On the eve of the publication of her new cookbook, Abla’s Lebanese Kitchen, legendary Carlton restaurateur Abla Amad took the time to chat with Readings’ resident foodie, Joe Rubbo, about her approach to cooking, the history of her restaurant, Abla's, and her new book.

I arrive at Abla’s late on a Friday afternoon. In the dining room, a few tables of diners still linger over coffee and Lebanese sweets. If you haven’t yet dined at this landmark Melbourne restaurant, then I suggest you do. By coincidence, I was here the night before and enjoyed a terrific meal that was entirely consistent with my memory of the last time I ate here. As a customer once told the restaurant’s owner, Abla Amad: ‘Every time I come here the experience is as good as the last, if not better. Abla, I never want you to change.’ It’s true. I don’t, either. I met Abla that night, too – she still does the rounds of the tables to thank diners for coming – and told her I’d be there the next day to interview her. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I knew someone was coming and I’m not so nervous now.’

In 1979, Abla’s late husband, John Amad, helped her secure the current restaurant location on Elgin Street and, encouraged by supporters and admirers of her cooking, Abla opened the doors. It’s still going strong. Thirty years in business is an amazing achievement in this notoriously fickle industry: a testament to Abla’s skill in the kitchen, which she attributes to her husband’s passion for eating.

She still runs the kitchen, keeping watch over all the food preparation and service with an inscrutable eye for detail. When she emerges from the kitchen, she tells me they are busy preparing for the night’s dinner service: they are fully booked, upstairs and down.

She’s found the time to write a new book too, an updated version of her last, The Lebanese Kitchen. There are many new recipes in this handsome volume. Before we can discuss the book, Abla excuses herself to show it to two regular customers dining by the front window. They want to buy the copy I’ve brought with me – then and there. She has a faithful following, built over many years. In the introduction to her book Abla writes, ‘many beautiful customers have been coming to my place for a long, long time – some of them for twenty or thirty years – and now their children and grandchildren are coming along too’.

Abla came to Australia as a teenager in 1959. It was meant to be a holiday, but luckily for us, she stayed. When she first moved here, she lived with her uncle in Elgin Street, a few doors down from the restaurant. ‘He was a bachelor,’ Abla says, ‘and a good cook. I used to watch everything he did.’

Surprisingly, Abla learnt about Lebanese cooking here in Australia – from her uncle and from a group of older Lebanese women who gathered together to prepare meals for family and friends on weekend afternoons. Abla, out of respect and admiration, refers to these women as her aunties. She used to watch them and help prepare the traditional Lebanese dishes she still cooks today. Her education in cooking for loved ones translates into the generosity of spirit felt in the restaurant today.

She sees The Lebanese Kitchen as a way to pass on her knowledge of traditional Lebanese food preparation, telling me that ‘many young people, the new generation of Lebanese Australians, love the book’.

What’s not to love? It is full of great recipes, adaptable to many different occasions. I like the idea of making the Okra in olive oil with Lebanese rice as a simple mid-week meal. There are also great recipes for mezza – dips, pickles, silverbeet rolls – that are perfect to take to a picnic, or the baked quails for a dinner party.

For Abla, all these dishes recall memories. She remembers charring eggplants for her mother to make a smoky baba ghannooj, eating salads her mother prepared after collecting the silk from silkworms, or cooking garfish for her husband and his friends here in Carlton. These recipes are laced with stories and history: this book is a concise catalogue of an incredible woman’s life’s work.

In approaching these recipes, Abla emphasises patience, cleanliness, and that you show care in what you’re doing. ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you have to have your heart in it, whatever you do. If you force yourself to do something it never works. But I never, never once forced myself to cook.’

I asked Abla if she herself has ever used a cookbook. The answer was simple: ‘no, never.’ And why would she? But, for the rest of us, we could do a lot worse than having a copy of Abla’s Lebanese Kitchen on our bookshelves.

Joel Deane is well known in literary circles as a poet: his collection Magisterium was shortlisted for the prestigious Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2009. He has also been a journalist and a political speechwriter (for Steve Bracks, then John Brumby). Jo Case spoke to him for Readings about his eagerly anticipated, utterly engrossing debut novel, The Norseman’s Song.

This is a wildly original novel – combining the confession of a nineteenth-century whaler with those of an ex-con taxi driver and a dying former journo in contemporary Melbourne, all of their lives steeped in violence. Where did your inspiration come from?

The genesis of The Norseman’s Song comes from a shred of family history and a meeting I had when I was 15 years old. The history is that one of my forebears was a Norwegian seaman who jumped ship in Melbourne in the nineteenth century.

The meeting was with a 95-year-old relative. This old man was the size of a redwood, walked like Frankenstein, had fire in his eyes, ranted about the decline of morals, yet had, I knew, fathered at least one child out of wedlock. I loved how cranky and contradictory that rellie was and decided to write an imagined history about a Norwegian with that old man as the physical template.

At the time, I was 15 and knew I didn’t have the chops or the depth of experience needed to write that book. That’s why I started working as a copyboy in a tabloid newspaper when I was 17 – to season myself. Along the way I held onto what became a 20-year-long daydream about the Norseman – influenced by my experiences as a newspaper journalist and the taxi-driving stories of my father and grandfather. Other stories and experiences fed into that daydream, such as the one about a Turkish soldier’s head that was found in Echuca decades after it was souvenired by an ANZAC. Or the one about the exorcist I once knew who stood trial for the accidental killing of a woman. There are too many to list.

By the time I sat down to write the first draft of The Norseman’s Song that daydream was closer to a nightmare – and it was a nightmare I’d never told anyone about. Maybe that’s why the first draft came out in 33 days straight. Telling aloud for the first time a story that had been internalised for so long was an incredible rush – it’s the closest I’ve come to an out-of-body experience.

The novel has an intimate yarn-spinning quality that draws the reader in – like (the very different) Shantaram, it’s a fabulous work of storytelling. Were you influenced by other ‘yarn-spinning’ works of literature, or by oral traditions of storytelling? What made you decide to tell your story in this way?

Bruce Springsteen once said that he wanted his breakthrough album, Born to Run, to explode in people’s stereos. When I was writing The Norseman’s Song I was fired by a similar ambition: I wanted it to go off like a hand grenade. I wanted it to be a fable like no other. I wanted it to tell a story about men and violence and the lies we tell to rationalise our lives, our beliefs and our histories. I wanted it to be bristling with voices and stories. I wanted it to drag people along for the ride whether they wanted to go or not. The best way to achieve all that was to tell a great story.

My influences were too numerous to list. The ones that particularly inspired me, though, were The Icelandic Sagas, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and, of course, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.

Another influence dated back to my days as a journalist. I was struck my the way people talk about incidents – the way they talk around events and come back to them, as well as their verbal ticks. I wanted to write like people think and talk.

This is your first novel, but you’ve also written journalism and – most notably – poetry (which is evident in your prose, particularly your imagery). Do you think your experience in these other forms influenced the way you approached writing a novel?

Definitely. Writing a novel is very different to writing a poem. You need the feel for language as music, which I developed through poetry, to make a novel fly creatively, but you also have a story to tell and, if you want to tell that story, you need the grunt to climb a mountain of 70,000 words – or more.

Poetry is the impetus of all my creative writing, but my fiction is equally reliant on the muscles I’ve developed through years as a reporter, editor, producer and speechwriter. In other words, I know what’s required, physically, to write 10,000 words a week.

The other thing I’ve learned through poetry and speechwriting is that writing is performance. To perform properly, you need to train by reading widely, you need to practice by writing constantly, and you need to improve by revising and editing ruthlessly.

There’s a lot in this novel that is confronting – your contemporary characters are racist and misogynist, shockingly so at times. Were you using these characteristics to comment on our society, or were these merely characteristics you thought these types of characters would have?

I didn’t setting out to write archetypes or deliver a message. What I was trying to do was understand some of the forces that make our nation what it is, for better and for worse. I’m talking about violence, I’m talking about mateship, I’m talking about racism. I wanted to write about an underbelly of contemporary Melbourne through the taxi driver, Farrell. I also wanted to go back to the limits of lived or oral history through the old journo, Bob, as well as inventing a mythic history through the Norwegian.

The only rule I set myself during the writing was to not flinch from the ugly stuff. I loath boutique fiction – the kind of books that are more about the novelist wanting to be loved than trying to tell a story that’s never been told before. I’d like to see more novels be true to the meaning of the word ‘novel’.

The taxi driver and his passenger, ‘Bob’, take us on a meandering night-time tour of Melbourne’s suburbs (Doncaster’s ‘houses too polite to tell apart’, Footscray flats, the oft-disparaged ‘Lego-land’ of Caroline Springs). What was the idea behind this tour of Melbourne and surrounds?

The idea behind the tour of Melbourne is that Bob and Farrell’s taxi ride is an odyssey. At the beginning, they’re both lost: Bob is searching for a way to end, Farrell for a way to begin again. The places they go and the people they meet along the way are part of that odyssey. You could say it’s an odyssey of Melbourne’s modern and mythic history. As for Doncaster, I live there and couldn’t resist giving my suburb a walk-on role.

Both ‘Bob’ and the Norseman of the title observe the intimacy of killing (the Norseman says ‘it binds the killer to the killed as surely as consummation binds the groom to the bride’). How integral is this idea to the book?

I’m the kind of person who can’t sit through violent movies – once I made it out to the foyer of a cinema before I fainted. Why, then, have I written a novel that, at its heart, is all about violence – not just acts of violence, but the reverberation of those acts? Hard to say. All I know is that violence both distresses and obsesses me. I guess I’m trying to understand why we do the terrible things we do.

This is shaping up to be another big year for short stories – and the pre-publication hype around Andrew Porter’s silkily elegant, delicately barbed short stories in The Theory of Light and Matter recalls that around Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in 2009. Jo Case – one of the many new fans of this award-winning writer – interviewed him for Readings.

In your title story, the narrator concludes that: ‘guilt, like any self-inflicted injury, becomes a permanent thing, as real as the act itself.’ Guilt – sometimes deserved, sometimes misplaced – recurs as a central theme in many of your stories. What is it that draws you to writing about it?

Well, in writing these particular stories, I think I was focusing a lot on characters who were having trouble moving forward in their present lives because of their inability to come to terms with something that had happened in their pasts. Usually their feelings about whatever had happened in the past were complex, but inevitably they always seemed to come around to questioning their own responsibility, their own guilt, and I suppose this is something that has always interested me. In other words, I think I’ve always been interested in why certain memories stay with us, or haunt us, and, more specifically, in why the memories that tend to haunt us the most are also usually those memories in which we question our own responsibility, or own culpability, in terms of the way things played out.

I was particularly impressed with your devastatingly effective endings – often double-edged, always beautifully crafted and prompting the reader to think further. How hard did you work to create those endings?

Endings are usually pretty tricky. If you’re lucky, they’ll sometimes present themselves to you during the writing process – you’ll suddenly see the final scene or realise the line you want to end on – but other times, the ending will elude you, and it might take quite a while before you actually find the exact sentence, or the exact piece of dialogue, that you want to end on. So, in answer to your question, I’d have to say that it really depends on the story. For example, the ending of my story ‘Hole’ came to me immediately, whereas the ending of my story ‘Azul’ eluded me for about five years. All I know is that I won’t ever say a story is truly ‘finished’ until I feel the ending is just right.

An uneasiness, a restlessness runs throughout these stories. Characters have misstepped, lost their way, wondered about the path not taken. Many stories seem to be as much about what didn’t happen as what did. Do you agree?

Yes, absolutely. In trying to understand the events of their pasts, many of my characters find themselves wondering ‘what if?’— almost as a way of trying to cope with or understand what has happened. And, of course, the ‘what if’ scenarios then end up becoming their own sort of reality, their own part of the story, and in some cases even add a certain level of complexity to what has actually happened.

The phrase ‘not right’ recurs throughout your stories, applying variously to your characters themselves and their behaviour. Was this a conscious theme, or is it something that simply came through as your wrote?

That phrase does appear a lot in the stories, though I don’t know that I was thinking about it consciously as I was writing them. I suppose, on some level, a lot of these stories are about characters who are perceived to be outsiders in their respective communities – whether it be the brother in ‘River Dog’, Mrs. Bently in ‘Connecticut’ or the Amish teenagers in ‘Departure’ – and so I found myself writing a lot about the idea of what is considered ‘normal’, or ‘right’, in contemporary society, mostly as a way of underscoring the kind of alienation that many of these characters feel.

Your stories are notable for the very real and often surprising dynamics in their relationships. There’s a deeper poignancy for the way that your characters are often frankly unromantic, or pragmatic. (For instance, in the title story, the narrator first realises she’ll marry her boyfriend because she could settle down with him ‘and not be unhappy’.) Do you work to eradicate false sentiment from your stories, or is that something you instinctively avoid?

I think it’s probably something I instinctively avoid. Or maybe it just comes from reading a lot. After you’ve read a certain amount of literature, I think you begin to develop a kind of radar when it comes to false sentiment.

The story ‘Azul’ is striking in its depiction of a couple unable to have children who experiment in parenting a teenage exchange student, seemingly for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways – knowing they’re wrong but somehow unable to behave differently. What was the original idea behind that story?

Well, I wrote the first few paragraphs of ‘Azul’ in my early twenties, then put it away for a long time and kind of forgot about it, so it’s hard for me to remember the exact inspiration for that story. All I know is that when I rediscovered those paragraphs several years later, I saw a lot of dramatic potential in them. In particular, I found myself wondering: why had this young couple decided to host an exchange student? What was wrong in their own relationship? And how did they think that the presence of exchange student would help? I think that almost everything that happens in the story grew out of me trying to understand the answers to these questions.

There are some brilliant and original metaphors in your stories. For instance, in ‘Coyotes’, the teenager daydreaming of taming coyotes ‘like regular dogs, and let[ting] them sleep in our rooms’, as his parents’ marriage fails, partly due to his dad’s unsuitability for domesticity. How hard do you work to get these metaphors just right, to make them seem as natural and effortless as they do?

I’ve always felt that metaphors should grow organically out of the story. In other words, they shouldn’t be something that the writer forces, or imposes, upon the story. And so they’re not something I really find myself thinking about until pretty late in the revision process – for example, when I’m looking for a title. I guess I’ve always felt that metaphors exist all around us in our everyday lives, and so if you just try to write honestly, then the metaphors will take care of themselves.

There is a sense of inevitability driving many of your stories – we know or sense that particular characters or situations are somehow doomed and the narrative drive is about finding out the complexities of how that happens, often through a series of seemingly small actions. (Particularly in ‘Hole’.) Is that inevitability a central interest of yours when writing?

Well, it’s certainly a narrative strategy that I tend to use a lot. In some of the stories, for example, I wanted to keep what was going to happen a mystery to the reader, but in other stories – like ‘Hole’– I wanted to let the reader know from the start what the outcome would be. I suppose this was my way of shifting the focus of the story from ‘What happened?’ to ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ And it is those questions – in that story and also in others – that tend to interest me the most.

Thanks so much for taking the time talk with me, Jo. It’s been a pleasure.

First-time author Foz Meadows talks to us about her new Young Adult book Solace and Grief, why vampires are just so hot right now and why she will never forget her 16-year-old self.

So, tell us what your book is about.

Solace & Grief is about Solace Morgan, a teenage girl raised in foster care doing her level best to conceal the fact that she's a vampire. After encountering a faceless man, Solace runs away and finds herself in the company of her first ever friends, none of whom are exactly plain old human. They live in an abandoned warehouse; they drink and joke, but once Solace decides to try and learn more about their respective abilities, they soon find themselves in over their heads with the mysterious Professor Lukin and a string of increasingly dangerous occurrences.

What was you inspiration for the novel? Actually, why the vampires?

Blame Buffy the Vampire Slayer, basically. I was working in a job that bored me, re-watching Buffy (as I do from time to time) and the opening prologue just occurred to me. The thought that may have triggered it off was that all the vamps in Buffy are innately evil (excepting Angel and Spike on occasion) but humanity has a choice to become evil or not. I also really like the idea of a female vampire because it’s usually fragile girl encounters brooding vampire male. I think its more interesting if she’s the one with fangs. I’m not the only one to have done that but it’s interesting that all the other writers to be popular at the moment, Claudia Gray, Cassandra Clare and of course, Stephanie Meyer are all writers I didn’t become familiar with until after I finished writing. I think there was something in the air at that time.

Do you think its terrible timing or fantastic timing that you happened to write your vampire book now, hot on the heels of so many others?

Honestly, I think its more good luck than bad. Had I not been shopping it around when I did I think it would have been much harder to find an interested publisher. I’m a young, un-agented first-time author and while I flatter myself that I can string a sentence together, I think it did help that this book was part of a trend.

Was it a deliberate decision to focus the book on friendship rather than on a specific romance?

I think it grew out of the fact that I was never going to sit down and write a romance, that’s just something that has never occurred to me to do. When I was at school I had a big group of friends and we were all geeks, roughly the same number of boys and girls. I think that’s something that a lot of other novels I’ve read miss out on, that group dynamic. It narrows down the relationships but my memory of that age is of a large rotating group that had seven or so core members. And there were always group politics and who was talking to whom. The big thing about being that age was finding a group of friends with whom I really connected and I wanted that to be the story.

How does the voice differ in writing for young adults and for adults?

I don’t think my style changes, the only exception is in writing for adults I feel no compunction whatever about swearing and I feel no compunction talking about drugs or alcohol. A strange taboo I think, when I remember my own experience in high school and we loved to swear. But authors like Justine Larbalestier in her novel Liar, I was cheering as I read it, she uses swearing and I think, yes, that how they would speak.

Do you write for yourself as a teenager?

A little bit, yeah. On the one hand I never want to forget what its like to be a teenager but if the point ever comes that I sit down and think, wow, being sixteen was so awesome, then I will be truly lost. There were awesome moments but there was a whole pile of stuff as well and the stuff is what’s important. Parents just see the youth, the lack of responsibility and the potential but they forget kids are doing everything for the first time. And that first time can really, really suck. Especially when all of the people who are meant to be advising us have usually banished and repressed the memories of how hard it was the first time. So if I were writing for my teenage self I would be writing to show I hadn’t entirely forgotten.

What do you think of the idea that there is too much darkness in kids books, especially YA books?

I think that’s rubbish. If we want to go back to the 1950s view of adolescence, I think they might like to look at the statistics that are now emerging on abuse in families, depression among women, child abuse. At the time, that era, it was something that was not to be discussed, if the victim came forward they were brutally repressed, children had no outlet. And over the top of this era we have an image of the 1950s as Happy Days but it’s just a candy coating. Going back to what I said before, you’re doing everything for the first time and if there are questions you can’t ask and can’t answer then you need to find someone who is going through the same thing you are. Even in a fantasy world, what makes fantasy real is the extent to which characters are human and if we can identify with the characters and the emotional transformation they go through remind you of something you are trying to get through in your life. More than anything else it tells you, you are not the first person going through this.

What would you like readers to take away from this novel?

Oh, that’s a tricky question. I think I would like them to take away that high school is not the be all and end all of human existence. Things do go on outside of it and once you’re not there anymore, the things that were important while you were there cease to be. And that’s actually a really, really good thing.

Foz Meadow, favorite authors?

Ooo, long list. Tamora Pierce, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Katherine Kerr, Kate Elliot, Robin Hobb, Nick Harthaway and Douglas Adams, although I have to say I am more of a fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show than the books.

Finally, is Scott Westerfeld your BFF? (Popular American YA author Scott Westerfeld launched Solace and Grief in Sydney)

I have no idea how I got him to launch my book. It was a shot in the dark, I am a huge fan of his work and he gave me some advice when I trying to get published, so I thought what the hell and emailed him.

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Patrick Ness won the 2008 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize with his first book for teenagers The Knife Of Never Letting Go - the first in the Chaos Walking trilogy. The sequel The Ask and the Answer came out last year and won the 2009 Costa Children's Book Award. The third and final book in the series Monsters of Men is out in May 2010.

Andrew McDonald spoke to Patrick Ness with 'Asks and Answers' about the Chaos Walking trilogy, writing about violence and the question that aspiring writers should be asking.

ASK: The voices in Knife and Ask are so distinctive and strange and absorbing. Is it like method acting when you write from these points of view and do you need to 'warm up' before you can write them?

ANSWER: Not 'warming up' so much, but they do definitely need finding. I spent a good amount of time having fun finding Todd's voice. There were times when he was more difficult, less difficult, a bit younger, a bit older, all those things. But I always say that voices are alchemical: you search and you search and you search, and then one day they're just suddenly there on the page, ready to go. Once I'd found Todd, I was off and running.

ASK: The fact that men's thoughts can be heard by everyone and women's thoughts can't be heard by anyone acts as a powerful metaphor throughout the books. Would you prefer to be born into this world as a man or a woman?

ANSWER: I don't think either side has it very easy, really. But then, the books are really about how it's so important to deal with what's given you in the best way possible, regardless of how hard it is, so maybe that's the best way to think of it. How would I deal with it if I was born a man? And how would I deal with it if I was a woman? And actually, since I'm the writer, I'd probably be most like Todd and Viola (I'd hope!). It's a good question to set off a long discussion, though.

ASK: The Knife Of Never Letting Go, book one in the Chaos Walking trilogy, was narrated from the point of view of the boy Todd, whereas book two, The Ask and the Answer, has its narration split between Todd and the girl Viola. Was this a conscious decision to keep the series fresh and can we expect a similar change for book three Monsters of Men?

ANSWER: I always knew it would be that way from the start. I knew book two would get bigger and wider and raise the stakes, and that would need two voices from two sides of a simmering civil war. It certainly did keep me fresh, which is always a good idea when writing a long book, but it also good fun switching between them and how different they are. As for Monsters of Men, I couldn't possibly give anything away! But just to say that, yes, there are some new things in store. You might be in for a few surprises.

ASK: The Chaos books are quite graphic and gory in places, and violence plays a large part in the depicted world; a world that is undoubtedly a man's world. Are there scenes like the ones containing violence that you find harder or easier to write?

ANSWER: Well, women aren't absolved from violence or difficult actions in this world. Mistress Coyle is either a freedom fighter or a terrorist, depending whether you're on her side or not, so I wouldn't agree that it's entirely a man's world at all. Violence is difficult to write, and it should be. I think if it's coming easy then there's not enough at stake. Every scene of violence should contain all the peril and terror as if it were against someone you loved. That has to be the benchmark, otherwise it's just cheap and exploitative. You have to earn it and it has to mean something. And when it's those things, yes, definitely it's hard to write.

ASK: As well as being a writer you've also taught creative writing at Oxford University. You must get asked questions by aspiring writers all the time. What's one question that you think aspiring writers should be asking more often than they currently do?

ANSWER: They should be asking, "Will you please leave me alone so I can write?" Aspiring writers (and I know this from firsthand experience) worry so much that they're doing it wrong, they can waste all their time asking about the "right" way to do it, when there really is no right way. There's only a right way for you. And the best way to find that is to shut off the world and get down and do some writing. Talking about writing isn't going to get anything written.

SPOILER ALERT! Only read the highlighted text of the last question if you've finished reading The Knife Of Never Letting Go.

ASK: Do you miss Todd's dog Manchee as much as everyone else reading the books does?

ANSWER: Oy, spoiler alert! This was kind of like those violent scenes above. I was upset when I wrote Manchee's great act of bravery, upset when I rewrote it, upset when I edited it, upset when I proofed it... That's how I knew it was working. But yeah, he was great fun to write. Todd got himself a horse, though, in The Ask and the Answer, as did Viola, and they play very important roles in Monsters of Men. Nothing like a loyal animal.

Closets Are For Clothes: A History Of Gay Australia has been heralded as the first of its kind in Australia. What prompted you to start writing it?

The publisher Black Dog Books approached me. I think they had been trying to get this idea off the ground for a couple of years. It was of definite interest to me as I had worked in queer media for a long time and I had also studied gay and lesbian history as part of my cultural studies degree. It was also of interest as while there has been a number of teacher resource books that deal with homophobia there was actually nothing for the kids themselves. Homophobia often stems from not actually knowing any gay people, hopefully this will make gay people seem a little more real.

Closets follows gay and lesbian history in Australia from the 1700s up to today and includes many first-hand accounts. What sort of research did you have to do for this book?

Although there isn’t a book that deals with the entire history of gay people in Australia since white settlement, there are books which are very detailed and focus on specific time periods. There are books which are focused solely on Mardi Gras for instance. It was a matter of reading many different books from Australian historians and from British historians too and then taking what was relevant for Closets. I also spoke with people, interviewed people, who could give first-hand accounts of what had happened in different times in history.

Were there any areas of research that you found particularly surprising?

I found it really surprising that people were calling for a more tolerant approach to homosexuality as far back as the mid 1800s in Europe. There were a lot of educated people who wanted the death penalty for homosexuality abolished and there were people who saw nothing wrong with it. I think many people think activism about attaining gay rights only started in the 1970s but the fight goes back much longer.

How do you think the experiences of queer youth in Australia have changed over the years? Are things improving?

Many laws have changed so that gay and lesbian people have much the same rights as the rest of Australia. There is still some way to go but we are getting there. People are not nearly as closeted as they were. We see gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people on television now and that sort of visibility goes a long way. We are no longer so hidden. Ignorance is what has lead to homophobia and the best way to combat that is via education. These day’s queer youth have a lot more access to social support groups. This wasn’t the case a few decades ago and to be gay for many people was a very isolating experience. We still see queer youth being bullied though and until that becomes completely unacceptable behaviour to everyone we must fight on.

Tom Rachman’s debut novel The Imperfectionists is a sharply observed, beautifully characterised look at the employees of an international newspaper based in Rome.

You have worked at various newspapers, including as a foreign correspondent in Rome and as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. How much did you draw on your own experience for the novel?

Using what I’d observed during my years in journalism, I sought to invent a realistic paper and to offer a peek into the workings of the international media – the flavour of a newsroom, the ambitions of reporters, the lives of expatriate editors. That said, each character and story was invented, and the paper does not represent a particular publication.

The book is told in the voices and from the perspective of various employees of the paper, from foreign correspondents, to sub-editors, to the editor-in-chief and the chief financial officer. Was it challenging to capture all those unique voices and bring them together to tell one wider story – the story of the paper itself?

Weaving the strands into a single novel presented certain challenges: for example, ensuring that all characters remained animated in the reader’s mind even after they had stepped from the spotlight of their own story and into a supporting role in another’s. Also tricky was ensuring that the tale of the paper itself be captivating, without the hook of a single leading protagonist. To manage this, I tried to build a newspaper that was not simply an organisation but the sum of the unusual characters who produced and read it – just as a real newspaper is.

This is a very funny novel, though it is often also deeply sad. What appeals to you about this combination?

I suppose it’s my world-view. Life is so often sad and maddening and unjust – and then it’s over! If we responded to this with bitterness alone, we would be a uniformly grumpy and unproductive species. But we have humour thankfully. I have always loved stories that express this – the humour that arises precisely because life is sad. Small, nervous people pretending to be tall and bold: it is sad and funny at once.

The Imperfectionists is infused with tremendous affection for the newspaper and those who work there. Do you share that affection for newspapers as a form of media?

I do. So many mornings I have spent getting my fingers inky, devoting far too long to the newspaper pages. This isn’t to say that I adore everything about papers. Indeed, one of the pleasures of the media is hating it. My father – a devout newspaper reader – spends much of each day denouncing the publications that he nonetheless buys without fail. I’m truly sorry at the decline of newspapers. Life won’t be the same without them.

The book begins with a 70-year-old foreign correspondent, well past his prime, hopelessly out of touch with new technology and in professional freefall. Is he a metaphor for newspapers themselves?

He could be interpreted that way, and it’s certainly true that newspapers are similarly in freefall. But his problems extend beyond technology, including sexuality, his sense of usefulness in the world, the cost of his past egotism, his regrets. His case is more that of an ageing striver who can’t bear to see strength abandon him. And in this, perhaps, he may share something with newspapers.

Many of the successful characters in The Imperfectionists have lonely or dissatisfying personal lives – and one character finds professional success after he no longer wants to think about his home life. Was this a deliberate theme?

Yes. The ambitions that churned through journalism – my own included, at certain times – were not those of contented souls. Every scoop, every page-one story, every promotion produced a shiver of triumph followed by a gradual return to the previous state of dissatisfaction. Then ambition rose again, insatiable. I found this effect fascinating in myself and in others, and hoped to depict it. To be clear, I do not think that professional aspiration and personal happiness are exclusive. Only that ambition risks feeding just itself, offering little to its host.

Many of the chapters in the book, which also work as self-contained stories, unfold in unexpected ways. I often felt sure I knew where a story was heading, only to be surprised when it didn’t reach the conclusion I imagined it was leading up to. Was this an effect you worked for, in writing the book?

An ending produces a note that is left ringing in the reader’s ear, a tone that resonates backward through all that happened in the story. If this final note is the same as that which sounded throughout the story, then the tale risks blandness – you may think, Why did I bother? If it’s wildly dissonant, however, that’s worse, since it undermines the credibility of the story. What I sought were endings that deepened the reader’s understanding of what preceded, illuminating the characters suddenly and starkly, so that the story ends not with a full stop but that it reverberates afterward.