The Book that Made Me Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  Logo

  Foreword by Judith Ridge

  A Feverish Desire to Possess by Randa Abdel-Fattah

  Twelve Reasons by Markus Zusak

  A Short Leap by Cathy Cassidy

  “What Happens Next?” by Will Kostakis

  The Great Sense of Unease by Mandy Hager

  Hooked (and a Bit Unsettled) by Shaun Tan

  Thwack! by Fiona Wood

  Becoming Human by Bernard Beckett

  Looking Where I’m Standing by Felicity Castagna

  This World is More Than What Can Be Seen by Ambelin Kwaymullina

  What the Doctor Recommended by Queenie Chan

  Of Magic and Memory by Kate Constable

  The Big Scooby-Doo Reveal by Rachael Craw

  Sweet Dreams and Social Fails by Simmone Howell

  Every Disgusting Detail by Benjamin Law

  Challenging the Machinations of Racism by Jared Thomas

  Invested with Enchantment by Alison Croggon

  It Looks Like a Comic by Mal Peet

  My First Reader by Ursula Dubosarsky

  In Folded Arms by Cath Crowley

  What Would Edith Do? by Emily Maguire

  Putting the World to Rights by Catherine Mayo

  Beyond the Influence by Ted Dawe

  A Sense of Resolution by Simon French

  Only White People Lived in Books by Catherine Johnson

  Set My Senses Alight by Sue Lawson

  Happy Endings by Brigid Lowry

  You’ll Go Blind: A Cautionary Tale about the Power of Reading by Julia Lawrinson

  Ingenious Decisions by Sue McPherson

  James Remembering by James Roy

  Seeing Red by Jaclyn Moriarty

  About the Authors

  About the Indigenous Literacy Foundation

  Books Mentioned in the Collection

  Writers Mentioned in the Collection

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Credits

  Dedication

  The Book That Made Me is a celebration of the books that influenced some of the most acclaimed authors from Australia and the world. Edited by Judith Ridge, it features non-fiction stories from 32 inspiring and award-winning authors including Markus Zusak, Jaclyn Moriarty, Shaun Tan, Mal Peet, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Simon French, Alison Croggon, Fiona Wood, Bernard Beckett, Ursula Dubosarsky, Rachael Craw, Sue Lawson, Benjamin Law, Cath Crowley, Kate Constable, James Roy, Will Kostakis, Randa Abdel-Fattah and many more. Royalties from the sale of the book will go to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF).

  Foreword

  Growing up, reading was my first and best thing. I don’t remember not being able to read – I was one of those precocious children who was reading before school, reading novels (Enid Blyton’s Adventures of the Wishing-Chair, to be precise) by the time I was in Year Two. For some people, reading is difficult – for me, it was like osmosis. I just seemed to absorb it into my way of being in the world as soon as was humanly, and cognitively, possible. Any time my family couldn’t find me – skiving off from the washing up, or just disappeared for hours – they knew that wherever they’d find me, in the loo or up a tree, I’d have a book with me.

  For me it was almost always fiction (when it wasn’t Archie comics and Pink magazine – an English girls’ magazine that published comic strips and pre-teen-suitable romance stories side by side with profiles of such top ’70s pop stars as the Bay City Rollers, Paper Lace and The Rubettes. Google them and thank me later). I probably read five or six books a week as a kid, often re-reading old favourites multiple times, while falling for new delights borrowed from the school or local library. (Thanks, Auburn Council in Sydney’s west – you had the best collection an obsessive reader could have asked for.)

  Later in life, though, I’ve come to equally enjoy memoir – stories of people’s lives. Not autobiography, strictly speaking, but slices of lives, and especially when they are the memoirs of writers. Writers’ memoirs, at their best, provide not merely insights into their childhoods, or romances, or whatever significant moments in their lives they choose to focus on, but often, indeed, almost always, they are meditations on creativity, and the role books and reading have played in the memoirist’s life. Memoirs such as Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal ? go so far as to suggest that books, and reading, can not only make a life, they can save it.

  This growing fascination with writers’ reading lives led me to the creation of this book. I didn’t know much about writers when I was a young reader. Apart from a few big names like Enid Blyton, or Ethel Turner, who wrote my beloved Seven Little Australians and whose grandchildren holidayed at the same beach we did, authors were simply names on books. Now, of course, writers are celebrities, and their readers often have opportunities to meet them. But still, I wondered, how great would it be for today’s young readers to catch a glimpse into the books that helped build the writers they love? Thinking about the writers I knew and loved, I wondered, what was the book that made them – the book that made them fall in love, or made them understand something for the first time? Made them think. Made them laugh. Made them angry. Made them feel safe. Made them feel challenged in ways they never knew they could be, emotionally, intellectually, politically. Made them readers, made them writers – made them the person they are today? And so I asked them. The book you hold in your hands is the result.

  As you’ll see when you start dipping into the essays, poems, memoir and other pieces in this collection, there’s a fascinating variety of stories told by people who ended up making words and stories their living (and perhaps their life). Some of the books that “made” them were encountered when they were very small children – see Ursula Dubosarsky’s charming verse account of her kindergarten readers. Some were primary-school aged (as with my own story, recounted below, and James Roy’s tribute to the Australian classic children’s novel Josh). Most, though, were in their teens and ready, as Emily Maguire so perfectly says in her essay about Frank Moorhouse’s novel Grand Days, for something to smash and explode their mind and their world wide open.

  Some of the books you’ll read about were in fact comics; some were magazines (stolen, as in Benjamin Law’s hilariously cheeky account, from an older sister). Some weren’t in paper form at all, but were stories passed down through family and culture – Ambelin Kwaymullina for one reminds us of the source of all story, from the oral traditions of our ancestors, wherever we, or they, came from.

  Whatever their form, and whatever the age the reader was when they were read, they were all books, stories, experiences that one way or another changed the reader. For good.

  For myself, the book that made me the kind of reader I am and, I suspect, played no small part in my decision to make a life trying to get inside books and figure out how they work, was the first book I ever read that challenged me on an intellectual and, for want of a better word, creative level.

  The book was The Flame Takers, a novel by the Australian author Lilith Norman. It was published in 1973, and I would have read it that year or a year or two, at most, later. I knew Norman’s work well – I’d been reading her for years in the New South Wales The School Magazine, where she worked on the editorial staff. I’d also read all of her previous novels, all more or less in the realist mode, about recognisably real children in recognisably real places and situations. Her best-known book at the time was probably Climb a Lonely Hill, about children stranded in the desert after a car accident. (Surviving the Australian environment was a favourite theme of children’s writers of the 1960s and ’70s.)

  The Flame Takers, though, was something else.

  The protagon
ists are still very real – young teenage brother and sister Mark and Joanna Malory, in their early years of high school at Sydney Boys and Girls High respectively (Norman was a proud alumna of Sydney Girls High School). The narrative begins as Mark’s story – he’s a gifted musician, the son of theatrical parents and grandparents, all of whose creative talents slowly start being drained away by some unknown, mysterious force. Audaciously, about a third of the way into the novel, Norman switches our attention from Mark to Joanna, the blessedly (so Joanna herself says) untalented member of the family, who is the one left to find the cause of her family’s “flames” – their creativity – being lost.

  The Flame Takers was the first book I found difficult, whose meaning was slippery and opaque, whose language and story spiralled around me like elusive, elliptical phantoms. It was the first book I remember where the story didn’t immediately present itself to me, but where I had to enter into the book in all its strangeness and make my own sense, make my own meaning. It was the book that introduced me to the intense pleasures of entering deep within the very bones of a story and working out its secrets from the inside out.

  And while I may have ended up here anyway, I can’t help but think it was The Flame Takers that determined my life’s path as a student of literature, which led me in time to work as an editor – for many years at The School Magazine, following in Lilith Norman’s remarkable footsteps – and then in another turn, a teacher of creative writing. Along the way, I’ve come to know and admire a lot of writers – many of whom are represented in the pages of this book.

  We hope that you may find inspiration and challenges to extend and expand your own reading life from the many amazing books written about – and written by – the contributors to The Book that Made Me. We’ve provided a handy list at the back for you, along with information about all the contributors (and a sneak peek at their past selves!).

  Finally, because everyone involved in this book believes so deeply and determinedly in both the need and the right for every child to have access to the highest standards of literacy skills possible, so that they, too, can be made (and undone!) by books, all author and anthologists, royalties of The Book that Made Me will go to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF). The Foundation sends books into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities – schools and homes – and supports young Indigenous readers by providing books in both Aboriginal (First) languages and English.

  Thank you for supporting us support the ILF, and now, may we present a book that we hope, one way or another, might just also be the making of you.

  Judith Ridge

  A Feverish Desire to Possess

  Randa Abdel-Fattah

  I have vivid memories of spending Saturdays with my mother and sister, moving from one wholesale bookseller to another in the suburbs of Melbourne in the eighties and early nineties. My mother, a senior teacher and administrator at Australia’s first Islamic school, was tasked with building the school’s emerging library. As she browsed each warehouse I would pore over the books lining the shelves in the children’s section: The Sweet Dreams series, Sweet Valley High, The Baby-Sitters Club, Nancy Drew, Judy Blume, Robin Klein, RL Stine, Christopher Pike, Caroline B Cooney. My bedroom walls were lined with photocopies I’d made of the covers of The Baby-Sitters Club (alongside my Kylie Minogue and Michael Jackson posters).

  Almost every second Sunday my father would take me to the Caribbean Gardens & Markets in the suburb of Scoresby to visit a particular second-hand bookseller who stocked the Sweet Valley High series. I remember the long drive down Spring Valley Road, the anticipation building inside me. What books would I find this weekend? Would I come closer to completing my collection?

  The Sweet Valley High series was set in California and offered readers stories about love, friendship, proms, jocks, sibling rivalry and romance. Girls with names like Jessica and Elizabeth fell for boys with names like Todd, Paul, Bruce and Michael – boys who had “sandy hair and piercing blue eyes”, and were either the “rich boy next door” or a sports coach at a summer camp.

  The stories I read filled me with a feverish desire to possess them. I wanted so badly to be part of these books – as their reader, as their writer. The only way of assuaging this desire was to write my own stories. And so I did. My father made me a writing desk and I threw myself into storytelling. The stories I wrote were all set in America, focusing on scandalous love triangles, sorority and fraternity clubs, tragic tales of running away from home, chaos at school camps, proms, snow fights during school. My characters ate ham and cheese sandwiches and snacked on “Twinkies”, even though I had no idea what a Twinkie was (this was pre-Google days after all). Their names were invariably Lisa, Samantha, Liz or Kylie. They always had blonde hair, blue eyes and milky white skin. The cliché machine was working overtime.

  Why should all of this be so strange?

  Because I’m an Australian-born Muslim of Palestinian Egyptian heritage with an unpronounceable surname (the phlegm inflection is necessary), curly dark hair (blow-dried and tamed now but electric power point out-of-control as a kid and teenager), who spent Saturday mornings at Arabic school among boys called Mohamed and Ahmed and girls called Fatma and Aisha. During the week, I attended a Catholic primary school. It was located in Bulleen, Melbourne, and many of the students were of European extraction, so the boys I spent hours writing “Dear Diary” entries over had names like Nicholas Papadopolous and Eddie Bonnachi. My school was filled with eucalyptus trees, tanbark and creepy-crawlies; we had water fights, not snow fights, and we bought our lunch from the tuckshop, not a cafeteria.

  Much like the teenage fiction I grew up with, my Arab and Muslim identity is invisible in my early writing. Although my life offered a potential rich tapestry of racial tropes and ethnic fetishisms – the stock-standard roles of cab driver, convenience store owner, terrorist or tyrant, oppressed Muslim woman – I couldn’t manage to exploit them for the purposes of telling a good yarn. To think I could have written the habib version of Sweet Valley High, set in Bankstown, Sydney, featuring twins Fatima and Jamilah. Sadly, my characters’ names were all pronounceable, everybody’s hair was Brylcreem-free and lunch consisted of sliced white bread, not kebab leftovers that stank out the locker room. (Oh Mum, what were you thinking?)

  The absence of diversity in the popular fiction I grew up with was, I believe, symptomatic of a collective imagination that equates mainstream with Anglo, and which casts indigenous people, minorities and migrants as exotic, fascinating deviations from the norm.

  The only exception to this that I can recall from the childhood books I read is Claudia Kishi in The Baby-Sitters Club. Subverting stereotypes, Claudia is Japanese-American and – wait for it – not academically inclined! Claudia was perhaps one of the first encounters I had with a non-Anglo character who did not reinforce popular stereotypes. While this was perhaps not a particularly sophisticated example of anti-racism politics, it should be credited as insightful given the time and context.

  And then, against this backdrop of Anglo-centric fiction, came along a book that turned my life upside down. Aged thirteen, my “coming of age” coincided with a particularly difficult time for my minority community: the first Gulf War which began in 1990. Australia, supporting the US, deployed warships to the Gulf. In the public imagination, Arab-Australians and Muslims were suddenly cast as the archetypal folk devils, made to feel like outsiders and suspicious Others because of events overseas over which they had no control. It was assumed that all Arabs and Muslims in Australia supported Saddam Hussein and that their loyalty to Australia was therefore in doubt. Media representations insisted on representing Muslims and Arabs in homogenous, monolithic terms, associating Islam with violence, fanaticism and fundamentalism. I felt this personally. Identified as a Muslim by the hijab I wore, I was called a wog, terrorist, nappy-head, camel jockey and sand nigger. My faith and identity were the subject of interrogation and discipline. I was spat at on the street and told to “go back home”
. (Postcode 3109, morons, I would yell back.) When you’re thirteen and feel as though you’re locked up in a cage of other people’s demonising rhetoric, totalising assumptions and crude stereotypes, your already precarious sense of identity and belonging threatens to unravel. You are made to walk the plank – a plank hitched up by people who politicise your very existence at a time when you simply want to get on with the business of being a teenager and worry about acne and schoolgirl crushes and big dreams and fierce friendships.

  I poured myself into books, searching for escapism. I did not dare to hope for validation, a cultural point of reference that spoke to me, and all the identity hyphens I straddled.

  And then I read Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi.

  There are books you read that make you hold your breath. It’s only when you get to the end that you realise you need to come up for air. In fact, the origins of the word “inspiration” stem from the act of inhaling. There is something sensuous and visceral in the experience of being inspired. I felt it with Looking for Alibrandi.

  I read it in one sitting. And then I read it again. And again. Something inside me changed.

  For the very first time in my own life, there was a book that didn’t fetishise a migrant upbringing. Josie wasn’t somebody to pity or consider “exotic”. I identified with her world, the pressures and challenges of straddling what I considered at that age to be identities in competition with each other. I loved Josie’s gutsiness, her insistence on making up her own mind about sex and not giving in to peer pressure. I loved her loud, vibrant, complicated family, and the fact that her experiences with racism vindicated my own. Even the cover appealed to me. Defying the quintessential blonde and blue-eyed Aussie girl, this girl had long, dark, curly hair and olive skin. Believe me this was no small matter. I regularly placed my head on the ironing board and allowed my friends to iron my hair (risking scalp burns and singed locks) in a perennial effort to attain smooth hair. Sun In (a spray-in hair lightener) was also a popular choice among my friends at the time and allowed one to circumvent the parental prohibition against hair dye by spraying the hair to lighten it (my hijab served more than just a spiritual function; it also allowed me to conceal evidence). Here was Josie with curly hair and not an iron or Sun In spray bottle to be seen.