Get to know our author of our book of the month for October, Trent Dalton. Trent is a two-time Walkley Award-winning journalist and the international bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, All Our Shimmering Skies, Love Stories and Lola in the Mirror. His books have sold over 1.7 million copies in Australia alone.
- To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
I was born in Ipswich, Queensland, on the southwest edge of Brisbane and raised in Bracken Ridge on the northern edge of Brisbane. I went to an amazing school called Bracken Ridge State High where I spent my days dreaming out of classroom windows and dragging my sorry backside up the stairwell to the principal’s office. I went back to that school recently to discover that an acrylic painting depicting the story of my first novel, Boy Swallows Universe, now hangs above that stairwell I once walked up.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
When I was 12 I wanted to be halfback for the Queensland State of Origin rugby league team. After receiving two very dangerous concussions while playing football for the mighty Brighton Roosters, a neurologist informed my father that I had a dangerously thin skull and that I had to end my football-playing days at the age of 14. It was probably not long after that I started writing bad poetry – including the odd ode to Wally Lewis and Alfie Langer – and realised I liked writing even more than I liked playing footy. When I was 18 I wanted to write for Rolling Stone magazine because I dreamed of writing a 4000-word feature on my favourite band, Pearl Jam. When I was 30, I dreamed of being a permanent staff feature writer on The Weekend Australian Magazine and, two years later, I was.
3. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?
The final two pages of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck showed me a level of human kindness and connectedness that not only led to me spending 20 years of my life writing journalistic features about social justice issues but it also directly led to me being brave enough to explore the social issues at the heart of my own childhood.
The only feminine presence we had in our house in Bracken Ridge when I was growing up was a framed print of John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shallot. It’s a haunting, gothic painting of a beautiful but deeply sorrowful woman from Arthurian legend who suffers from a curse that forbids her from going outside or even looking out a window. The painting shows the moment she defies the curse and goes outside, floats down a stream in a boat, accepting her fate of certain death by doing so. Pretty powerful image for a 10-year-old Brisbane boy to stare at while he thought about the years his mum spent trapped inside a prison cell in the Boggo Road womens clink.
The music of Pearl Jam entered my life when I was 13 and lost and angry at the world and fairly self-destructive. Then Eddie Vedder and his beautiful friends came along to remind me that I was, in fact, extremely lucky to be nothing more or less than…. Alive!!!!! Eddie Vedder taught me how to turn curses into blessings. A sick kid’s gotta take his medicine from wherever he can get it. If it has to come from Seattle rock ‘n’ roll gods, then so be it.
4. Please tell us about your novel (which is also our BOTM!), Gravity Let Me Go.
I can’t even begin to tell you how thrilled I am to see that Gravity Let Me Go is your Booktopia Book of the Month. It’s probably the most personal novel I have written yet. More personal than Boy Swallows Universe. That book was all about the wonders and sadnesses of my childhood. Gravity explores the wonders and sadnesses of my adult life, but it also explores my own many failings. It’s about a true crime journalist who becomes so profoundly obsessed with the scoop of his lifetime that he’s in danger of missing an even bigger scoop: the one that’s unfolding inside his own home. It’s a wild murder mystery that’s buried inside the wider mystery that is modern marriage.
5. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
I know from first-hand experience as a journalist that there is a darkness that dwells beneath the great Australian suburban dream. The thing, however, that I want people to take away from Gravity is the fact that there are certain lights in our lives that burn so much brighter than any darkness that we might one day be forced to confront. These lights are so often found in the ones we love. It’s the theme of my life. Light in the dark. The light of true love to pull you out of the cracks.
6. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
Countless authors, living and dead. Lately I’ve been admiring the writers who can do it relentlessly. Those amazing souls who fight the self-doubt and the fear and the dreaded work-life balance and manage to produce a book almost every year and somehow have that book be better than the last book.
7. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
Write the first draft from your heart. Just get the words down from your heart and soul. Do not, under any circumstances, introduce that disloyal betrayer called your brain into the equation until the second draft. It’s your heart that gets it done. It’s not your brain. Let your heart lead the way, let the rubble and debris of your wondrous weirdness fall where it will, and let your brain trail behind with the broom and the vacuum and, if necessary, the blowtorch.
Gravity Let Me Go
Trent Dalton, Australia's #1 bestselling author, returns with the astonishing Gravity Let Me Go - a story you won't ever forget.
How will you ever know how the story ends, if you let the story go?
Noah Cork has just published the scoop of a lifetime: a white-hot true-crime book about the cold-blooded killer who slipped an unfolding murder mystery into his mailbox. But if this is his moment of triumph, then why is the tin roof being ripped from the walls of his reality? Why are skeletons standing upright in his closet? Why do people want to run him over in the street? And why does his wife keep writing a cryptic message across the bathroom mirror? As a severe storm heads towards Brisbane, Noah is hurtling headfirst into a swirling storm of secrets. He must now cling for dear life to the only story that ever really mattered. He must hold on to the truth. He must hold on to the story. He must hold on to love.
Dark, gritty, hilarious and unexpected, Gravity Let Me Go is Trent Dalton's deeply personal exploration of marriage and ambition, truth-telling and truth-omitting, self-deception and self-preservation. It's a novel about the stories we want to tell the world and those we shouldn't, and how the stories we keep locked away are so often the stories that come to define us.
It's the story of a murder.
It's the story of a marriage.
It's the story of a lifetime.
Comments
No comments