Australian author Dominic Amerena is a former Westie now living in Greece. Emily Westmoreland, Program Director of the Willy Lit Fest, recently caught up with him to chat about his latest work, I Want Everything.
I Want Everything is very much embedded in the western suburbs, what does this part of the world mean to you?
I lived in Footscray for most of my twenties, in a ramshackle share house near Victoria University. The sights, sounds and landmarks of the western suburbs are bound up in my struggle to make my way as a writer. I’ve done much of my best work not at my desk but puzzling over a story or a sentence, while I walk along the Maribyrnong, or swimming laps at the Vic Uni pool (where the first scene of I Want Everything takes place). So when I had the idea for my novel, I knew there was only one place to set it!
The way you’ve rendered Footscray and Yarraville in I Want Everything feels correct to its minutiae. Does living in Greece (where you live now) give you the distance to be able to see the western suburbs more clearly?
It speaks to the hold that this part of the world still has on me that I still feel compelled to write about it from the other side of the world. It was never a conscious decision to write (or not write) about the western suburbs, but when I think of my characters I often see them in the places I spent so much time, beneath the West Gate Bridge, or in the dining room of Hao Phong.
What is I Want Everything about?
I Want Everything is about ambition, authenticity and the costs of getting everything you want. It tells the story of a young writer who by chance encounters Brenda Shales, a cult author whose disappearance is one of Australia’s last literary mysteries. The narrator worms his way into Brenda’s life and discovers the secrets of how her novels came to be and why she retreated from the public eye.
There’s a slip of the tongue he can’t back, one lie leading to another until he is caught in a web of deception. To write the book that will make his name, he must balance his ethics and ambition and decide what he’s willing to sacrifice to become the next great Australian writer.
The protagonist of I Want Everything has ambitions to be a successful writer. What does being a successful writer mean to you?
Fame, acclaim and a hefty book deal. Like my narrator, I want everything, or at least a part of me does. But all those things are mostly out of my hands, and in recent years I’ve found a great deal of success and satisfaction in the process of writing, rather than the results. If I can challenge, surprise or appall myself when I sit down to work, I feel like I’m doing something right.
Your novel is an expose on the ‘great Australian writer’ who is now a recluse, Brenda Shales. Was Brenda Shales based on any real Australian writers?
As my narrator fails to discover, if you borrow from one source as an artist you are considered a plagiarist, but if you take from several, people will see that work as your own. In that sense, Brenda is a composite character in conversation with the backstories and biographies of many female writers who have been important to me over the years. Writers like Helen Garner, Janet Frame and Elizabeth Jolley and Elizabeth Harrower, whose work, lives and influence cast a long shadow over I Want Everything.
Which books were you reading whilst writing this novel?
It took me the better part of five years to finish the novel, so this list will be far from exhaustive, but some books that my mind returned to again and again while writing I Want Everything were: The Well by Elizabeth Jolley, which is the closest thing to the books I imagined my Brenda Shales would write; Erasure by Percival Everett, the best novel about a literary hoax ever written; and The Door by Magda Szabo, a brilliant character study of a brilliant and difficult woman. Without these books my novel would be an anaemic, sickly thing.
Dominic Amerena will be in conversation with Emily Westmoreland at Footscray Library on June 10, 6.30pm as part of Willy Lit Fest. Proudly supported by Maribyrnong Library Services.
