Don't you see your camera? Don't see your camera?
He's breaking up a lot. I think he's on vhotaphone. Don't they pay you?
Isn't it nice when you encounter someone whose success is matched with humility, someone who, though seemingly drowning in acclaim, is down to earth, decimingly warm and friendly. In the Australian literary world, it's hard to find a better example of that than Trent Dalton. Trent is lovely and a walking success story, having written bestsellers like Boy Swallows Universe,
Lola in the Mirror and Love Stories Literally. Editor Caroline Overington sat down with Trent to discuss his new novel Gravity Let Me Go, which will hit bookshops in September. It's only natural for aspiring writers to look at their heroes and think, how did they do it? When it comes to Trent Dalton's process, the answer might flammeax them.
My first book, Boy Swallow's Universe, So I swear like that came out of lightning. These things come to me in dreams, and they come to me from the universe.
They come to me from space.
If summoning your stories from space is a bit out of your comfort, zone. Maybe the best way to emulate Trent would be to follow the advice of creative writing teachers around the world. Write what you.
Know, everything I've done in Gravity let Me Go is absolutely just.
Inspired by or something I've seen in the suburbs or something I've lived, and it's like, let's take that a little bit further and let's amplify it, just like I did with Boy Swallow's universe.
Trent Dalton's started his career at The Courier Mail before joining us here at The Australian writing features for the Weekend magazine. It was that instinct channeling his own experiences into his work that earned Trent too Walkley Awards.
I was doing it in journalism, like I did so many stories on the links between drug addiction and domestic violence and homelessness and just I mean, these were all the things that were just part of my childhood. And then you know, I did stories on women getting out of prison, and then it was just tick tick tick tick. Everything I've written is a reflection of where I am at any given time.
Hello Trent Dalton and welcome.
Ar Literre editor Caroline Overington sat down with Trent to discuss his new book, Gravity Let Me Go.
Can you tell us about it?
It's the story of a true crime journalist who is so obsessed by the scoop of his lifetime he is in danger of missing an even bigger scoop, and that is true love. It might be, I think the most personal book I've ever written.
I'm a little bit worried about it.
It could be that close to the bone, but it's really beautiful at the same time, so I'm really excited about it. It's my version of a marriage story buried inside a murder mystery. So it's got everything that I kind of love about the suburbs and about crime, and it's my little tribute to my obsession with journalism and my obsession with storytelling.
And yeah, it's coming out in September.
Tell me about the title and what does it refer to?
Those words gravity let Me Go came to me in a vision I had of things in my own suburb floating, just like my very ordinary suburb in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, floating away.
And you know what if we were let go of where it comes.
From in relation to this story, is our journal steps out the shower, he looks in the bathroom mirror, and in the stem that has built up in the bathroom mirror, he sees four words, and those four words say gravity, let me Go. And now those words must have been written by one of three women that he lives within his house, either his wife or one of his two teenage daughters. That's just one of the great mysteries of the novel as to who was the person who wrote that.
But of course the greater mystery is that are those four words a statement or are they a request?
Trent Dalton is forty six.
If Boyce Waller's universe drew on the experiences from Trent's childhood and Lola in the mirror mind experiences Trent had while working as a journo, Gravity Let Me Go examines some of Dalton's current day, real life narrative lines.
So it's kind of me drawing on myself, but it's me also observing people in my age group who have been in long term relationship and where they're at with them. I love this idea of looking at a wife, right, just the concept of my wife and just going she's wondrous, Like I watched her form two amazing human beings inside her you know, and it's like, could I lean into a bit of that side of marriage as well as looking at all the bones that are buried beneath the great Australian dream, you know.
So like we're all here in these suburbs.
You know, it's so idyllic and it's so beautiful and middle class.
But I know full well from the.
Journalism that I've done that there's a darkness that permeates the Brisbane suburbs, the Sydney suburbs, the Melbourne suburbs.
And it's like that all gets me very excited.
I'm interested that you've honed in on the mid forties, which I guess is a kind of reckoning for a lot of people. Yeah, people completely different by the time they get to their forties. And if so, what does the reckoning k like for you and for your character?
I love this idea that a couple needs to transform. The character in this book his name's Noah Cork, and like a lot of my stories, he's got a lot of me and him. He's coming to terms with the fact that something even more miraculous than his understanding might be happening to his wife in terms of her transformation. But I'm also very interested in that thing us blokes through where we alienate ourselves from our own love stories.
We sometimes think it's our partners being alien but it's us who are alienating, you know, we are actively alienating ourselves sometimes from the wonders that surround us. I'm so guilty of alienating myself inside storytelling. I did it as a journal. You go deep on a yarn, you know, And I'd go deep every month or so. I would be on some story for the weekend oz mag and just nothing got in between those stories, you know, nothing.
We're all diving into these things trying to avoid change, sometimes, trying to avoid evolution and transformation and maturing.
You know, as a couple, when you started out, Trent, when you first met your partner, you would have been a very young man, but also a young man from a troubled upbringing. And I wonder you seem to be a little hard on yourself here today talking about how you can get lost in your work. But weren't you trying to do something for your family in becoming so committed to your craft and so determined to succeed.
You know, I'll get emotional if I do well that's a beautiful thing to say, Caroline, thank you. I'm going I am getting emotional because it's a really beautiful thing to observe, Like I have no doubt I've got a job on the Courier Mile, and I'm telling you that was groundbreaking for me and my family to think that someone found a space, literally a desk space, and they said, hey, mate, you're going to take all of your experience.
I'm talking zero to twenty, which was wild in my life.
Like that does involve every social issue that is facing the state of Queensland, that is facing the nation of Australia.
I think I saw it up close.
I remember when I was like year six, Caroline my teacher at Brighton State School. So everything had gone down with my mom, Like my mum had gone to prison and for dealing heroin and stuff, and she'd gone away and we went to live with my dad over in Brackenridge, like on the northern outskirts of Brisbane, and this teacher one of the few parent teacher nights that dad went to was missus Garside and.
Dad came home that night. I was like, how did it go? Dad? And he goes, what the bloody.
Hell you doing in that class because Miss Garside is convinced that you're going to grow up to be the leader of an outlaw motorcycle game. Like that's what she told Dad. And I just find that so funny and so beautiful and so sweet. It's so ridiculous, Like you imagine me as the leader of the rebels or something, It'd be the worst move the rebels ever made. I just remember thinking, Man, if I ever got a crack like that would be the greatest tasting gravy.
And I would never let it go.
So when well, I jagged that role, and I was just like and then whatever. Became a feature writer for the Career Mahal and then a feature writer for the Ohs, the National broadsheet, huge groundbreaking things, and so yeah, I gave it everything and that was me absolutely yeah, and it worked.
You know, here's the thing.
Yeah, you've clawed your way up from the underbelly, yeah, into the middle class, and you've taken your wife and children with you. So why all the guilt?
It comes from? What is at the deeper part of it? What is about me that keeps chasing it? Like, where does the ambition come from? It's almost guilt from my shameless ambition Boyce what was Universe? And even like Lolla in the Mirror, these books went to places I never thought possible. When would I ever be satisfied? That's what the guy in this book Gravity Let Me Go is trying to to terms with.
You know.
It's sort of like, when will you stop thinking about stories and just be satisfied with real life? I sort of interrogate that a bit in this book. That's where this guy is just chasing this scoop and nothing will get in the way. You know, Like it's me fascinated with my own psychology, and I know that those guilty feelings come from me still trying to maybe not process stuff from the past, you know, like not dealing with that in the best way and putting it all in stories.
Like you think you can solve stuff about the sorrows I feel about my family, but you think you can deal with it by putting it inside a book called boy Sweller's Universe.
But that's just a four hundred page book.
That's not twenty years of life that you've probably got to process in other ways than just putting them into words.
You know, we'll be right back with more of Caroline Overington's chat with Trent Dalton.
Do you know, I think sometimes people look at your career, Trent, and they think to themselves, if I could have that, If I could get my first book published and it could become an international best seller. And then Netflix comes along and turns it into a series, and somebody else comes along and turns it into a stage play, and I turn up at writers festivals and there's whole rooms full of people cheering for me. You know, I'd be happy. That'd be enough. I know. Great artists across the pantheon
have discussed this question. Bob Dylan in when I paint my masterpiece that actually you think it will make you happy, but the things that make you happy are perhaps more fundamental. Has that been your experience?
Oh god, man, you're so okay?
Can I just tell like that is so wise because you've just defined the meaning of gravity. Let me go the book I just wrote it. You know, if I could put it in a sentence, it's yes. I climbed the mountain and I went to the summit, and I looked over the edge and all I saw was the kitchen that I walked.
From earlier that morning.
And please don't get me wrong, man, I am deliriously happy with my lot.
If I had a moment where I got all that where.
People wanted to start seeing me at festivals, it's because I was talking about deep personal.
Family stuff, you know, like that's interesting.
I remember being in the OZ Bureau of Brisbane and I remember a retrospective crime story. One of the court reporters. He comes flying into the office and he's like looking for a name. I won't say the name, and I put this into boy Swallow's universe this journey is shouting it across the bureau. He's like, does anyone have a contact for blah blah right? Quite a well known criminal
figure in Queensland. And I sank into my desk chair as I'm writing my flowery, colorful feature articles just saying shut up, Trent in my head because I knew that I played with that guy's kids when I was a kid, at like barbecues and just going wow, like you know, my mom still knows that guy's family and what I'm
trying to say. I knew that that was such a cool story, Like I knew I had a real humdinger of a yarn that I could turn into sort of this autobiographical story which became boy Saul's universe.
But the thing.
About all that really great stuff and all of that, it always comes back to what are your relationships? Like, like what what was the cost? And did I do it right? Like I called every member of my family. Caroline was like, hey, you guys got to know I just have to tell this story because it's too good.
Not too but it's like, did I do that in the right way?
Where it's like, you know, my mom had that she's retired now, but you know, she was working for Budget Direct, like on a call center Caroline when that book came out, and she like had to walk into her boss's office and go like, listen, I'm sorry, I've got this youngest son.
He's written this book.
I don't think anyone will read it, so don't worry, but just in case anyone does, it's kind of about the time I was like in love with this heroin dealer and I went and did time in prison.
But don't worry. I'm well past all that. You know, you know that's well in the past.
But it was like, that's really awkward for this beautiful mom of mine. It's all of that stuff that I carry, and all the stuff is beautiful that comes with it, and it has been extraordinary. But the thing that I always keep coming back to is exactly what you say.
It's sort of what was at.
The bottom of the mountain, you know, before it all, you know, and that was actually the important stuff. And it's like no surprise that it creeps into this more modern book that I've written now, the latest, because it's like, it's absolutely the thing that's on my mind.
Caroline Overington is The Australian's literary editor. You can read her feature on Trent Dalton's new book in this Weekend's Review section of The Weekend Australian Gravity. Let Me Go, published by HarperCollins, comes out in September. Thanks for joining us on the front this week. This episode was hosted by me Claire Harvey and produced and edited by Jasper League, who also composed our theme. Our team includes Kristen amiot Leat, Sammergloo, Tiffany Tymack, Josh Burton and Stephanie Kons