A CHAT WITH...

Trent Dalton gets emotional talking about his novels. That’s understandable. Much of the material in them is rooted in his own boyhood which was lived against a backdrop of drugs, violence and career criminals, but also love. Lots of love. His debut novel, Boy Swallows Universe, sold over 1.3 million copies in Australia alone, and has recently been made into a Netflix series. He followed up with All Our Shimmering Skies and his latest, Lola in the Mirror, the story of a nameless teen and her mother on the lam to escape domestic violence. Dalton is also an investigative journalist. Ahead of his events in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland, he tells Bess Manson about the ‘tyrannosaurus waltz’, fear of judgement and why what he writes comes from a place of truth.

Does journalism still come first or are you a full-time novelist these days? You get enough messages about a book where you start to think, hang on matey, maybe the novel writing could come first. For so long I have thought, of course I’m a journo. That’s my trade. But I swear, I think it might have flipped. But I’m a journo for life. It’s the greatest excuse to talk to as many people as you can in life and there are so many more people I have still got to talk to.

Your mother’s story features in your Boy Swallows Universe and Lola in the Mirror. What is your relationship with her like? She’s a wonderful grandma, my daughters worship her. I do too. My mum is so complex. She’s a woman who went to university and studied psychology and yet she’s also a woman who worked at a stop/ go traffic control. She’s the smartest woman I know. She can tell you the ins and outs of Tolstoy but she can also tell you how to hold a stop sign. It’s that complexity of any person that I love in storytelling.

In Lola in the Mirror you write about the ‘tyrannosaurus waltz’ to describe domestic violence. Was this a reality in your family? Parts of Lola in the Mirror are from areas of my mum’s life and things my brothers and I saw in relation to domestic violence. Those things were as true as anything I’ve ever written. The tyrannosaurus waltz is a horrific dance women sometimes have to engage in with men in kitchens across Australia. You wouldn’t believe how many women have come up to me very quietly and say ‘I’m still doing the waltz but thank you for showing me exit strategies, for showing me some hope’.

Boy Swallows Universe has characters based on your family who had real struggles – your mother and stepfather both went to prison. Did you fear the world would judge them harshly? Yes, I was worried people wouldn’t understand where I was coming from when I say I love those people dearly, that it’s possible to love the Lyal character – the first father figure I ever had in my life, the first man to tell me that he cared about me. It was important for a kid to have an adult male in your life telling you that you’re worth something and I just happened to get that from a notorious Queensland heroin dealer. Can you tell the world why you love your mum so much, why you think she’s an absolute warrior if by telling them you’re talking about her darkest days? I’m forever telling people to please do my mum a favour of not using that period of her life – that five-year period in the 1980s – to define her.

Turning your novel into a TV series, that’s a big deal. The Netflix series of Boy Swallows Universe was an endpoint on a journey with that story. The things that came out of that show were incredible. Real world family things. My own daughters got to understand the blood that runs in their veins.

You did a cameo on Boy Swallows Universe, don’t tell us you’re an actor too. I was really honoured to be asked to be a part of it. But I think I set the craft of acting back about 10 years. All I had to do was look at Anthony LaPaglia as he walked past me and I managed to do that so appallingly they had to do about eight takes. It gave me a newfound respect for actors

You sound like you were a curious kid. Would you say you were a journalist in waiting? Everything I wrote about in my 20s and 30s I saw in my teens in my own neighbourhood. It was so rich. I remember my dad would send me down to get cigarettes and I would walk down the street at night, in the baking heat and no one in my suburb of Bracken Ridge had air conditioning so everyone in their housing commission homes had their windows wide open, curtains back and it became this theatre. I was this 12-year-old kid standing in front of these homes observing families – they’d be fighting or eating lamb chops or drinking or dancing or singing or kissing – and I would just be standing and watching. I remember being profoundly taken by ordinary families who were just going through it like we were six doors down. That really stayed with me. It was incredible when I got a job as a journalist that I got paid to [observe].

Tell us about your dad’s influence on your writing career. My dad was amazing, an incredible guy. He had many demons, emotional issues he masked with his love of drink. But if I’m talking to you it’s because of him – his love of literature, all the things he taught us. He died of emphysema two years before Boy Swallows Universe happened. It kills me that he doesn’t get to see all this. To see me travel and talk about books, about what I wrote… He was a massive reason that any of this exists.

“I was this 12-year-old kid standing in front of these homes observing families – they’d be fighting or eating lamb chops or drinking or dancing...”