TONI JORDAN

Multiple early work choices paved the way for an award-winning writing career

How has being a molecular biologist, quality control chemist, TAB operator and door-to-door aluminium siding salesperson prepared you for life as a novelist? It’s given me lots of jobs for my characters, and the discipline to sit at my desk every day.

Is Dinner with the Schnabels the escapist read we need right now?

I hope so. Laughing and feeling joyful are vital for our mental health, and help us feel more connected to other people – and our best chance of survival as a species is by cooperating with others. Humour is a weapon against the kind of despair that leads to giving up.

Is there a book that made you love writing?

Every book I read makes me want to write more: the good ones, because they give me inspiration, and the bad ones, because they give me confidence.

What’s the best book you’ve read? Emma, by Jane Austen. The point-of-view technique is mindblowing. I can’t begin to comprehend her genius. I think her brain actually worked differently from other people alive back then.

A book that had a pivotal impact on your life?

At eight, I was obsessed with Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree series. My real life seemed less vivid than the books. The book you couldn’t finish?

Gasp. I always finish. It’s true that sometimes I don’t connect with a book, or find I’m not enjoying it, but I persevere – these are the books that raise so many interesting questions for me. Why don’t I like it? If I were writing it, what would I have done differently? I’m always thinking of ways to become a better writer and I can learn a lot from books like those. A book you wish you had read but haven’t got to?

I have a towering TBR pile but I keep 2666 by Robert Bolano aside in case I ever break my leg and need something to keep me busy for a month at least.

The book you are most proud to have written?

There are two: Nine Days is partly historical with nine different narrators in non-chronological order. It was so difficult to construct, like writing a Rubik’s cube. And my new book, Dinner with the Schnabels, because you have to be brave to label a book a comedy. It’s almost daring someone to say: But I didn’t find it funny.

Your earliest reading memory? Poems to Read to Young Australians, by Mary Gilmore and Lydia Pender. What book do you re-read?

So many. All the Austens, Middlemarch, some Zadie Smith, some Franzen, and Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.

Books on your bedside table?

Other Houses by Paddy O’reilly; The Natural History of Love by Caroline Petit; The Very Last List of Vivian Walker by Megan Albany.

What are you writing next?

I’m not finished with the Schnabel family yet. Next is a book about the oldest sister, Kylie.

Dinner with the Schnabels: Hachette, $33, out now