have been one
Speaker 2: of the challenges of putting this book together, putting it
Speaker 2: down on paper, bringing it out into the world, is
Speaker 2: the number of people who have a sense of ownership
Speaker 2: over this story, or adjacency to the story, or direct
Speaker 2: you know, that thing about your responsibility to others. Again,
Speaker 2: part of what is so moving about this book is
Speaker 2: the care you take in not claiming for yourself anything
Speaker 2: that you feel uneasy about doing that with, but also
Speaker 2: allowing space for the other ways in which people's lives
Speaker 2: have been touched by their stories.
Speaker 4: How hard.
Speaker 2: Is it with your siblings and their role in the story,
Speaker 2: how much ambivalence do they have about the telling of it.
Speaker 4: I think when I first talked about researching the story.
Speaker 3: And I mean at the time, I kind of felt
Speaker 3: like I was forty or fifty, but I was in
Speaker 3: my early twenties, So I think that they were a
Speaker 3: bit puzzled I would be remotely interested in kind of
Speaker 3: researching it, let alone contacting their biological father. But even then,
Speaker 3: they are always supportive of that and incredibly interested in
Speaker 3: the stuff that I've found out. So through that process,
Speaker 3: I don't think that they were you know, they weren't.
Speaker 4: Calling me up every day to check where I was at.
Speaker 3: But they were incredibly supportive of my decision to write
Speaker 3: about it. And now that I've finished it, and now
Speaker 3: that they've read it, like they couldn't be more over
Speaker 3: the moon, because partly because Michael and Mary have both
Speaker 3: passed away and so they're not living in fear of
Speaker 3: them anymore. And I've given them something which not only
Speaker 3: tells their story and provides details that they never had
Speaker 3: any knowledge of, which explains certain aspects of their personalities
Speaker 3: and life experience, but it also disabuses.
Speaker 4: Some of that fear in the same way that happened
Speaker 4: to me.
Speaker 3: And you lose some of that anger once you start
Speaker 3: actually empathizing, especially with Mary. And also because my parents
Speaker 3: have both passed away and I've got thirteen nieces and nephews,
Speaker 3: and I've kind of created this story which not in
Speaker 3: a historical way, it's not like a work of history,
Speaker 3: but it actually brings to life my parents in a
Speaker 3: way that my nieces and nephews who will never get
Speaker 3: the chance to meet them, will be able to meet
Speaker 3: them on the page and actually be able to see
Speaker 3: them and hear them. And they will also get the
Speaker 3: genesis story of their parents in a way that you
Speaker 3: don't necessarily sit around a kitchen table and tell a
Speaker 3: story like this with this level of detail. But when
Speaker 3: you read it, you feel it in a way that
Speaker 3: you don't if you just if you're just hearing it.
Speaker 3: So I think that for them, I think that's probably
Speaker 3: the best part about about it all.
Speaker 2: For you, though, I mean, in a eleven year run
Speaker 2: up to this book, and in the meantime, you've actually
Speaker 2: established a career for yourself as a published writer, and
Speaker 2: you've found your voice and you found your craft. And
Speaker 2: I'm curious about how necessary those steps were to get
Speaker 2: to you to the point where you could actually finish
Speaker 2: this book, or you could conceive of the shape of
Speaker 2: it or know how to approach it. How different a
Speaker 2: writer are you now to the one you were when
Speaker 2: you start on this.
Speaker 3: I did do an essay based on it with the
Speaker 3: Griffith Review in twenty seventeen. But I remember when I
Speaker 3: first started writing in that summer in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 4: I was writing the story like.
Speaker 3: In the voice of Tolstoy, and it was like going
Speaker 3: to be war in peace, and.
Speaker 4: So it was indible.
Speaker 3: It was incredibly overwrought, incredibly overwritten. The shelleys were kind
Speaker 3: of monstrous figures. The fear interrepidation was like dripping from
Speaker 3: every page. Whereas I think, not just writing my first book,
Speaker 3: Car Crash, that was helpful, but I think writing political
Speaker 3: essays and interviewing people and just letting their voice shine through,
Speaker 3: which is it kind of taught me not just about
Speaker 3: the structure of the story, but how light of a
Speaker 3: touch you.
Speaker 4: Need to give to provide a narrative.
Speaker 3: That is, it isn't dripping with fear interrepidation, that actually
Speaker 3: has the subtlety and the quietness. It isn't shouting at you,
Speaker 3: It isn't telling you what to think about anything. And
Speaker 3: so I think all those years of writing those different
Speaker 3: things and then publishing a book, and then going through
Speaker 3: the editorial processes, and it got me to the point
Speaker 3: where I if I had written that book even five
Speaker 3: years ago, it would be a very different story.
Speaker 2: Let Blaine's incredible book, A Straaming Gospel, A Family Saga
Speaker 2: is available at all Good bookstores.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure Justin Bieber's memoir might have been remained it.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: of Read This Next week, we'll be sharing Michael's conversation
Speaker 1: with two time Miles Franklin winner Michelle da Kretze. As always,
Speaker 1: if you want to dive in to read this, you
Speaker 1: can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There
Speaker 1: are more than seventy episodes and the archive for you
Speaker 1: to enjoy. See you next week.