June 11, 2025 • 29 mins
Australian author Dominic Amerena has been a writer for years. Now, finally, comes his dazzling debut novel I Want Everything. The story follows an ambitious young writer who tells a white lie to land a scoop, and explores desire, deception, authenticity, and the costs of creative ambition. This week Michael and Dominic chat about the necessity for, and pitfalls of, ambition, and why a writer should never be satisfied. Reading list: I Want Everything, Dominic Amerena, 2025 Stinkbug, Sinead Stubbins, 2025 You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store. Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram Guest: Dominic Amerena
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So, as we've mentioned more than once at this point,
there's the books we love and the stories behind them.
There's the joy of reading, the mysterious, wondrous, ineffable artistic
achievement of writing, imagine world's creative feats, inspiration and whimsy.
When I'm lucky enough to sit down and have these
conversations with authors about how they do the things that
(00:22):
they do, I'm often struck by the vast spectrum from
what we might call the work. On the one hand,
that's the slog the edits, the rewrites, the very deliberate
honing of the book as this grounded, crafted thing, and
then on the other hand you have the creative impulse.
When Booker Prize, when a Paul Lynch was on read this,
he put it in particularly ethereal terms.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
It goes back to the Greeks. Actually, this idea of
the word damonic, the demon the Greeks called creativity the demon.
Socrates talked about when you're in communication with the gods
that you or these this thing that you were channeling
down was the damon. And of course we know that's
(01:06):
that's it's there is internally, but it's just subconscious and
as a writer you learn to live in proximity to that.
You opened the door to it, and I called the
door into the dark, and you and you learn to
channel this energy, this voice from back there, or maybe
it's down down here somewhere. It's hard to know where
(01:27):
it comes from, but it's deeply authentic, and it must
be obeyed.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
The mechanics of the book world, the heartbreaking quest for
sales and recognition, the anglamorous jockeying for a publisher, for
a place in the bookshops, for readers, all these things
feel a long way from tales of inspiration. There's that
brilliant line from Janet Malcolm's famous essay The Journalist and
the Murderer, where she damns the profession of journalists and
(01:55):
writers in no uncertain terms. She says, every journalist who's
not too student or two full of himself to notice
what is going on, knows that what he does is
morally indefensible. He's a kind of confidence man, preying on
people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying
(02:15):
them without remorse, deliciously. Grin and I thought of it
when I was reading Dominic Amarina's debut novel I Want Everything.
One of the things I particularly enjoyed in that book
is how deep into the venal, effortful part of the
writer's life it's willing to delve. Amorina's been a writer
for years. He's been involved in readers and writers' groups,
(02:38):
taught writing, edited writing, been generally immersed in the world
of writing and writers. But this is his first novel.
In it, his unnamed narrator comes across an elderly woman
he recognizes as Brenda Shales, an Australian literary luminary who
has disappeared from the landscape after contributing to seminal incendiary novels,
(03:00):
Shales has willingly faded from public view and into obscurity.
For our narrator, who is striving and mostly failing to
build a career for himself as a literary icon, this
serendipitous sighting might just be the opportunity and the idea
he's been searching for. This could be his breakthrough. All
(03:20):
that will take is lies, theft, and betrayal, and in
dominic Amarina's account of the world, these might be just
the skills that make someone a writer. I'm Michael Williams
and this is read this to show about the books
we love and the stories behind them. Ambition is it
(03:48):
always ugly?
Speaker 3 (03:50):
I guess it can be. I think that it's something
that every writer contains, whether they want to acknowledge it
or not. And I guess my novel looks at the
way that ambition and ethics kind of are balanced against
each other. And I like exploring the idea of the
(04:14):
kind of labdinal thrill of these ugly ambitions, which is
expressed by my unnamed narrators desired to be the next
great Australian writer without writing a book of his own.
And I think ambition can be something that is a
(04:35):
bit of a sickness, but it's also something that kind
of creates great work. And I think it's an endlessly
kind of fascinating topic.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah. The thing that struck me in your novel is
firstly how thrilling and rare it is to have your
narrator confess to his ambition at the start. And the
truth of it is, I think anyone who takes pride
in their work, who wants to be good at what
they so, who wants to achieve stuff, is just by
(05:04):
dint of those conditions an ambitious person, but lots of
us feel the need to mask that or lie about that,
or people are very uncomfortable saying I want this.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
And I think, you know, I've now maybe moved into
a phase of my career where I actually know a
few people who earn a lot of money from their writing,
and they don't have to do any other work, and
they're quite independently wealthy. And one thing that they all
share is a kind of really strong ambition and sense
(05:35):
of kind of purpose, which I don't think makes them
particularly happy. It kind of makes them neurotic and crazy.
But they are obsessed with achieving and making great art.
And I think that's a really interesting quality. And I
wonder is it possible to even make great art without
this drive? And I agree, I think there's something particularly
Australian about our rejection of ambition and that you're supposed
(05:59):
to you're supposed to think of the work that you
make as something that just kind of happened, rather than
something that you really worked hard for or kind of
aimed high for.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
As well, that pose of foe diffidence, you know, the
line that was ubiquitous on social media for a while
when people shared bits of writing they've done, and they'd
be like, here's a little thing I did a thing,
or deliberately pretending to be offhand or to diminish it
because to say I am proud of this, or I
worked really hard on this, or I'm hoping this will
(06:33):
make you cry or laugh or think those things are
somehow not worthy.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah, yeah, well why would you not, as an artist
want to kind of like create big feelings in other people?
And I think that's a very ambitious thing to strive for,
and we should be kind of proud of that rather
than hide it. But I do think there's a particularly,
a particularly Australian desire to downplay any sort of artistic ambition.
(06:57):
You know, we go back to the I don't know,
cultural cringe is still quite strong, I think, And I
think we should all be more ambitious, and we should
all be more We should be ambitious readers, we should
be ambitious writers, and we should kind of like hold
art to a very high standard.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
I think I think that's absolutely right. But the corollary
of it in Australian culture is the idea of the
laconic as well. Not only do we not show ambition,
but we don't show great passion. We can't show emotion,
we don't profess love in the public's feel those kind
of things, And one of the things that you do
so well in this book is make the case for
(07:32):
how that's changed over the years. The generational divide. Brenda
is a classic boomer, the narrator is a kind of
elder millennial, and that divide goes no small way to
defining the ways in which they regard ambition and their work.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, I think this is an interesting point,
and I guess I set up this, I guess duality
between the two principal characters my novel, one of whom
is an unnamed narrator who's a kind of young man
who has these ambitions to write the great Australian novel
very much quote unquote, alongside Brenda Shales, who is this
(08:10):
kind of cult author from the seventies who wrote these
two incendiary novels, disappeared from the public eye and has
had this great influence over Australian literary culture for the
past fifty years. And in her I guess I'm kind
of interested in looking at this kind of trope of
the literary recluse. The author who estews kind of public
(08:31):
attention and also a writer who kind of writes difficult,
knotty literary novels, which also made her name as opposed
to maybe the narrator, who you might think of as
more of a neoliberal writer, where he's kind of thinking
of the career comes before the writing, like the career
kind of supersedes the writing. And I actually think it's
(08:54):
kind of interesting that basically, I think all writers have
this kind of duel impulse, one of which is to
kind of show themselves to the world through their riding
or through the kind of you know, promotional aspects of
like being a public writer, but also to kind of
hide and to kind of like hide behind the work
and not have to speak for it in a sense,
because I think one of the big differences now is
(09:17):
that all writers are expected to, you know, take up
the mantle of being a public figure almost before they've
even written anything. Like we're kind of trained to be
eloquent and verbal and very able to present our work
in a digestible way in a way that I'm not
sure that you had to do that back fifty years ago,
where where the work perhaps could stand more for itself.
(09:40):
But I also kind of want to contest this notion
that you know, literary fiction was so different back then,
and that you know that something has been lost, because
I think that is something that we all feel, but
I don't know whether it's quite true. It's like a
nostalgia for something lost which may have never existed, but
I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
I think it's a really interesting question because I think
the modes of having to package yourself as a writer,
the poses you strike, that all of those things, those
modes and those mechanisms might have changed, but I suspect
they were always a function of it. The writer as
public figure, as public intellectual, as sudden expert on the
subjects that they wrote about, who's expected to kind of
(10:18):
sing for their supper. And one of the things that
I think is quite interesting maybe has shifted, is that
that it seems to make it offer me the locus
of the ambition rather than the writing itself, is that
their ambition, and maybe in the case of your unnamed narrator,
this is a bit true. The ambition is for being
a writer rather than having written or doing the writing
(10:40):
exactly exactly.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
And I think when we think about this, you know,
maybe what has changed I think, you know, it's very
deliberate in my novel that Brenda Shale's her story is
very bound up in the Whitlam Years, which is a
kind of period of history. I've always been very fascinated by,
principally because I think this is a time when they're
all these tectonic changes happening to Australian society. It seems
(11:02):
the future is kind of up for grabs. Maybe it's
going to be a bit more of a socialist future,
you know, that's what it looked like for a little while.
But it's also from people of my generation. It is
this object of nostalgia where we kind of think back
to a time that was before we were born, where
we're like, well, that's when things could happen and the
political future looked bright. And I think there's a kind
(11:23):
of parallel there with the writing world, because that's how
a lot of writers think back to a time before that.
There was this time when difficult literature was kind of
held up and you could have a career writing kind
of literary fiction, which was somehow more pure than it
is today. And I do think there is a really
(11:44):
kind of interesting economic element to it, and I often
think back to like, you know, artistic movements of the
nineties like grunge lit basically existed because all the artists
in Australia were on the doll and like Helen Garner
as well, you know she I think she thanked centerlink
more in the acknowledgments of one of her books because
she's like, without government support, she wouldn't have been able
(12:05):
to write any of her books. And it's something that
doesn't it isn't really possible anymore, and that is something
that I do think has been lost that in an
economic sense, I think it's much harder to put writing
at the center of your life than it used to be.
And I think in part my book is kind of
obliquely referencing maybe the economic conditions which have made it
more difficult to prioritize art and take it seriously.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I think, I mean obliquely, but also directly. I mean
it is a book that, apart from what it has
to say about intellectual and emotional procarity, financial procarity is
a part of it. There is that kind of question
about what it is to not be able to make
choices just based on creativity or imagination alone, but by
(12:51):
tethering Brenda's story so much to the kind of Whitlam
years as well. That was an inflection point in cultural
policy that also had a big impact on a kind
of independent Australian identity on the page. You know, the
rise of small, independent local presses meant that actually a
(13:11):
different kind of Australian story started being told. I hang
up until the Whitlam era, the preponderance of sepia toned,
dumb colored.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Bushy stuff.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Yeah, historical, there are lots of explorers, lots of people
going missing. You know. The idea of the Australian voice
was a largely historical, realist, non urban one, and that
started to change around the time of Brenda Shales.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Well, yeah, I think I think that's a really good point.
And I think, you know, when I was coming up
with the character of Brenda, there were a lot of
writers from that time which were feeding into this idea
of this kind of composite character. Of a lot of
kind of feminist or female writers from that era who've
had a great influence on my work. You know, there's
(13:56):
a bit of Elizabeth Harrower in her, there's some Janet.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Frame, Elizabeth Jolly.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Well, yeah, of course, like, probably the most fun thing
of creating Brenda was imagining the works that she might
have written. And when I was kind of imagining the
two books that she wrote, they called Anchorus and the Widowers.
When I was kind of imagining what these texts might
have looked like, I kept returning to The Well, which
is one of my favorite Australian novels, which is this
if you haven't read it, it's this psychosexual, lesbian, gothic
(14:23):
country kind of I don't know, very strange, very dark,
very sexy and weird and very Australian in a very
smart way. And you know, when I was kind of
rereading this book, I kept imagining that this is the
type of book that Brenda Schlls might have written and
might have built her career upon.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
It is remarkable, like that generation of women in particular
in Australian fiction, how many of them there are, how
sharp they are, like, how amazing they are on the page,
and by and large, how at least until relatively recently,
how more or less forgotten lots of them. It's crazy,
Even someone like fear Asler, whose output was enormous, who.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Masks Franklin a bunch of times.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Although always had to share it. You know, like there
is an interesting people will remember Patrick White, they won't
necessarily talk about Asley, they won't necessarily talk about any
number of them.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Yes, wild yeah, and you think, like, you know, even
Helen Garner, she's somewhat getting her day in the sun
overseas now. But you know, it makes it seems crazy
to me that, you know, this is the first time
that Britain and America is paying attention to Helen Garner.
And alexis right as well. It's it seems very instructive.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Coming up after the break, we discussed the difficulties of anonymity,
and Dominic explains why living abroad has made him appreciate
Astradit as vibrant literary scene. He'll be right back. One
(16:01):
of the pleasures that I want everything lies in the
sections that are written from Brenda's perspective as she unveils
her life story to Ammarina's narrator. Her voice is distinctive,
her recounting of a life of horrors and disappointments is
particularly well realized, and what's clear is the way in
which her experience are being underestimated as a writer and
(16:22):
dismissed as a political thinker is both typical of Australia
in the period and also intensely gendered. The larger than
life literary figure who's chosen to remain in the shadows
is clearly a lot of fun to write.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
There is lots of kind of supposition about who she is.
Maybe it's a non di plume, maybe she's another writer
who's written these novels. And you know, I was really
interested in this idea when it really came to me
during the Ferrante scandal, where you had this like scumbag
Italian journalist tracking down this translator and you know, fingering
(16:57):
her as the culprit who's written this than novels, And
I was like, what's going on here? Like why do
people care so much that a writer wants to be anonymous?
And especially today, I think it's very interesting that we
live in such a competitive attention economy that anybody who
actively rejects attention, we reject that rejection. We think it's
(17:19):
really dangerous and we think it's something that has to
be kind of weeded out and kind of revealed. And
I guess in my narrator's desire to kind of worm
his way into Brenda Shell's life and kind of learn
her story. I was referencing maybe this idea about what
is this unconscious hatred we have of people who refuse attention?
Speaker 1 (17:38):
How much do you think it comes from feeling like
someone who manipulates us through art owes us something that
you know that, Okay, well, you're able to produce these emotions,
You're able to kind of carry me along for a story.
You owe it to me to expose yourself a bit
so that I know who's taken me for this ride.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
That was a really interesting idea. I don't think I've
ever thought about it in quite those terms, but I
guess it is like it can be a really personal
thing when you know you're reading a book that you
kind of connect with. And I don't think it's strange
that we want to know more about the writers who
write these books. I just think it's strange that we
force them into the public in a way that they
(18:20):
don't necessarily want to be in my narrator's kind of
desire to well, he wouldn't say exposed, but expose that
the brutal truth of you know, what Brenda Shell's novels
meant and why she kind of disappeared from the public eye.
His way of making art is very gendered, it's very extractive,
it's very kind of has some parallels with colonialism as well.
(18:43):
It's like it's a way of telling a story which
isn't his, which he can kind of steal for himself.
And I guess throughout the novel all of the ethics
of using other people's stories is very much kind of
like ever present.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
I'm glad you mentioned the Colonial overtimes because it is
a very Australian story to identify a good story on
which you can build your own idea, and that tension
runs through it as well. Given all of this, given
that you're presenting a couple of different models of rightly
(19:16):
choices or ways to be in the world as a writer,
where do you situate yourself in that?
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Wow?
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Yeah, that's a very tough question. You know. It's weird.
You don't really know how you're going to go in
the public until you're in the public. And I have
found myself enjoying it much more than I thought, and
it took me a while to accept that in myself.
I felt a bit sick. I've written this book about
an ambitious writer and here I am getting some scaic
(19:44):
of success and I'm really enjoying it. But now I've
kind of come to think that I'm really proud of
the novel, and I think it's okay to enjoy what
little success comes one's way, because it takes a really
long time to write a book.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
It's a long time between dreams. You need to be
able to strap when you're allowed to say exactly, exactly exactly.
That's something like your unnamed narrator. You share your life
with another writer. And I'm always interested in writers who
in a relationship, who live together, and the ways in
which that works, and the ways in which that causes friction.
(20:20):
For your unnamed narrator, it's not great.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Yeah, well, yeah, I would say, you know, you are right, Yes,
I am in a relationship I live in Greece with
with my wife Ellena Savage, who you know, the best
Australian writer, And would I would say, but the novels
the relationship between the narrator and his girlfriend, you know,
I don't think accurately reflects our relationship to each other's work.
(20:44):
And I think it's actually kind of interesting. I had
to change the book a bit because perhaps at one
time it did resemble our relationship, which is much more
supportive collaborative. You know, we're always each other's first reader.
You know, I've read a million drafts of her book.
She's read a million drafts of my book. We really
do kind of work together in a way that's quite
(21:04):
you know, quite beautiful and quite nice, and like, you know,
I can't really imagine making work without her as a support.
And you know, during a certain draft, that sort of
collaborative relationship was present in the text. And you know,
I got a few notes from readers it's like, it's
a little bit boring to read this. You know, we
need to we need to kind of put a bit
more at tension in So I had to end up
(21:26):
making it a bit more competitive.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
I like that you had to change it, not because
of fear of betrayal, as would have happened to your character,
but you had to change it just because real life
is a little too mundane and nice. How for you
was going from the shorter form and from essays to
a novel, because part of what makes a novel work
is the richness of the world that you paint, which
(21:49):
is built on such little stories fabrications and digressions and whatever.
From what I understand, this book came out of winnowing
down a much rather than building up a shorter thing.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Yes, massachist that I am, I had this very long,
unwieldy had a specfic conceit, which is not really my thing.
I don't know why I kind of went down this path.
It was very long, and then it was just doing
my head in and there were just a couple of
scenes in there which I really enjoyed writing. They were
(22:22):
like the kind of treat that I was returning to,
which was this relationship between this character and an older novelist,
And that was really kind of what I was enjoying writing.
And you know, it took me a while to give
myself permission to imagine, well, what if it was just
that story? And once I did, I was able to
kind of get rid of the rest and drill down
(22:44):
into that relationship, and suddenly everything just unlocked and it
opened up, and it taught me something about I don't know,
this intuition about the writing and finding where like the
heat is in the writing, and I found I was
really enjoying writing it. And I feel like that sense
of kind of excitement kind of transmitted to the reader,
at least I hope it did.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
So if that heat in part corresponds with pleasure, the
heat in the writing is the bit where you're having
fun doing And what role does discomfort play in finding
the heat?
Speaker 3 (23:18):
That is interesting. It's like I suspect maybe you have
to go through the discomfort to find the pleasure, or
perhaps the discomfort is in the editing. You know, the
pleasure is in the writing, and the discomfort is in
turning it into something that functions as a kind of text,
because you know, sometimes it starts off a bit raw.
Sometimes you know, it's it can be a bit digressive.
(23:40):
And maybe the discomfort is in deciding what has to
be there and what shouldn't be there, and what's there
just to entertain you and what's there to entertain the reader,
and what the difference between those two things, and making
those sometimes very difficult decisions about like what the form
and what the final kind of text should look like.
So maybe maybe writing is pleasurable and editing is horrible.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Just before I let you go, you mentioned you and
Eleanor live in Greece, and from what I understand, one
of your motivations for moving overseas was to focus on
your writing, for both of you, to create a space
where you could go and do that. And I'm interested
in whether that's your version of being a Brenda Shale's
style recluse, whether you had to remove yourself from the
(24:26):
scene and the conversations and the comparisons and the awareness
of the book industry such as it is, Like how
much did being outside that help you?
Speaker 3 (24:38):
I think that's a really interesting question. And again, I
think there's no kind of easy answer about whether whether
it's helpful or unhelpful to be embedded in a literary scene.
I think in some senses it can be really generative,
and it can be really fun to be in a
community of writers where you're always talking about writing, you're
always talking about ideas, But in another sense can subsume
(25:01):
the work sometimes, and I don't think it's particularly healthy
to just be talking about who got it which grant
and who got it which book deal, And sometimes it
is beneficial to kind of have some distance from that.
But ironically, living in Greece, we found ourselves missing these conversations,
and so you know, we found ourselves really trying to
kind of embed ourselves or even create a literary scene
(25:24):
in Greece. So you know, we started a reading series
where we brought together international and Greek writers and you know,
we've been trying to kind of build these connections because
I think we didn't know how much we would miss it,
and so we had to kind of build it ourselves.
And it's been very kind of lovely to come back
to Australia. And I think we're talking about this off air,
(25:45):
which is just the writing world has a reputation for
being backbiting and competitive, and it can be, but I
also think that writers are really comrades and they really
act that way to each other. They really read each
other's work with love, and we all want the best
for each other, and that is sometimes hard to remember
when I'm living overseas, so it's been really nice to
(26:06):
kind of reconnect with that.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Finally, is the ambitious artist. Is the ambitious writer ever satisfied?
Speaker 3 (26:14):
No, Because you know, it's like I would say, a
satisfied artist, it's like the death drive. It's you know,
you have to be always striving. I think it kind
of goes back to, you know, some of the things
we've touched upon, which is that if you stake your
levels of happiness and satisfaction on the external validation, the reviews,
(26:36):
the readership, the success, you will eventually be very disappointed
because it can never be enough. But I think this
whole process has taught me that if you can find
pleasure in actually writing, then it doesn't really matter the
rest of it, which is what I say. You know, well,
my book is out and everybody's reading it, so you
(26:58):
know it's easy for me to say, that's.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
The perfect time to say it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, dom
thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Thank you, Michael, it was great.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Dominic Camarena's debut novel I Want Everything, is available at
all good bookstores. Now before we go, I wanted to
tell you what I've been reading this week, and it's
another debut novel, this one by Melbourne and Shade Stubborns.
(27:30):
It's called Stinkbug and it's a corporate satire set behind
the scenes in an advertising agency who are off on
a retreat that may or may not have nefarious intentions,
that might just have horrible corporate ones. But the book
is really funny, it's really well put together. Chanade's Stubborn's
well worth a read. You can find it and all
the other books we mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore.
(27:53):
That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it,
please tell your friends and rate and review us. It
helps a lot. Next week read this, I'm joined by
Irish author Kevin Berry to discuss his lightest book, The
Gorgeous The Hat in Winter.
Speaker 4 (28:08):
I was out walking again. I was in the hills
nearby where I live in County Slide on the Northwest,
just walking through the woods on the side of a
mountain one day and just had a vision in my
mind's eye of a young couple on horseback, riding double.
And I thought, if they're riding double, they must be
trying to get away from someplace fast. They're in trouble,
(28:31):
you know. And it struck me about them as I
saw them in my mind's eye that they were kind
of very slight.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
They were kind of wayfish.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
So these weren't heroic characters or cowboys or anything, you know,
But I thought, we're really trying to get away from
They're on a horse. It's a Western what if it's
but Montana in eighteen ninety one. Just very quickly, this
succession of thoughts and I thought, Okay, that's the setup.
Runaway Lovers very easy. Make it fucking easy for yourself,
you know.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Read. This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
the generous support of AR Group. The show is produced
and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans
and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See
you next week.
So, as we've mentioned more than once at this point,
there's the books we love and the stories behind them.
There's the joy of reading, the mysterious, wondrous, ineffable artistic
achievement of writing, imagine world's creative feats, inspiration and whimsy.
When I'm lucky enough to sit down and have these
conversations with authors about how they do the things that
(00:22):
they do, I'm often struck by the vast spectrum from
what we might call the work. On the one hand,
that's the slog the edits, the rewrites, the very deliberate
honing of the book as this grounded, crafted thing, and
then on the other hand you have the creative impulse.
When Booker Prize, when a Paul Lynch was on read this,
he put it in particularly ethereal terms.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
It goes back to the Greeks. Actually, this idea of
the word damonic, the demon the Greeks called creativity the demon.
Socrates talked about when you're in communication with the gods
that you or these this thing that you were channeling
down was the damon. And of course we know that's
(01:06):
that's it's there is internally, but it's just subconscious and
as a writer you learn to live in proximity to that.
You opened the door to it, and I called the
door into the dark, and you and you learn to
channel this energy, this voice from back there, or maybe
it's down down here somewhere. It's hard to know where
(01:27):
it comes from, but it's deeply authentic, and it must
be obeyed.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
The mechanics of the book world, the heartbreaking quest for
sales and recognition, the anglamorous jockeying for a publisher, for
a place in the bookshops, for readers, all these things
feel a long way from tales of inspiration. There's that
brilliant line from Janet Malcolm's famous essay The Journalist and
the Murderer, where she damns the profession of journalists and
(01:55):
writers in no uncertain terms. She says, every journalist who's
not too student or two full of himself to notice
what is going on, knows that what he does is
morally indefensible. He's a kind of confidence man, preying on
people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying
(02:15):
them without remorse, deliciously. Grin and I thought of it
when I was reading Dominic Amarina's debut novel I Want Everything.
One of the things I particularly enjoyed in that book
is how deep into the venal, effortful part of the
writer's life it's willing to delve. Amorina's been a writer
for years. He's been involved in readers and writers' groups,
(02:38):
taught writing, edited writing, been generally immersed in the world
of writing and writers. But this is his first novel.
In it, his unnamed narrator comes across an elderly woman
he recognizes as Brenda Shales, an Australian literary luminary who
has disappeared from the landscape after contributing to seminal incendiary novels,
(03:00):
Shales has willingly faded from public view and into obscurity.
For our narrator, who is striving and mostly failing to
build a career for himself as a literary icon, this
serendipitous sighting might just be the opportunity and the idea
he's been searching for. This could be his breakthrough. All
(03:20):
that will take is lies, theft, and betrayal, and in
dominic Amarina's account of the world, these might be just
the skills that make someone a writer. I'm Michael Williams
and this is read this to show about the books
we love and the stories behind them. Ambition is it
(03:48):
always ugly?
Speaker 3 (03:50):
I guess it can be. I think that it's something
that every writer contains, whether they want to acknowledge it
or not. And I guess my novel looks at the
way that ambition and ethics kind of are balanced against
each other. And I like exploring the idea of the
(04:14):
kind of labdinal thrill of these ugly ambitions, which is
expressed by my unnamed narrators desired to be the next
great Australian writer without writing a book of his own.
And I think ambition can be something that is a
(04:35):
bit of a sickness, but it's also something that kind
of creates great work. And I think it's an endlessly
kind of fascinating topic.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah. The thing that struck me in your novel is
firstly how thrilling and rare it is to have your
narrator confess to his ambition at the start. And the
truth of it is, I think anyone who takes pride
in their work, who wants to be good at what
they so, who wants to achieve stuff, is just by
(05:04):
dint of those conditions an ambitious person, but lots of
us feel the need to mask that or lie about that,
or people are very uncomfortable saying I want this.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
And I think, you know, I've now maybe moved into
a phase of my career where I actually know a
few people who earn a lot of money from their writing,
and they don't have to do any other work, and
they're quite independently wealthy. And one thing that they all
share is a kind of really strong ambition and sense
(05:35):
of kind of purpose, which I don't think makes them
particularly happy. It kind of makes them neurotic and crazy.
But they are obsessed with achieving and making great art.
And I think that's a really interesting quality. And I
wonder is it possible to even make great art without
this drive? And I agree, I think there's something particularly
Australian about our rejection of ambition and that you're supposed
(05:59):
to you're supposed to think of the work that you
make as something that just kind of happened, rather than
something that you really worked hard for or kind of
aimed high for.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
As well, that pose of foe diffidence, you know, the
line that was ubiquitous on social media for a while
when people shared bits of writing they've done, and they'd
be like, here's a little thing I did a thing,
or deliberately pretending to be offhand or to diminish it
because to say I am proud of this, or I
worked really hard on this, or I'm hoping this will
(06:33):
make you cry or laugh or think those things are
somehow not worthy.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah, yeah, well why would you not, as an artist
want to kind of like create big feelings in other people?
And I think that's a very ambitious thing to strive for,
and we should be kind of proud of that rather
than hide it. But I do think there's a particularly,
a particularly Australian desire to downplay any sort of artistic ambition.
(06:57):
You know, we go back to the I don't know,
cultural cringe is still quite strong, I think, And I
think we should all be more ambitious, and we should
all be more We should be ambitious readers, we should
be ambitious writers, and we should kind of like hold
art to a very high standard.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
I think I think that's absolutely right. But the corollary
of it in Australian culture is the idea of the
laconic as well. Not only do we not show ambition,
but we don't show great passion. We can't show emotion,
we don't profess love in the public's feel those kind
of things, And one of the things that you do
so well in this book is make the case for
(07:32):
how that's changed over the years. The generational divide. Brenda
is a classic boomer, the narrator is a kind of
elder millennial, and that divide goes no small way to
defining the ways in which they regard ambition and their work.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, I think this is an interesting point,
and I guess I set up this, I guess duality
between the two principal characters my novel, one of whom
is an unnamed narrator who's a kind of young man
who has these ambitions to write the great Australian novel
very much quote unquote, alongside Brenda Shales, who is this
(08:10):
kind of cult author from the seventies who wrote these
two incendiary novels, disappeared from the public eye and has
had this great influence over Australian literary culture for the
past fifty years. And in her I guess I'm kind
of interested in looking at this kind of trope of
the literary recluse. The author who estews kind of public
(08:31):
attention and also a writer who kind of writes difficult,
knotty literary novels, which also made her name as opposed
to maybe the narrator, who you might think of as
more of a neoliberal writer, where he's kind of thinking
of the career comes before the writing, like the career
kind of supersedes the writing. And I actually think it's
(08:54):
kind of interesting that basically, I think all writers have
this kind of duel impulse, one of which is to
kind of show themselves to the world through their riding
or through the kind of you know, promotional aspects of
like being a public writer, but also to kind of
hide and to kind of like hide behind the work
and not have to speak for it in a sense,
because I think one of the big differences now is
(09:17):
that all writers are expected to, you know, take up
the mantle of being a public figure almost before they've
even written anything. Like we're kind of trained to be
eloquent and verbal and very able to present our work
in a digestible way in a way that I'm not
sure that you had to do that back fifty years ago,
where where the work perhaps could stand more for itself.
(09:40):
But I also kind of want to contest this notion
that you know, literary fiction was so different back then,
and that you know that something has been lost, because
I think that is something that we all feel, but
I don't know whether it's quite true. It's like a
nostalgia for something lost which may have never existed, but
I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
I think it's a really interesting question because I think
the modes of having to package yourself as a writer,
the poses you strike, that all of those things, those
modes and those mechanisms might have changed, but I suspect
they were always a function of it. The writer as
public figure, as public intellectual, as sudden expert on the
subjects that they wrote about, who's expected to kind of
(10:18):
sing for their supper. And one of the things that
I think is quite interesting maybe has shifted, is that
that it seems to make it offer me the locus
of the ambition rather than the writing itself, is that
their ambition, and maybe in the case of your unnamed narrator,
this is a bit true. The ambition is for being
a writer rather than having written or doing the writing
(10:40):
exactly exactly.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
And I think when we think about this, you know,
maybe what has changed I think, you know, it's very
deliberate in my novel that Brenda Shale's her story is
very bound up in the Whitlam Years, which is a
kind of period of history. I've always been very fascinated by,
principally because I think this is a time when they're
all these tectonic changes happening to Australian society. It seems
(11:02):
the future is kind of up for grabs. Maybe it's
going to be a bit more of a socialist future,
you know, that's what it looked like for a little while.
But it's also from people of my generation. It is
this object of nostalgia where we kind of think back
to a time that was before we were born, where
we're like, well, that's when things could happen and the
political future looked bright. And I think there's a kind
(11:23):
of parallel there with the writing world, because that's how
a lot of writers think back to a time before that.
There was this time when difficult literature was kind of
held up and you could have a career writing kind
of literary fiction, which was somehow more pure than it
is today. And I do think there is a really
(11:44):
kind of interesting economic element to it, and I often
think back to like, you know, artistic movements of the
nineties like grunge lit basically existed because all the artists
in Australia were on the doll and like Helen Garner
as well, you know she I think she thanked centerlink
more in the acknowledgments of one of her books because
she's like, without government support, she wouldn't have been able
(12:05):
to write any of her books. And it's something that
doesn't it isn't really possible anymore, and that is something
that I do think has been lost that in an
economic sense, I think it's much harder to put writing
at the center of your life than it used to be.
And I think in part my book is kind of
obliquely referencing maybe the economic conditions which have made it
more difficult to prioritize art and take it seriously.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I think, I mean obliquely, but also directly. I mean
it is a book that, apart from what it has
to say about intellectual and emotional procarity, financial procarity is
a part of it. There is that kind of question
about what it is to not be able to make
choices just based on creativity or imagination alone, but by
(12:51):
tethering Brenda's story so much to the kind of Whitlam
years as well. That was an inflection point in cultural
policy that also had a big impact on a kind
of independent Australian identity on the page. You know, the
rise of small, independent local presses meant that actually a
(13:11):
different kind of Australian story started being told. I hang
up until the Whitlam era, the preponderance of sepia toned,
dumb colored.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Bushy stuff.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Yeah, historical, there are lots of explorers, lots of people
going missing. You know. The idea of the Australian voice
was a largely historical, realist, non urban one, and that
started to change around the time of Brenda Shales.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Well, yeah, I think I think that's a really good point.
And I think, you know, when I was coming up
with the character of Brenda, there were a lot of
writers from that time which were feeding into this idea
of this kind of composite character. Of a lot of
kind of feminist or female writers from that era who've
had a great influence on my work. You know, there's
(13:56):
a bit of Elizabeth Harrower in her, there's some Janet.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Frame, Elizabeth Jolly.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Well, yeah, of course, like, probably the most fun thing
of creating Brenda was imagining the works that she might
have written. And when I was kind of imagining the
two books that she wrote, they called Anchorus and the Widowers.
When I was kind of imagining what these texts might
have looked like, I kept returning to The Well, which
is one of my favorite Australian novels, which is this
if you haven't read it, it's this psychosexual, lesbian, gothic
(14:23):
country kind of I don't know, very strange, very dark,
very sexy and weird and very Australian in a very
smart way. And you know, when I was kind of
rereading this book, I kept imagining that this is the
type of book that Brenda Schlls might have written and
might have built her career upon.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
It is remarkable, like that generation of women in particular
in Australian fiction, how many of them there are, how
sharp they are, like, how amazing they are on the page,
and by and large, how at least until relatively recently,
how more or less forgotten lots of them. It's crazy,
Even someone like fear Asler, whose output was enormous, who.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Masks Franklin a bunch of times.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Although always had to share it. You know, like there
is an interesting people will remember Patrick White, they won't
necessarily talk about Asley, they won't necessarily talk about any
number of them.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Yes, wild yeah, and you think, like, you know, even
Helen Garner, she's somewhat getting her day in the sun
overseas now. But you know, it makes it seems crazy
to me that, you know, this is the first time
that Britain and America is paying attention to Helen Garner.
And alexis right as well. It's it seems very instructive.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Coming up after the break, we discussed the difficulties of anonymity,
and Dominic explains why living abroad has made him appreciate
Astradit as vibrant literary scene. He'll be right back. One
(16:01):
of the pleasures that I want everything lies in the
sections that are written from Brenda's perspective as she unveils
her life story to Ammarina's narrator. Her voice is distinctive,
her recounting of a life of horrors and disappointments is
particularly well realized, and what's clear is the way in
which her experience are being underestimated as a writer and
(16:22):
dismissed as a political thinker is both typical of Australia
in the period and also intensely gendered. The larger than
life literary figure who's chosen to remain in the shadows
is clearly a lot of fun to write.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
There is lots of kind of supposition about who she is.
Maybe it's a non di plume, maybe she's another writer
who's written these novels. And you know, I was really
interested in this idea when it really came to me
during the Ferrante scandal, where you had this like scumbag
Italian journalist tracking down this translator and you know, fingering
(16:57):
her as the culprit who's written this than novels, And
I was like, what's going on here? Like why do
people care so much that a writer wants to be anonymous?
And especially today, I think it's very interesting that we
live in such a competitive attention economy that anybody who
actively rejects attention, we reject that rejection. We think it's
(17:19):
really dangerous and we think it's something that has to
be kind of weeded out and kind of revealed. And
I guess in my narrator's desire to kind of worm
his way into Brenda Shell's life and kind of learn
her story. I was referencing maybe this idea about what
is this unconscious hatred we have of people who refuse attention?
Speaker 1 (17:38):
How much do you think it comes from feeling like
someone who manipulates us through art owes us something that
you know that, Okay, well, you're able to produce these emotions,
You're able to kind of carry me along for a story.
You owe it to me to expose yourself a bit
so that I know who's taken me for this ride.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
That was a really interesting idea. I don't think I've
ever thought about it in quite those terms, but I
guess it is like it can be a really personal
thing when you know you're reading a book that you
kind of connect with. And I don't think it's strange
that we want to know more about the writers who
write these books. I just think it's strange that we
force them into the public in a way that they
(18:20):
don't necessarily want to be in my narrator's kind of
desire to well, he wouldn't say exposed, but expose that
the brutal truth of you know, what Brenda Shell's novels
meant and why she kind of disappeared from the public eye.
His way of making art is very gendered, it's very extractive,
it's very kind of has some parallels with colonialism as well.
(18:43):
It's like it's a way of telling a story which
isn't his, which he can kind of steal for himself.
And I guess throughout the novel all of the ethics
of using other people's stories is very much kind of
like ever present.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
I'm glad you mentioned the Colonial overtimes because it is
a very Australian story to identify a good story on
which you can build your own idea, and that tension
runs through it as well. Given all of this, given
that you're presenting a couple of different models of rightly
(19:16):
choices or ways to be in the world as a writer,
where do you situate yourself in that?
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Wow?
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Yeah, that's a very tough question. You know. It's weird.
You don't really know how you're going to go in
the public until you're in the public. And I have
found myself enjoying it much more than I thought, and
it took me a while to accept that in myself.
I felt a bit sick. I've written this book about
an ambitious writer and here I am getting some scaic
(19:44):
of success and I'm really enjoying it. But now I've
kind of come to think that I'm really proud of
the novel, and I think it's okay to enjoy what
little success comes one's way, because it takes a really
long time to write a book.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
It's a long time between dreams. You need to be
able to strap when you're allowed to say exactly, exactly exactly.
That's something like your unnamed narrator. You share your life
with another writer. And I'm always interested in writers who
in a relationship, who live together, and the ways in
which that works, and the ways in which that causes friction.
(20:20):
For your unnamed narrator, it's not great.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Yeah, well, yeah, I would say, you know, you are right, Yes,
I am in a relationship I live in Greece with
with my wife Ellena Savage, who you know, the best
Australian writer, And would I would say, but the novels
the relationship between the narrator and his girlfriend, you know,
I don't think accurately reflects our relationship to each other's work.
(20:44):
And I think it's actually kind of interesting. I had
to change the book a bit because perhaps at one
time it did resemble our relationship, which is much more
supportive collaborative. You know, we're always each other's first reader.
You know, I've read a million drafts of her book.
She's read a million drafts of my book. We really
do kind of work together in a way that's quite
(21:04):
you know, quite beautiful and quite nice, and like, you know,
I can't really imagine making work without her as a support.
And you know, during a certain draft, that sort of
collaborative relationship was present in the text. And you know,
I got a few notes from readers it's like, it's
a little bit boring to read this. You know, we
need to we need to kind of put a bit
more at tension in So I had to end up
(21:26):
making it a bit more competitive.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
I like that you had to change it, not because
of fear of betrayal, as would have happened to your character,
but you had to change it just because real life
is a little too mundane and nice. How for you
was going from the shorter form and from essays to
a novel, because part of what makes a novel work
is the richness of the world that you paint, which
(21:49):
is built on such little stories fabrications and digressions and whatever.
From what I understand, this book came out of winnowing
down a much rather than building up a shorter thing.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Yes, massachist that I am, I had this very long,
unwieldy had a specfic conceit, which is not really my thing.
I don't know why I kind of went down this path.
It was very long, and then it was just doing
my head in and there were just a couple of
scenes in there which I really enjoyed writing. They were
(22:22):
like the kind of treat that I was returning to,
which was this relationship between this character and an older novelist,
And that was really kind of what I was enjoying writing.
And you know, it took me a while to give
myself permission to imagine, well, what if it was just
that story? And once I did, I was able to
kind of get rid of the rest and drill down
(22:44):
into that relationship, and suddenly everything just unlocked and it
opened up, and it taught me something about I don't know,
this intuition about the writing and finding where like the
heat is in the writing, and I found I was
really enjoying writing it. And I feel like that sense
of kind of excitement kind of transmitted to the reader,
at least I hope it did.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
So if that heat in part corresponds with pleasure, the
heat in the writing is the bit where you're having
fun doing And what role does discomfort play in finding
the heat?
Speaker 3 (23:18):
That is interesting. It's like I suspect maybe you have
to go through the discomfort to find the pleasure, or
perhaps the discomfort is in the editing. You know, the
pleasure is in the writing, and the discomfort is in
turning it into something that functions as a kind of text,
because you know, sometimes it starts off a bit raw.
Sometimes you know, it's it can be a bit digressive.
(23:40):
And maybe the discomfort is in deciding what has to
be there and what shouldn't be there, and what's there
just to entertain you and what's there to entertain the reader,
and what the difference between those two things, and making
those sometimes very difficult decisions about like what the form
and what the final kind of text should look like.
So maybe maybe writing is pleasurable and editing is horrible.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Just before I let you go, you mentioned you and
Eleanor live in Greece, and from what I understand, one
of your motivations for moving overseas was to focus on
your writing, for both of you, to create a space
where you could go and do that. And I'm interested
in whether that's your version of being a Brenda Shale's
style recluse, whether you had to remove yourself from the
(24:26):
scene and the conversations and the comparisons and the awareness
of the book industry such as it is, Like how
much did being outside that help you?
Speaker 3 (24:38):
I think that's a really interesting question. And again, I
think there's no kind of easy answer about whether whether
it's helpful or unhelpful to be embedded in a literary scene.
I think in some senses it can be really generative,
and it can be really fun to be in a
community of writers where you're always talking about writing, you're
always talking about ideas, But in another sense can subsume
(25:01):
the work sometimes, and I don't think it's particularly healthy
to just be talking about who got it which grant
and who got it which book deal, And sometimes it
is beneficial to kind of have some distance from that.
But ironically, living in Greece, we found ourselves missing these conversations,
and so you know, we found ourselves really trying to
kind of embed ourselves or even create a literary scene
(25:24):
in Greece. So you know, we started a reading series
where we brought together international and Greek writers and you know,
we've been trying to kind of build these connections because
I think we didn't know how much we would miss it,
and so we had to kind of build it ourselves.
And it's been very kind of lovely to come back
to Australia. And I think we're talking about this off air,
(25:45):
which is just the writing world has a reputation for
being backbiting and competitive, and it can be, but I
also think that writers are really comrades and they really
act that way to each other. They really read each
other's work with love, and we all want the best
for each other, and that is sometimes hard to remember
when I'm living overseas, so it's been really nice to
(26:06):
kind of reconnect with that.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Finally, is the ambitious artist. Is the ambitious writer ever satisfied?
Speaker 3 (26:14):
No, Because you know, it's like I would say, a
satisfied artist, it's like the death drive. It's you know,
you have to be always striving. I think it kind
of goes back to, you know, some of the things
we've touched upon, which is that if you stake your
levels of happiness and satisfaction on the external validation, the reviews,
(26:36):
the readership, the success, you will eventually be very disappointed
because it can never be enough. But I think this
whole process has taught me that if you can find
pleasure in actually writing, then it doesn't really matter the
rest of it, which is what I say. You know, well,
my book is out and everybody's reading it, so you
(26:58):
know it's easy for me to say, that's.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
The perfect time to say it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, dom
thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Thank you, Michael, it was great.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Dominic Camarena's debut novel I Want Everything, is available at
all good bookstores. Now before we go, I wanted to
tell you what I've been reading this week, and it's
another debut novel, this one by Melbourne and Shade Stubborns.
(27:30):
It's called Stinkbug and it's a corporate satire set behind
the scenes in an advertising agency who are off on
a retreat that may or may not have nefarious intentions,
that might just have horrible corporate ones. But the book
is really funny, it's really well put together. Chanade's Stubborn's
well worth a read. You can find it and all
the other books we mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore.
(27:53):
That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it,
please tell your friends and rate and review us. It
helps a lot. Next week read this, I'm joined by
Irish author Kevin Berry to discuss his lightest book, The
Gorgeous The Hat in Winter.
Speaker 4 (28:08):
I was out walking again. I was in the hills
nearby where I live in County Slide on the Northwest,
just walking through the woods on the side of a
mountain one day and just had a vision in my
mind's eye of a young couple on horseback, riding double.
And I thought, if they're riding double, they must be
trying to get away from someplace fast. They're in trouble,
(28:31):
you know. And it struck me about them as I
saw them in my mind's eye that they were kind
of very slight.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
They were kind of wayfish.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
So these weren't heroic characters or cowboys or anything, you know,
But I thought, we're really trying to get away from
They're on a horse. It's a Western what if it's
but Montana in eighteen ninety one. Just very quickly, this
succession of thoughts and I thought, Okay, that's the setup.
Runaway Lovers very easy. Make it fucking easy for yourself,
you know.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Read. This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
the generous support of AR Group. The show is produced
and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans
and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See
you next week.
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