What inspired the idea behind this book?
This book began six years ago, and really, I had very little idea what I was doing to begin with. I’d recently become a father and it occurred to me that I knew very little about my own father’s life before I was born. I decided to go around and interview his old friends. This was a revelation to me. I learnt things I had never known about him, but just as importantly, I learnt things about his friends, about their lives during the 1970s and 80s. People were extraordinarily generous. And one of the things that kept coming up, in interview after interview, was the importance of India at the time, as a destination, and Indian thought – Buddhist and Vedic Traditions – as an antithesis to Western secular materialism.
But even this account makes it sound like I knew what I was doing, or like I was proceeding logically from one thing to another. Mostly I just lurched from one vague intuition to another. I spent a long time thinking the book was about the nature of images – photographs, memories, films, etc. I spent a long time researching Japanese witches. I spent a long time in the State Library of Victoria, with a rare collection of science-fiction zines from the 1970s. I spent a long time researching the Vietnam War. I stayed in a very dodgy caravan park in semi-rural Victoria. I travelled to India – to Chennai, Pune, and Kerala – and wrote a long section based on that experience.
I had to lose almost all of this stuff. That was the hardest part for me. Realising that after four years, the book didn’t work. It didn’t work structurally and the narrative voice didn’t work. This was a dark period – and I felt for a while like it might not actually be possible to write the book at all. In fact, I don’t think I really understood what the book was about until very close to the end, until I was literally nearly finished. Then it sort of finally clicked. Thank God.
What’s some great advice you’ve received that has helped you as a writer?
The best advice I got came from my mum, after she read the first draft. She just made a gesture with her hands, like someone turning something upside down – I imagined a snow globe or an hourglass. Everything I needed was there already, she was telling me, I just needed to let it settle into a different configuration. For some reason this gesture helped, more than anything anyone said.
If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring writers, what would it be?
If I had to offer advice to anyone else, and I try not to, I would say: trust your own strangeness, go further, and make it snappy.
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