I am happy to announce that my fictional memoir The Item I Became is now published on Amazon.
It’s the story of Gita Paterson, a female Sydney journalist who enters her profession with the best of intentions but soon discovers that, as Boris Pasternak says, life is not a walk across an open field. Gita was always a private person, revealing little about her private life to others, until the night she felt her career and life were about to all come crashing down. So sat alone with her voice recorder, she begins to tell in her own words how she got to this point in her life. She does mention early on that often the telling of the story can help a person find a way through their troubles. We hope this is the case.
I began this novel in late 2022. My first brainstorm of ideas was chaotic, an avalanche of themes, plots and characters. It progressed slowly. Then I left it for over a year as I was drawn to completing Operation Golden Light, a Chinese translation exercise which was way more demanding than I ever imagined. This break to my novel was refreshing.
I knew I wanted to write about the career of a female journalist and connect her life to contemporary Australian history. My approach to writing was very William Gass-like, for he does not plot his fiction. He prides himself on writing (or I should say constructing) one sentence at a time. If at the end of that sentence, he doesn’t know how to go forward then he goes back into the story until he gets his cue to go forwards again. For me, it wasn’t sentence by sentence, but more of a case of scene by scene.
I am at a point with my writing where big time book publishing and author recognition are highly abstract events. I am finding more and more I get my satisfaction from immersing myself into the project itself: I perceive a challenge and then I go out and meet the challenge, chapter by chapter. There is such a sense of satisfaction for me as a writer with this approach. I find myself dealing with uncertainties in a calm and methodical manner as the word count rises.
Essentially, in this novel I guess I am making a statement about the media in the modern world. We have always had stories, narratives, myths etc, however we want to label them. But our modern media landscape is something else again. It seems there is something so one-sided about it. And I was perhaps ambitious in my hopes to write something definitive about my feelings on this subject.
Early on, the working name for my main character was Penny Murchison. I was consciously wanting to pay homage to that famous fabulist Baron Munchausen but had no real idea of how to swing it at that time. Then bingo, Penny became Gita Paterson, a sideways homage to a famous Australian writer. And not to spoil anything, I will just say that Penny had a son called Barron.
Again my novel project was interrupted as I considered another detour. This was in 2025. A notable event which occurred in Sydney in July 2006 was the creation of a mural behind the altar in St Vincent’s Catholic Church in Redfern. The mural quoted words spoken by Pope John Paul II when he visited Alice Springs in 1986. The 2006 mural was to mark the 20th anniversary of the said Pope’s visit. Essentially, the mural was painted during the night, so that the priest was not aware of it until he entered the church on the Sunday morning. The ‘break-in’ made page one headlines in Australia. Looking forwards, I wanted to mark the 20th anniversary of this 2006 event for a very personal reason and this was that my father and my uncle were involved in the goings on that night. They supplied the ladder that helped one of the activists climb through a window and unlock the church door from the inside. However, my novel had such momentum, I decided to forego a separate work and mark this event more modestly as a chapter in my novel.
Anyhow, in summary, writing this novel was a wonderful adventure for me. I’ve never written a long work with such an experimental approach before. And I am happy to share the fruit of this labour with the world.