Speaker 1: What if one of your closest friends or your most
Speaker 1: trusted work colleagues actually had a secret side to them
Speaker 1: that you weren't aware of.
Speaker 2: Well, it's more common than you think.
Speaker 1: Hello, I'm Art Simone and I'm on a quest to
Speaker 1: uncover the interesting sides that ordinary looking people keep hidden,
Speaker 1: because what's.
Speaker 2: The fun of hiding it? Let's get it out of
Speaker 2: the shadows and celebrate it.
Speaker 1: The tricky thing is I don't know who I will
Speaker 1: be speaking to or what they're concealing from us. I'll
Speaker 1: get to know them, ask three questions, and from there
Speaker 1: I'm confident we can figure it out together. Welcome to
Speaker 1: conceal it with me, Art Simone, Our guest is here.
Speaker 2: Roll the time.
Speaker 3: Hi.
Speaker 4: I'm John, I'm fifty. I used to live in Sydney,
Speaker 4: but now I live in the UK. I've been a
Speaker 4: writer for thirty years. I'm married, I have two step children.
Speaker 4: I like traveling and I like reading a lot, and
Speaker 4: I mean a lot. I don't think Art will guess
Speaker 4: what I'm concealing, because I even managed to conceal it
Speaker 4: from my best friends.
Speaker 2: Hello, John, how are you going very well?
Speaker 3: How are you?
Speaker 1: I'm doing very well, So we've never met before. This
Speaker 1: is very twenty twenty. We are meeting through the wonders
Speaker 1: of technology. I'm talking to you all the way in
Speaker 1: the United Kingdom. Now, how long have you been in
Speaker 1: the UK?
Speaker 3: For three years? Oh?
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, fairly recent then, yeah, okay, three years? Am
Speaker 1: I alowed to ask you what brought you to the UK?
Speaker 1: Or is that delve into your concealingness?
Speaker 3: No? No, I can be very open about that.
Speaker 4: I caught a plane, you bitch.
Speaker 2: All right, Okay, so a plane brought you to the UK.
Speaker 2: Good for you.
Speaker 1: For me lived in Sydney. I won't hold that against you,
Speaker 1: but I'm glad you got out.
Speaker 2: Sorry.
Speaker 1: I love Sydney everyone, and I love every place in
Speaker 1: the world. It's my favorite. I'm looking at you through
Speaker 1: this beautiful screen at the moment. You've got glasses, you've
Speaker 1: got a bit of a stubble, bit of bed, wearing
Speaker 1: a nice tablecloth.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I mean shirt.
Speaker 1: It's wonderful, you know, just look like everyday, wonderful, pixelated
Speaker 1: person in front of me. I'm going to ask you
Speaker 1: three questions. So question number one, John, what was your
Speaker 1: favorite subject in school?
Speaker 4: Oh? That's as tough one. I wasn't very good at school.
Speaker 4: I wasn't a very good student at all. I think
Speaker 4: probably i'd have to go with biology, maybe, I mean, yeah, biology,
Speaker 4: how we tick, why we work, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Oh, I just think of biology and cutting up rats.
Speaker 1: But I know, I mean that could work too. And
Speaker 1: you're saying earlier that you love reading. Yeah, and you're
Speaker 1: a writer. I wasn't very good at English, and you're
Speaker 1: a writer.
Speaker 3: Now I know.
Speaker 4: It's bizarre, amazing.
Speaker 1: Now anything can happen, Anything can happen, dreams can come true, guys.
Speaker 2: Question number two, do you have a favorite superhero?
Speaker 3: I do, but.
Speaker 4: It's so boring. It's Superman. I mean it's I mean,
Speaker 4: he's got to be the most boring superhero you can have.
Speaker 4: He's pretty much indestructible.
Speaker 2: Why do you like him?
Speaker 3: I like the inevitability of him, I do. I do
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 4: I like the complication of the dual life, but I
Speaker 4: do like the inevitability of his power is strength never.
Speaker 2: I can't even write that word inevertability. He never yes
Speaker 2: that word?
Speaker 1: Okay, biology Superman, I can't piecing it together. A Question
Speaker 1: number three, and the final question I have for you
Speaker 1: is who is your favorite musical artist.
Speaker 4: Well, I've gone through three major crushes through my youth
Speaker 4: for music, and the first was Kiss, and the second
Speaker 4: was Culture Club and the third was Bowie. So there
Speaker 4: was a kind of a theme running through them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, flamboyance, costumes, makeup, excitement, right right, right, Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: so we like Kiss, we like kissing rebellion in school.
Speaker 1: Good guys, superhero, This is really hard today. Normally there's
Speaker 1: like little hints in there, this is okay. And you're
Speaker 1: in the UK and you're a rider and you're okay,
Speaker 1: and you've hitden it you said, even your best friends
Speaker 1: you've hitden it from Oh my god, this is chaos. Makeup,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm going to stick with the makeup alright
Speaker 1: because I like makeup, right, and I'm going towards makeup.
Speaker 1: You like biology. I'm going to say you invented makeup.
Speaker 1: I've just woked that you invented makeup. You've been time
Speaker 1: traveling and you are the inventor of makeup because you
Speaker 1: like the people that wear it in the music's And
Speaker 1: you know Clark Kent, he dresses up, but he also,
Speaker 1: like you know, has his kryptonite, and you know, you
Speaker 1: like biology. So that's like almost like putting things together.
Speaker 1: You invented makeup? Am I right?
Speaker 4: Yes, I'm one hundred and eighty five years old and
Speaker 4: my makeup is extraordinarily good.
Speaker 2: Sarcastic, I'm writing that down.
Speaker 4: Okay, you know me as John, but actually un Natasha Walker.
Speaker 4: Under the pseudonym Natasha Walker, I published three erotic novels,
Speaker 4: The Secret Lives of Emma Beginnings, The Secret Lives of
Speaker 4: Emma Distractions, The Secret Lives of Emma Unmasked. They went
Speaker 4: on to sell sixty thousand copies in Australia.
Speaker 2: What how many hats are we wearing today?
Speaker 3: You've actually got a real double life here.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: All right, so we've just found out that no, John
Speaker 1: is not the inventor of makeup, which is a real
Speaker 1: shame because I thought it could give me a discount.
Speaker 1: But he is instead a writer who writes erotic novels
Speaker 1: under the name of a lady.
Speaker 2: He's got a he's got his own drag name. I'm
Speaker 2: so confused.
Speaker 1: Also, how many kilometric pens is he used to write
Speaker 1: these books? You must go through a lot of pins.
Speaker 2: I needs me all right.
Speaker 1: So we've just met John, but we found out that
Speaker 1: John is also Natasha Walker. He was sickly writing erotic
Speaker 1: novels under that female pen name. Oh my god, it's
Speaker 1: so exciting. There's so many hats here. How did this start?
Speaker 1: How did this happen? Did you just wake up one
Speaker 1: day and decide today I am Natasha Walker?
Speaker 2: What happened?
Speaker 4: Well, what happened was that I was a writer who
Speaker 4: was getting absolutely nowhere with my work. I had an agent,
Speaker 4: I landed an agent. I was like, yeah, I'm going
Speaker 4: to get somewhere now. But nothing happened. But I had
Speaker 4: written quite a lot of very rude stories many years before,
Speaker 4: and my agent was asking around, going, please, have you
Speaker 4: got anything else, anything else you can show me because
Speaker 4: the book you've given me I love, but I can't
Speaker 4: find a publisher for right And so I gave her
Speaker 4: these pages. She came back to me saying, you just
Speaker 4: cannot know. No one should see these pages. These are
Speaker 4: just filth. You'll be carted off to jail for these pages.
Speaker 2: It's like, what is this muck?
Speaker 1: Exactly what I think in my pigeon hole right now,
Speaker 1: you filthy man.
Speaker 4: So I took them away, but about a week later,
Speaker 4: on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald was
Speaker 4: the story about fifty Shades of Gray, Yes, bursting onto
Speaker 4: the scene and having this enormous publishing contract with Random House,
Speaker 4: and suddenly the world went paorn crazy.
Speaker 3: So there I was with a big.
Speaker 4: Pile of pawn and my agent ran off to every
Speaker 4: publisher in town and they snapped it up.
Speaker 1: You said, you like fifty Shades of Gray vibe ha.
Speaker 1: So what made you write all this erotic fiction in
Speaker 1: the first place.
Speaker 4: It was a kind of competitive spirit. My girlfriend at
Speaker 4: the time was working this really dull job and one
Speaker 4: of the girls that was working with her, her boyfriend,
Speaker 4: was writing these erotic stories and sending them in and
Speaker 4: so all the girls were reading them, and I was
Speaker 4: I was kind of jealous. Really Enviously, these incredible power
Speaker 4: over this room of girls, and so I wrote my own.
Speaker 4: The problem was that they were very critical that you've
Speaker 4: got a whole lot of girls in the room and
Speaker 4: it's like a reading group, isn't it. And so they
Speaker 4: sent back my work with red marks all the way
Speaker 4: through it and critiqued it and ripped me to shreds. Really,
Speaker 4: it was a very tough lesson to learn that I
Speaker 4: could not write erotica. And so from then on, of course,
Speaker 4: the competitive spirit kicked in and I tried to perfect
Speaker 4: my art.
Speaker 1: So you're like, all right, you've been your homework's been
Speaker 1: handed back to you. They said, absolutely not fix this,
Speaker 1: This would never happen. So in these books, you're writing
Speaker 1: from a female's perspective as Emma, but you're also writing
Speaker 1: from Emma's perspective as Natasha Walker. Why make it so complicated?
Speaker 1: Why did you create Natasha Walker?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So one of the things that happened when I've
Speaker 4: got the book contract was that it was a really
Speaker 4: women led movement. Fifty Shades of Gray. They weren't aimed
Speaker 4: at men like a most erotica in the history of
Speaker 4: writing has been aimed at men. This was squarely aimed
Speaker 4: at women. And so the publisher really wanted to publish
Speaker 4: me as as a woman. They thought it would be
Speaker 4: much much better for sales and for everything. Really, so
Speaker 4: we count with a Natasha Walker and use that as
Speaker 4: my pseudonym, and it did changed the way people read
Speaker 4: the books. People will pick up a book by a
Speaker 4: woman and read in one way, and pick up a
Speaker 4: book by a man and read in another way. The
Speaker 4: only problem with my stories was that my Emma very
Speaker 4: different to fifty Shades. The heroine in that is an
Speaker 4: eighteen year old virgin who was seduced by a billionaire.
Speaker 2: By life story, Actually.
Speaker 4: Emma, Emma is a thirty year old married woman who
Speaker 4: seduces an eighteen year old neighbor next door.
Speaker 1: Oh, she's the girl next door. Did not all with
Speaker 1: the boy next door?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I mean in the first Emma book there was one
Speaker 4: hundred page sex scene.
Speaker 1: One hundred pages. Jesus Christ, I can't even last that long.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, there'd be like a four part series.
Speaker 2: Jeez.
Speaker 1: How many descriptive words do you have to use in
Speaker 1: one hundred page sex scene? Or is it just so
Speaker 1: descriptive as like and then he took off his sock,
Speaker 1: and then he took off the other one, and then
Speaker 1: then he just stood there for a bit and looked
Speaker 1: at her, and she was just having a good time.
Speaker 1: And then anyway, Actually, I think I could write a
Speaker 1: hundred page It would be very good, wouldn't be engaging,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't see what's coming. There's always surprise in
Speaker 1: the bedroom with me. So you are writing as Natasha
Speaker 1: but also as Emma. But also you were John, this
Speaker 1: is hats on. Hats on hats sometimes and I put
Speaker 1: makeup on, I'm like, wait, who am I today?
Speaker 2: What's going on? What's my tone of voice? Who are you?
Speaker 1: But how do you even like get yourself in that mindset?
Speaker 1: Or do you just write everything like yeah, I'm writing
Speaker 1: this job. It would just slap another name on it.
Speaker 4: Pretty much my whole writing life is so far has
Speaker 4: been writing from the point of view of a woman.
Speaker 4: I don't know whether that's just that's just how naturally
Speaker 4: whenever I have a character in my head, it's generally
Speaker 4: the strongest character that I'm dealing with is a female character.
Speaker 4: And so far I've written, I've published five novels, and
Speaker 4: all five novels have a strong female lead.
Speaker 2: So basically, you're kind of a drag queen. I'm putting
Speaker 2: it out there. You're kind of a drag queen.
Speaker 1: Just you don't look like one, but you're still kind
Speaker 1: of getting in drag.
Speaker 2: Mentally, I'm probably just a drag queen. So have you
Speaker 2: ever tried drag? I have to ask you, Well, I'm
Speaker 2: wearing it now.
Speaker 3: This is this is my.
Speaker 4: Restaurant tablecloth, as you referred to it earlier.
Speaker 2: Yes, very pizza.
Speaker 1: Hut, it's beautiful now okay. When they sat down, they said, oh,
Speaker 1: do you want to try, you know, like going under
Speaker 1: a pseudonym, you know, a female name.
Speaker 2: What was your reaction? Were you like, oh, it's fine,
Speaker 2: or were you like, I don't know.
Speaker 4: I first wrote my first novel when I was twenty one,
Speaker 4: and Natasha Walker happened when I was forty, So I
Speaker 4: was desperate to get published, to see my name on
Speaker 4: the front of a book. In one sense, I was
Speaker 4: dying inside because all I wanted was my name on
Speaker 4: the front of a book, and I wasn't going to
Speaker 4: have my name on the front of the book.
Speaker 3: But on the other.
Speaker 4: Side, my professional life was booming at the time, and
Speaker 4: I thought it probably best not to be known as
Speaker 4: the porn guy at the same time, so having a
Speaker 4: pseudonym might be might actually work for me.
Speaker 2: So just your agent knew?
Speaker 1: Who knew that when you were like in the closet,
Speaker 1: essentially in the library.
Speaker 4: My parents knew, my wife knew. Before I even signed
Speaker 4: the contract, I kind of went up to my boss
Speaker 4: at the time and said, I don't want to bring
Speaker 4: the company's name into disrepute. By my behavior outside of work.
Speaker 4: But I've done this thing and they want me to
Speaker 4: publish it, and I'm going to use a pseudonym to
Speaker 4: protect myself and my family and the business. And they're like,
Speaker 4: you know, can I do this? And he just laughed.
Speaker 4: He loved it. He thought it was the best idea ever.
Speaker 4: So that my boss knew, my family knew pretty much.
Speaker 4: So I had to live this lie day in day out.
Speaker 2: Oh it's tough for you, isn't it.
Speaker 1: You walk past the bookshop and you know there's a
Speaker 1: Natasha Walker and you say to the person, she.
Speaker 2: Must be a cool chick. She just be pretty cool.
Speaker 1: But I totally get it because I'm a fool, like,
Speaker 1: you know, narcissist. But I've managed to just live through
Speaker 1: my drag name. But it could be really hard. You
Speaker 1: spent your whole life being wanting to be published writer
Speaker 1: and then you know your name is it on the book?
Speaker 1: But maybe just an idea, you could legally change your
Speaker 1: names to Natasha.
Speaker 3: What do you think I think I should by?
Speaker 4: Now? I was interviewing writers at the time too, so
Speaker 4: I was interviewing her best selling authors, and I just
Speaker 4: wanted to scream at them saying I'm a writer too.
Speaker 2: Guys.
Speaker 1: Take me seriously, Come on, guys, I've got a book
Speaker 1: two it's really popular. They were like, yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: like you, Kasha, Yeah, what's that like? Have you ever
Speaker 1: told someone to like prove it?
Speaker 2: Prove it? You be like, oh, I'll write something now,
Speaker 2: I don't know what.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I had a few encounters where people just laughed. They
Speaker 4: just laughed so much and they thought it was funny
Speaker 4: and they had no sense of it being true. And
Speaker 4: it was a few days later that count to me
Speaker 4: and going, wait, it was true what you were saying.
Speaker 2: After you go and tell them, do they go and
Speaker 2: have a little read? Do they let you know?
Speaker 4: Most people, thankfully, people I know well decided for their
Speaker 4: mental health, not to which I think is good. I'm pleased.
Speaker 4: I remember a friend of mine gave it to his
Speaker 4: mum and she devoured them. That was awkward.
Speaker 1: I would love you to like hand the books to
Speaker 1: someone without saying anything like did you like it? Like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, that Natasha Walker. She's a dirty bitch and
Speaker 1: you well surprise trick jar, trick chair. I'm tashi now
Speaker 1: with Natasha Walker? How did you pick this name? Where'd
Speaker 1: it come? From, you know, because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: ways you can pick a name. Did you live in
Speaker 1: Walker Street and your first pet was called Natasha?
Speaker 4: What I wanted was because the title was strong, it
Speaker 4: was Secret Lives of Emma, and I really wanted a
Speaker 4: dull name. So the name wasn't the thing. It was
Speaker 4: just the title of the book was the thing. And
Speaker 4: I created a spreadsheet of boring names and made a
Speaker 4: list of them.
Speaker 1: I just want to say, if Natasha Walker, a real
Speaker 1: life Natasha Walker is listening right now, we love your name.
Speaker 1: And it's very special, Okay, very special. It's really unique. Okay,
Speaker 1: if you're out there, Natasha.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So people didn't know who Natasha was. They couldn't see
Speaker 1: her face, they didn't know what she looked like, they
Speaker 1: hadn't spoken to her. Was there ever a bit of
Speaker 1: a witch hunt of people trying to work it out
Speaker 1: and be like, you know, fool like me right now?
Speaker 1: Many people actually guess correctly, unlike me.
Speaker 4: Within the book community. Definitely, because I was working in
Speaker 4: the book industry at the time, because it's very small
Speaker 4: industry really, and the number of writers who know each
Speaker 4: other and people were there were suggestions because it was
Speaker 4: set in Mossman. The bookshop in Mossman was rife with
Speaker 4: accusations that they were writing it someone they knew, and
Speaker 4: so there was a lot of speculation around, and the
Speaker 4: publisher really wanted to keep it that it was a
Speaker 4: woman who wrote it, and so there was kind of
Speaker 4: a little bit of pressure on me to keep it secret.
Speaker 3: I had people come up to me.
Speaker 4: One person't come up to me at a dinner and
Speaker 4: pretty much declared that I was Natasha Walker to the
Speaker 4: group that I was standing in, and I pretty much
Speaker 4: had to say, under, there's no chance that I had
Speaker 4: any time to write. Everyone knew that I was very
Speaker 4: busy at the time. Their business I was involved with
Speaker 4: was booming at the time, and I was taking on
Speaker 4: more and more work, so it seemed plausible that I
Speaker 4: had no time to write this kind of smut. So
Speaker 4: I was able to back out of that one. But
Speaker 4: there were twitter conversations in front of me, and conversations
Speaker 4: that I was a part of where I couldn't join
Speaker 4: in really because all I wanted to do is go,
Speaker 4: it's me, and I couldn't do that.
Speaker 2: It's me, guys, I'm a treasure.
Speaker 1: And then what happens when you know someone wants to
Speaker 1: interview Natasha about a fabulous book, like You're like, no
Speaker 1: phone interviews, no phone interviews. Do you put a voice
Speaker 1: changer on or can you do a very convincing lady voice.
Speaker 3: That was the worst part of it. I mean I did.
Speaker 4: I absolutely considered some dark room interviews with me and
Speaker 4: drag with wonderful silhouettes. I didn't say no, I said
Speaker 4: I'd think about it. It was difficult because there's so
Speaker 4: much promotion needs to be done for these books at
Speaker 4: the time, and I think things would have gone even
Speaker 4: better if I had been able to do interviews. But no,
Speaker 4: because of the pseudonym, it just became text interviews and
Speaker 4: email interviews and that was really all I could do,
Speaker 4: which was a real bummer.
Speaker 1: Just go so so my phone credits run out, goers
Speaker 1: I can't call, but you know, maybe just you know,
Speaker 1: send me a letter.
Speaker 2: I'll write a letter back to you.
Speaker 1: When did you decide to finally like start telling people
Speaker 1: because it was a secret, it sold lots of books.
Speaker 1: You said, yeah, I reckon I could come clean that
Speaker 1: I John M.
Speaker 2: Natasha.
Speaker 4: Well, publishing is a very much a rollercoaster, and I
Speaker 4: enjoyed an incredible high, and everyone in the industry could
Speaker 4: see that the low was coming. There was a rush
Speaker 4: for porn. Every woman on the planet was reading porn
Speaker 4: openly on buses and on trains, and suddenly it was
Speaker 4: as if no one had ever read porn before, and
Speaker 4: that reading porn was just publicly unacceptable, and so the
Speaker 4: market just dropped and fell out. So I saw the end.
Speaker 4: I saw the end coming, and so I decided to
Speaker 4: reveal that it was me and get a little tiny
Speaker 4: bit of a pat in the back before it all
Speaker 4: disappeared and disappeared forever. And I got a little of
Speaker 4: a spike in sales because the Woman's Weekly ran a
Speaker 4: story about how this dude was writing all this women's pawn.
Speaker 4: And I got on TV because I was this mysterious
Speaker 4: man behind this mysterious writer called Natasha Walker.
Speaker 1: A narcissist comes out, baby, it's what we like. I
Speaker 1: knew there was one in there like me. Oh, he said,
Speaker 1: I need to be on TV too.
Speaker 2: Fuck you, Natasha, Fuck you. It's not about you anymore.
Speaker 2: It's me. It's me.
Speaker 1: So does that mean you have you stopped? Is there
Speaker 1: no moditor Natasha Walker? No more dirty pages?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Well, efficiently, there's no more dirty pages. I dropped Natasha
Speaker 4: Walker at that time, the whole world dropped erotic fiction.
Speaker 3: At that time.
Speaker 4: Charity shops were filling up with copies of Unwanted fifty
Speaker 4: Shades of Gray, and suddenly it was just overwhelming and
Speaker 4: everyone just pulled away from it and just gave it up.
Speaker 4: So there hasn't really been a market for it. I
Speaker 4: think for Australia it ended abruptly when Tony Abbott admitted
Speaker 4: to reading the book in his in his Budget Smuggler
Speaker 4: as well on holidays. I mean that was a real
Speaker 4: dampner that that really was a cold shower for the
Speaker 4: whole of.
Speaker 2: I really kill it. Yeah, Bloody, Tony Abbitt.
Speaker 1: I need to think about this because you know, maybe
Speaker 1: I want to write a sexy book.
Speaker 2: One day.
Speaker 1: People couldn't know that I possibly was writing a sexy book.
Speaker 1: So if I was to write a sexy book, I'd
Speaker 1: need another name, and I've already got two names. But
Speaker 1: I'm going to do a third name today. My pen
Speaker 1: name could be Anita Root.
Speaker 2: That could work.
Speaker 1: Lovely, Amanda Rene, Amanda play with that could be a
Speaker 1: good one actually, or just like Aphelia Cox, it was
Speaker 1: a book that said, you know, it was called The
Speaker 1: Damp Pillow by Philia Cox. That'd be pretty good. So
Speaker 1: John isn't the inventor of makeup. No, it's hands out
Speaker 1: that he was hiding behind a female pen name and
Speaker 1: writing erotic novels about women for women.
Speaker 2: Dirty Dirty, Dirty Given.
Speaker 1: Listening to an iHeart Australia and Kiss production Concealed with
Speaker 1: Art Simone. Listen for free on the iHeart app and
Speaker 1: listen to your art's content and for some sexy fashion inspo,
Speaker 1: check us out on the socials. Just search for Concealed
Speaker 1: with Art Simone. I look really good today, I promise
Speaker 1: ma