AustLit

'My skin is white, or rather it is a soft, warm pink, which is the colour of the skin of the most dangerous and successful pillagers in recent times. I descend from them. I am them. Nothing is random. I am capable of killing another person but I would prefer not to. I would prefer not to survive an apocalypse.'  (Introduction)

'There’s an ache that comes from somewhere in my middle-lower back and which feels emotional at its root. Like whatever it is that keeps me standing and breathing and conscious is giving up. I live with depression, and I know the feeling of low mood descending, and this ache is not quite it. The ache isn’t only mine, either; it goes beyond my edges and is shared by people around me. It feels widespread, not just within my local community, but perhaps distributed generationally.'  (Introduction)

'The cold is a living thing in this old house. It snakes under doorways, through glass thin with age, wraps itself around my legs, creeps into my toes, stiffens my fingers and hardens my nose.' (Introduction)

'When I am not writing my novel, In Real Life, I edit tender documents for firms in the construction industry. I am seconded to skyscrapers across the country, writing copy for road pavers, train station constructers, and level crossing removalists. I activate passive sentences and remove dangling infinitives and double spaces left at the ends of sentences. I wear monochrome shirts and a single pair of Versace suit pants that I found, miraculously, for $24 at the Southern Cross TK Maxx.'  (Introduction)

'Just when you think we have finally killed off the idea that writers need to retire Coleridge-style to a lonely farmhouse on the moors to get anything done, another writer notes on their acknowledgements page how the work would ‘never have been written’ without the generosity of this or that writers retreat, giving them a break from the world to do their work. But this must be an exaggeration. As much as I love writing retreats, the reality of writing a book is that the work is not done in a two-week uninterrupted block in the mountains: it is done around other paid work and domestic life, daily or weekly, iteratively, over long stretches of time. Writers who publish also grapple with deadlines, editorial direction, and the affordances and limitations of their economic status in the industry. These things impact creative practice. Far from being separable from the social and the material, writing is always inflected by these twin forces.' (Introduction)