On one point Erik Jensen is emphatic when discussing his book Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen: ‘This book is not about art. It’s a character study.’ Adam Cullen was a Sydney artist who flamed out in his forties on alcohol and drugs. He won the Archibald Prize for his portrait of David Wenham but was also notorious for his headline bad-boy behaviour. Because I live in New York, I had never heard of Cullen. Not his grunge art, not his adolescent antics, not his early death from pills, booze and smack.

I knew Erik, however. He’d looked me up when he and his boss, Morry Schwartz, were hatching The Saturday Paper as an antidote to the ailing, attenuated press presence in Australia. I liked Erik immediately because he was willing to engage in gutsy debate, and we became friends. Another point in his favour was that he’d joined the Sydney Morning Herald at 18. Once upon a time, this sort of apprenticeship was called being a cadet journalist. He was whacked into shape by seasoned practitioners instead of university professors. Experience instead of theory. Refreshing.

I’d read Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen as a friend before I was asked to interview Erik. I have nothing but admiration for his accomplishment: a sober book about a man who was anything but. A clear-eyed, careful account of a squandered life that is generous and unusual in Erik’s refusal to condemn or opine about a man who was a stew of wretched characteristics common to an addict: bombast and grandiosity hiding terminal insecurity; charisma as a tool to manipulate everyone around him. The constant feeling of being a fraud, an imposter. A fucked-up fibbing fabulist. A man-child.

I ask Erik about the book’s level tone, which is an extraordinary achievement, extremely difficult to realise. His reply: ‘I decided early that I wanted to write the book without moral judgement or speculation. It would be too easy to damn Adam for his selfishness, for the sadness that became his life. I wanted to watch, to write things down, but never tell the reader how to think about them. I refused to recoil from any detail, but I refused to judge anything I saw.’ Dear reader, make up your own mind. No redemption in this story.

Cullen was trapped by his mythologising of himself but also the mythology of a culture that tolerates drunkenness, and idealises those who crash and burn. When I say this to Erik, he says immediately, ‘A culture that celebrates drunkenness.’ He has a point. Addiction is better understood these days, but there remains a stubborn notion that a fine old piss-up and getting falling-down drunk is part of the Aussie national character. And that alcohol and drugs fuel creativity when it’s the opposite; they are the enemy of promise. Cullen’s best art was done early in his career before he was drinking a bottle of vodka or two to get the nerve to paint.

I want to know if Adam ever talked about shaping up, flying straight. ‘No. Never. Adam lived the way he did because he wanted to be sure he would run out of life before he ran out of talent. He was shy of his gift and if it caught up with him he would have to confront its size: big or small.’ And there it is. The vexing question of talent. If whatever talent Cullen possessed was extinguished by booze and drugs, he had a wide range of schtick to replace it. He played the role of enfant terrible to the hilt or became a sensitive soul if that would draw you into his web. He was called a faux-naive painter, with the emphasis on faux, as one critic cleverly noted. Will the real Adam Cullen stand up? And that’s what kept Erik digging. Underneath all Cullen’s calculation? Most likely mental illness. He was bi-polar and self-medicating. Enabling his substance abuse: the art world. And, unbelievably, plenty of denial, even by those close to him, about his wildman rampaging. All of it, an old, old story.

Cullen was always testing friendships, pushing them to the limits. His erratic, controlling, and increasingly insane behaviour caused most of his friends to scuttle, to bar the door. In conversation, Erik clearly remains fond of Cullen despite his klaxon-like faults. His history with Cullen began when he interviewed the artist for the Sydney Morning Herald. Erik was 19 at the time. The artist liked what he wrote and asked if he would be interested in doing a biography of him; Thames & Hudson wanted one. Erik, being ‘young and impulsive’, moved into Cullen’s spare room. ‘I was attracted to his studied disobedience; his mischief,’ he writes in the book. Not to forget his outsized personality, his intensity, and what Erik remembers as a glint in his eyes that couldn’t be extinguished by his squalid existence. That glint could have been intelligence or just a waggish boy on the lookout for the next prank. The biography part was a ruse; Cullen was lonely.

Cullen’s work and its reception does, of course, come up in the course of the book. As recounted by Erik, Cullen’s art and his enthusiasms seem to be very much of their time. He first drew attention to himself through stunts such as dragging around the rotting head of a pig chained to his ankle. Shades of Damien Hirst. He had a penchant for koans, plentiful in the art world. Some of his koans were admittedly amusing, tinged with Aussie larrikinism. He claimed Goya, Joseph Beuys and Martin Kippenberger as influences, but his studio was littered with books of tattoos. He had pilfered bon mots from Bukowski, Kubrick and the like; outright plagiarism has also become fashionable. Postmodern critics love him because you can read anything you want into his art.

Adam Cullen’s portrait of Erik Jensen

Erik started keeping company with Cullen first as a journalist, but the relationship morphed into a friendship, a real one, or as real as it could be with someone layered with falsity like Cullen. Some have questioned the ethics of his role in Cullen’s life and the book he has written about it. Cullen took him on board as biographer. This is the result. Erik is now the ripe old age of 25. He is a seasoned journalist, the editor of a burgeoning newspaper, and now has a first-rate book under his belt. Needless to say, he is seen as ambitious, a young man in a hurry. As anyone with sense does, Erik readily acknowledges the role of luck in his life: ‘Journalism is a career of accidents and luck, and I get through on a fair bit of both. On the strength of some music criticism, the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald had the mad idea to give me job. He decided to chance on my ludicrous inexperience. I’ve been chancing on my ludicrous inexperience since.’

Was Erik worried by the reception of the book? Yes, he admitted, he was, but his concern was not reviewers. He was worried how Kevin Cullen, Adam’s father, would react. ‘After a long silence, I receive a brief but blissful message from Adam’s dad,’ says Erik. ‘He would rather some things had been left unsaid, but accepted that Adam would have wanted to say them.’ Erik describes Kevin as a man of inestimable grace. He also thought the book was ‘a helluva read’. ‘And with that, a great knot in my stomach was undone.’ Yes, a helluva read. The exploits of someone living on the edge can make excellent vicarious reading, whether you are horrified or merely fascinated. And his portrayal of Adam’s parents is especially poignant: beautiful writing, observed with close affection.

But Erik’s book is a good read for another reason: the questions it raises about mythologising anyone bent on self-destruction. We would do well to remember that Adam died by destroying his insides bit by bit with alcohol and drugs. Rotting himself. Instead of a decaying pig head attached to his ankle, he himself decayed. He became the pig’s head.

Kate Jennings is a writer.