{"id":12453,"date":"2025-07-22T03:53:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T03:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/12453\/"},"modified":"2025-07-22T03:53:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T03:53:12","slug":"dominic-amerena-writes-about-a-literary-fraudster-in-his-debut-novel-i-want-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/12453\/","title":{"rendered":"Dominic Amerena writes about a literary fraudster in his debut novel, I Want Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since the Ern Malley affair<\/a> of the 1940s \u2014 where two poets pretended to be a recently deceased mechanic who penned a sheaf of modernist poems \u2014 Australia has produced an array of literary fraudsters.<\/p>\n

Notorious examples include Norma Khouri<\/a>, Helen Demidenko<\/a> and John Hughes<\/a>, who was revealed to have plagiarised extensively from the work of others in his 2022 novel The Dogs.<\/p>\n

“Once you start looking back across Australian literary history, you see it’s littered with notable scandals and hoaxes,” author Dominic Amerena tells ABC Radio National’s The Book Show<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Listen to the podcast<\/a><\/p>\n

Your favourite fiction authors share the stories behind their latest books on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.<\/p>\n

He believes “there’s something very Australian” about this pattern of fakery, borne from a sense of unbelonging that comes from living on colonised land.<\/p>\n

“These writers are expressing an instability in settler identity,” he says.<\/p>\n

Amerena draws on this rich history in his debut novel, I Want Everything, the tale of a modern-day literary heist set in Melbourne’s western suburbs.<\/p>\n

The lies we tell ourselves<\/p>\n

I Want Everything’s unnamed narrator is an unpublished author who nevertheless dreams of writing a great Australian novel.<\/p>\n

But there’s a problem: he lacks the discipline or creativity necessary to become a serious novelist.<\/p>\n

“We know that he is roiling with ambition and that he has no talent and no stories of his own to tell,” Beejay Silcox tells ABC Radio National’s The Bookshelf<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

I Want Everything is a novel with heart, Silcox tells The Bookshelf. “It cares deeply about Australian letters as much as it skewers it.” (Supplied: Simon & Schuster)<\/p>\n

Instead, he has lived a life of “noble precarity” for a decade, funded by submitting himself to paid medical trials.<\/p>\n

He exists in the shadow of his talented girlfriend Ruth, a “Melbourne-famous” writer whose essay mining her problematic relationship with her mother goes viral.<\/p>\n

“[He] has this idea that greatness can be something that is almost stolen from other writers,” Amerena tells The Book Show.<\/p>\n

“He has an extractive view of talent and how to tell stories.”<\/p>\n

But, in an apparent stroke of good luck, he encounters a woman at a local aquarobics class who is “maddeningly familiar”.<\/p>\n

Eventually he puts a name to the face: Brenda Shales, a cult 70s author who disappeared from public view after publishing two wildly successful and controversial novels.<\/p>\n

Review: I Want Everything <\/a><\/p>\n

A revealing memoir from one of Australia’s most beloved authors and an exciting debut about a literary fraudster are among this month’s best new releases.<\/p>\n

Reeling from the realisation he has unwittingly stumbled across Australia’s most notorious living literary recluse at the local pool, he tracks her down to a nursing home in Yarraville in Melbourne’s western suburbs, hoping she will somehow revive his anaemic literary career.<\/p>\n

“The nurse who’s bringing him to her room introduces him as her grandson, and, strangely, Brenda Shales doesn’t seem to correct the nurse’s mistake. In fact, she seems to recognise him as a long-lost relative,” Amerena says.<\/p>\n

“It’s a mistake that he doesn’t correct \u2026 and he continues not to correct it until the deception becomes so big that he has to really lean into it and chaos ensues.”<\/p>\n

This subterfuge \u2014 framed by the narrator in the novel’s opening line as “an innocent mistake” \u2014 drives the narrative.<\/p>\n

Although he’s beset by guilt at his actions, the narrator fails to reveal the truth to Shales at crucial points in the narrative.<\/p>\n

“The novel is about the self-deceptions that we tell ourselves to permit ourselves to do unconscionable things,” Amerena says.<\/p>\n

Inspired by Australian literary giants<\/p>\n

The Shales character \u2014 spiky and quick-witted with a “grim hyphen of a mouth” \u2014 is an amalgam of some of Australia’s greatest women writers.<\/p>\n

Amerena used Helen Garner’s three-volume diaries as a guide when developing the “cadence” of Shales’s voice, which made for an interesting encounter when he met the revered writer at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.<\/p>\n

Heart in mouth, he told Garner she’d been a great influence on a central character in his novel.<\/p>\n

“And she said, ‘Well, I bet she’s a real bitch, isn’t she?'” he says.<\/p>\n

“It was so perfectly Helen Garner and so perfectly Brenda Shales as well. It was very fitting.”<\/p>\n

\"Author<\/p>\n

English-born author Elizabeth Jolley, who died in 2007, was one of the inspirations for the character of Brenda Shales. (Supplied.)<\/p>\n

Another source of inspiration was Elizabeth Jolley’s novel The Well, a “strange psychosexual gothic story”, which won the Miles Franklin in 1986.<\/p>\n

The book explores the relationship between two women \u2014 one older than the other \u2014 who live together on a farm in the country. The story takes a macabre turn when they hit something, or someone, in their car and dispose of the body in the nearby well.<\/p>\n

“It’s a very strange, opaque text which can be read in many, many different ways,” Amerena says.<\/p>\n

He relished using these points of reference to fashion Shales and her fictitious literary works.<\/p>\n

“It didn’t feel like I was pulling it out of thin air; she’s a character who’s heavily influenced by my literary influences and a lot of female writers who’ve been important to me.”Who owns a story?<\/p>\n

I Want Everything is also concerned with the ethics of storytelling.<\/p>\n

“Writers are always coming up against these ethical considerations [about] what parts of other people’s lives are fair game to use, what parts of your own lives are fair game [and] who owns a story,” Amerena says.<\/p>\n

“These are questions that I don’t think have a clear answer, but [they’re questions] my novel is trying to explore.”<\/p>\n

The Miles Franklin shortlist unpacked<\/a><\/p>\n

ABC experts unpack the shortlist of Australia’s biggest book prize: who made it, who missed out and who they think will win.<\/p>\n

Amerena says he tried to avoid autobiography in his novel, using instead “small snippets of the world”. But he soon discovered how difficult it can be to discern memory from make-believe.<\/p>\n

“I come from an Italian background, and I have this distinct memory of my grandfather telling me about his father, who’d been interred in a labour camp during World War II, which is what happened to a lot of Italian immigrants. It stuck in my mind for a few years \u2026 and it ended up in my book in a very, very small way.<\/p>\n

“Eventually I came back to my family to get the full story, and they were very confused. They were like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I somehow completely made it up.”<\/p>\n

The episode was instructive.<\/p>\n

“It taught me that the boundary between fiction and life is more porous than I’m often conscious of,” he says.<\/p>\n

The difficult work of writing a novel<\/p>\n

While I Want Everything is a work of fiction, Amerena and his narrator share some common traits.<\/p>\n

At a recent literary event, an old schoolmate reminded him how, after reading Les Mis\u00e9rables as a 14-year-old, he, too, announced his intention to write the next great Australian novel.<\/p>\n

While Amerena laughs at the anecdote now, he says ambition can be a “dirty word” in our literary culture.<\/p>\n

“Artists have to pretend that they’re not ambitious; they pretend the work flows out of them.<\/p>\n

“[But] writing a novel is a gruelling and difficult process. I’ve heard it described as assembling a chicken coop in the middle of a tornado, and that’s what it feels like.”<\/p>\n

It’s a struggle Amerena knows firsthand. He rewrote a prize-winning but unworkable manuscript<\/a> to produce I Want Everything, discarding several storylines in the process.<\/p>\n

“Part of writing this book \u2026 has been getting in touch with my own ambition and feeling comfortable with saying that I am proud of this book and \u2026 I’m happy people are reading it,” he says.<\/p>\n

I Want Everything is published by Summit Books (Simon & Schuster).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since the Ern Malley affair of the 1940s \u2014 where two poets pretended to be a recently deceased…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,457,14182,14184,134,14183,14187,14188,14189,14181,14185,14186],"class_list":["post-12453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-books","tag-dominic-amerena","tag-dominic-amerena-i-want-everything","tag-entertainment","tag-i-want-everything","tag-literary-scandals","tag-melbourne-author","tag-melbourne-books","tag-the-book-show","tag-the-bookshelf","tag-what-to-read"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}