I’ve been reading a lot of biographies and memoirs of novelists. They don’t make for uplifting reading. I mean honestly, what a miserable bunch writers are. Moan moan, drink drink, write write. Never satisfied. Always seeking out greener pastures. Boring everyone to death with their thoughts, boring them even deader with their silence. Their interminable reading. And that tap, tap, tap, or scribble, scribble, scribble and shouts for silence echoing down the hall. All the while torn between incompatible futures – that of austere artistic merit and the esteem of the few or the abuse of talent and shameless wealth and lonely fame. Both futures lined with the same milestones – divorce, financial disaster, anxiety over legacy, obscurity, addiction, illness, despair – leading to the same place, the grave.

Of course it isn’t all doom and gloom. Some get cut down in their prime. Like that newly published writer who was killed by a falling branch while walking down the Champs Elysees. I don’t recall his name.

No, you’re right, maybe I am choosing the wrong writers. I am a miserable bastard myself. It’s probably just unconscious bias. I’m drawn to the worst of them. There are probably hundreds of happy writers and as many biographies of them. Case in point, there’s a biography of Henry Miller on my shelf called The Happiest Man Alive. He’s dead now, too.

Even though I know how it always goes, I can’t help reading about them. There is just something fascinating about writers. At least to me. They are such odd bods. Walking contradictions. Brilliant and stupid. Exciting and dull. Observant and yet so blind. Especially to their own faults and their own talents.

I am talking of a certain subset of novelists. I can admit it. Not all writers wrestle with their own devils. Not all are artists. Some start out with no integrity so don’t live in fear of losing it. In fact the vast majority do their best, succeed or fail, potter about, develop a small following, get bored of financial insecurity and go back to the work they did before. Those few who succeed beyond their own expectations and actually make some money from their work try very hard not to disappoint their readership and present them each year with the same novel in different guises.
My 2018 novel, The Girl on the Page, dealt with all this – miserable writers, artistic integrity, the lure of commercial success, the publishing machine and literary prizes. So you would expect I was done with writers in my novels. But you’d be wrong.

Just as I can’t stop reading about writers, I can’t stop writing about them either.

When I wasn’t looking, a novelist snuck in the back door of my new novel The Lessons and proceeded to take over. Her name is Jane Curtis and she is a piece of work. But I kind of like her. The novel centres on the love affair of two young people, Daisy and Harry. It was almost a romance novel before Jane Curtis turned up and did what all novelists do, stuck her nose where it didn’t belong and brought pain and misery to everyone she claimed to love. But she does all this with such flair that we can almost forgive her.

The truth is, the novel just didn’t work until Jane turned up.

I have always been fascinated by stories that seem to be aware they are stories. The multiple endings to John Fowles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman, Kurt Vonnegut inserting himself into the narrative of Breakfast of Champions so he can be there when his two main characters finally meet, that sort of thing. Jane gave me the opportunity to play in my own small way.

The bulk of The Lessons is set in the 1960s, Jane’s first person narrative is set in the 1980s and interrupts the main narrative from time to time. A novelist in a novel will always bring an element of self-consciousness to a narrative. Throughout the 1960s storyline Jane is writing novels based on the events we are reading about. The reader is invited to reflect on what they are being told in light of this.

I feel I must have been influenced by E.M. Forster’s use of novelist Eleanor Lavish in A Room with View. As witness to events in the first half of the novel, Lavish is able to effect change, albeit unwittingly, in the second half of the novel, even though she herself doesn’t appear, because her much disparaged novel is read aloud to the main characters, and that novel contains a description of a kiss everyone has been trying very hard to pretend never happened.
The reading aloud of Lavish’s novel forces Forster’s characters to interrogate the stories they have been telling themselves. Stories within stories. We are all novelists. Some are just better than others.

Throughout The Lessons, with each of Jane’s interruptions, I hope the reader will become more and more conscious of her attempts to control the narrative. I found her voice irresistible. I gave way to her more times than I’m ready to admit. I ask the reader to keep their wits about them. But then, to my mind, there is no better narrator than a novelist. Who better to tell us the whole truth than a professional liar?
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--The Lessons by John Purcell (HarperCollins Australia) is out now. 

I find it funny when someone asks me how I write female characters. As though women were some foreign entity only ever glimpsed by the fortunate. Rare and unknowable. But they aren’t rare, are they? Women are everywhere. My mother is a woman. So are my sisters. Come to think of it, so is my wife. And my step-daughter. My publisher is a woman, too.

The question isn’t as simple as it seems either. How do you, a man, write female characters? It’s a bit of a trap. It kind of implies that not only would it be too difficult, if not impossible, for a man to write a female character, convincing or not, but that a man really shouldn’t be writing women period. On the other hand, I may be over analysing it. Sometimes we ask a question because we don’t know the answer. I’m sure there are men out there who see women as completely alien and can’t imagine what they’re thinking at any given moment. I think the accepted collective noun for such a group of men is a Morrison. A murder of crows. A Morrison of unimaginative men.

Both my recent books, The Girl on the Page and my new book, The Lessons, centre on the lives of female characters. This wasn’t my plan. I didn’t set out to write about women. I wish I had that much say in what I write. I write what bubbles up from within me. One of the narrators of The Lessons, Jane Curtis, a novelist, wasn’t part of the original concept of the novel. Her character’s role expanded as I wrote. Her voice was the clearest in my head. It was like meeting an interesting person at a party and getting to know them over subsequent accidental meetings, until a friendship develops and you find you’re arranging to meet up regularly. I came to know Jane Curtis over time.

But she isn’t real, you made her up, shouts a heckler from the back.

As I said, my mother is a woman. A very intelligent, strong willed woman with feminist principles. And I mentioned my sisters – both a little bit older than me, both big influences on me as a teen. The eldest was heavily involved with politics as a young woman, the other sister was very interested in having a lot of fun. Each liked dragging their younger but taller brother here and there, as protection. I was jammed into the backseat of cars full of young women and taken to parties, nightclubs and bars. I listened to their stories. I was trained to see the world through their eyes. My sisters told me what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to watch and, somewhat disastrously, what to wear. And all the while their friends taught me other memorable lessons.

As a result I was never one of the boys. I sought out the company of women. Still do. The better question to ask me would be, how do I write men?

I’ll admit, writing female characters does hold certain advantages for the novelist. The inequalities in society means there is conflict in every aspect of their lives. A necessary element of drama. In this life there is still so much for women to overcome, from the mundane to the monumental. In my first few novels, my protagonist Emma Benson battles against the suffocating sexual mores of modern suburban life. In The Girl on the Page, Helen Owen hits out against ageism in the arts, while editor Amy tries to find something to value in herself. In my new novel, The Lessons, Daisy Richmond is told she doesn’t know her own heart and is forced by her mother and aunt to give up on her first love.

An early draft of The Lessons was in the voice of a male character. But it was too like being in my own head. Artistically, I prefer to see life through the eyes of women. In The Lessons the reader gets to do both.

But that damnable question won’t go away. How do I write female characters? I don’t know. My wife is my muse. I read novels by women. Memoirs and histories, too. Writing The Lessons I discovered Cat Power and obsessed over her music. I have many female friends, I take an interest in their lives, and I listen to them.

How do I write female characters? Women are half of all life. How could I not?

Learn more about The Lessons here. 

As we near publication of my new novel, The Girl on the Page, I cannot but stop to wonder where the book came from. I wrote the novel so quickly. It just fell onto the page. Almost as if I had been researching it for years. But I hadn’t. I had just been working away at my day job selling books.

Then it hit me. Rather belatedly, I’ll admit – everything I had done up till now had been research for The Girl on the Page.

I spent the greater part of my twenties and thirties sitting behind the counter in a second-hand bookstore. First someone else’s, then my own. Second-hand bookselling looks a lot like normal bookselling to the untrained eye, but they are nothing alike. And neither are the customers.

Second-hand bookshops are not viable businesses. But somehow they always seem to limp on. Mine teetered on the edge of oblivion for the full ten years of its existence. It never fell in. The end came when building owners tore the building down. I had no option but to get out of their way. By then I’d had enough of living hand to mouth, so decided to become a full time writer. This reasoning still makes me laugh.

Those ten years sitting in my bookshop were my education. I learnt more than I can say. My teachers were the eccentrics who visited regularly. And they were eccentric. Every sort of misfit, creep, loser and cracked genius would venture in. The world’s outcasts desperate for the lifegiving air of a musty secondhand bookshop.

Some of my teachers wore the outer garments of the everyday man and woman, but this would be pulled aside as soon as they entered. Then they would air their grievances, or lose themselves in some trancelike hymn to the last book they had read, or they would take umbrage over one of my eccentric book cataloging decisions. The greatest teachers were the idealists, the artists, the true believers. Their unbending natures in a world of bending reeds excited my imagination like no others.

It was their recommendations I heeded. The old man with a permanent drip hanging from the end of his nose who spoke of Jung and chemistry and forced me to take home all of the works of John Cowper Powys. The angry woman who made me read The Egoist by George Meredith. The white-haired woman who spoke little and read much, who placed a copy of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy on my desk and made me promise to read it without asking what it was about. The best advice. And the woman who overheard my conversations with other customers and brought Of Human Bondage to the counter saying it was the only great book she had ever read and wanted to know if I thought it was great, too. It was.

Then there were the shelves themselves. The hours in a second-hand bookshop are twice as long as the hours outside the shop and I would peruse my own shelves and listen to the books chatter as I passed. As I read more and spoke more with my oddbod teachers, the shelves grew more talkative. I heard Willa Cather and Edith Wharton arguing, the incessant chatter of Christina Stead’s House of All Nations and the urgent whispers of Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin.

My new novel, The Girl on the Page, is born from these experiences. This is where the hearts of the two of main characters, literary giants, Helen Owen and Malcolm Taylor were forged. Their knowledge and wisdom, too. And their integrity. Without my second-hand bookstore education, I could not have created them. I love them and all they stand for more than I can say.

Helen and Malcolm ask the question at the centre of the novel: what do we lose when we sell out? Because I love them, I feel cruel asking them to act out the answer to this question, but it is a question that needs to be answered in this increasingly opportunistic age.

Amy Winston is the other main character of The Girl on the Page, she works in publishing and is very much born of this age. Or at least so she appears on first meeting her. She is damaged and we meet her mid-decline. To create Amy Winston and her world I have drawn from more recent experience.

Since leaving the second-hand bookshop I have become unrecognisable to myself. I have become the book guy at Australia’s fastest growing online bookshop. I have published a series of erotic novels under a pseudonym. I have met and interviewed hundreds of authors and celebrities. I have worked closely with every major publisher in the country. And I rarely read a book by a dead person.
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The Girl on the Page describes what happens when these two worlds collide.
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(First published on the The Booktopian)

HarperCollins Publishers Australia is delighted to announce the exciting acquisition of The Girl on the Page by Booktopia’s Director of Books, John Purcell. The Girl on the Page is scheduled for publication in Australia in October 2018.

The Girl on the Page is a smart, sexy, provocative and powerful novel of ambition, betrayal and redemption. It follows the story of a hard-drinking, bed-hopping, hot-shot young book editor on a downward spiral. Having made her name and fortune by turning an average thriller writer into an international megastar, Amy Winston is given the unenviable task of steering literary great Helen Owen back on track to meet her publishing deadline. Helen and her husband are brilliant, complicated writers, who unsettle Amy into questioning who she is and what she does for a living – and before Amy knows it, answering these questions becomes a matter of life or death.

Publisher Catherine Milne says: ‘The joy of this novel isn’t just that it’s a complete page-turner, with lashings of sex, glamour, bad behaviour and wonderfully wicked insider publishing references, but that at its heart The Girl on the Page is a deeply serious and intelligent novel about the power of literature, which asks searching questions about art and commerce, integrity and authenticity – it’s razor-sharp, thought-provoking and vastly enjoyable.’

John Purcell says: ‘The characters came to me whole. I felt more like their biographer than creator. The challenge faced by my characters is one we are all facing. Do we take the money and stay silent or do we forgo fame and fortune to stay true to what is right and good? In my current role I have worked closely with people from all the major publishing houses and most of the boutique ones, too. I have interviewed Booker Prize winners and celebrities, chatted with authors who have sold hundreds of millions of books and laughed with nervous debut authors. Though perspectives change, the question of integrity is important to them all. It is this complexity I have attempted to depict in my novel.’

John Purcell has worked in the book industry for the last twenty years. After living in Europe and while still in his twenties, John opened a secondhand bookshop in Sydney, in which he sat for ten years reading, ranting and writing. In 2009, John joined Booktopia, Australia’s largest online bookseller, where he is currently Director of Books. In 2012, under the pseudonym Natasha Walker, John published a bestselling erotic trilogy, The Secret Lives of Emma, which went onto sell over 50,000 copies in the Australian market alone. John has appeared regularly at live events with the Sydney Writers Festival and the Wheeler Centre, and has appeared on Sunrise, Seven News, Nine News and across ABC radio. He also made a surprise appearance in Luke McGregor’s excruciating ABC TV series, Luke Warm Sex. 

The book is terminally ill, say those in the know, and lies near death in a private hospital plugged into a life support machine and surrounded by close friends and relatives. Right now, across the world commentators are drafting moving eulogies. Commemorative plates and tea towels are being made. Songs are being written. A mini-series is planned. TV people are putting together five minute montages for the news bulletins which touch on the book’s long and varied history

Everyone is preparing themselves for news because no one wants to be caught off guard. At any moment word may come. The book is dead.

But then, isn’t this is all rather familiar? I grew up in the seventies and eighties and back then top people had said something similar. They said that while the whole world was off watching TV the book had died of neglect in a rented apartment, friendless and alone. A few learned souls, a loneliness of dust-covered professors and dowdy librarians, had even been brought in to identify the corpse.

There had been no elaborate funeral planned for the book then. A pauper’s grave had awaited, and there, we were told, the book had been unceremoniously dumped. No one had wept.

Back then when the news had broken, people had been genuinely surprised to learn that the book had been living amongst them at all, they had assumed the book had died long ago. The book seemed to belong to another age altogether. The dark age before TV.

I suppose the prophets of doom did have a point. I’m sure I remember teachers teaching literature to students who had never read for pleasure. These were teachers who would no sooner expect a student to read outside the requirements of the curriculum than their colleague, the Latin teacher, would expect students to speak Latin outside of the classroom. And, really, these English teachers, the poor servants of an absent master, could only go through the motions. I imagine that any rare successes served only to underline the futility of the whole enterprise. For, to all concerned, the book was dead.

And where imagination still existed, it was nourished by a thin broth of TV and, beyond the thrall of the TV, film. It is easy to forget just how dominant TV was. There was no real competition from any other medium. For thirty years TV ruled unchallenged. Those living in its shadow soon took ill. First the book, and then film. To survive, film pumped out grandiose spectacles of a kind TV could not emulate. Star Wars, Superman, Jaws. But these did not save film. It was the video player that saved film. When film entered the home via the rented video cassette, it occupied the TV. And TV began speaking a new language. The video reintroduced the beginning, middle and end, the natural rhythm of the imagination, which TV had abandoned with its endless stream of programming.

Then the damnedest thing happened, the rhythm of film revived the wider world’s interest in the book. Some discovered that certain films were based on books. On one man’s books in particular, too. As I recall it, the book rose from the dead, beckoned out of the grave by the imagination of Stephen King. Suddenly a few teens were reading. They were choosing to read. They were turning off TVs. This faint heartbeat gave the book a fragile existence.

But the book had never really been dead, had it? No. And the book won’t die now, will it? No.

The book has always lead a double life – a private life and a public one. In the book’s public life its health is judged by sales, media coverage, popular influence and contemporary relevance. In the seventies and eighties because sales dwindled, because media coverage was negative, because its popular influence was nil and because it had no contemporary relevance, the book’s public life did meet its end in a pauper’s grave. And no one wept.

But the book lived on its private life. The wider world does not monitor the health of the book in its private life because it only recognises the book’s public face. Which is to be expected. The public face is a commodity, while in private the book is not bound by the expectations and conventions of business. Its value does not fluctuate according to the whims of commerce, for its value comes from within not from without.

The most baffling thing about the private life of the book, and this is why it doesn’t get any press, is that it belongs to everyone and therefore no one person in particular. So it is both priceless and worthless in the same breath.

The wider world can get excited about books when, as in the case of J.K. Rowling, someone makes a squillion dollars writing them. There is a story to tell and one that is easy to quantify. Books suddenly have a monetary value which can be compared with other commodities.

While I credit Stephen King with raising the public life of books from the dead, it wasn’t until the release and subsequent success of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and its sequels, that the book was able to walk without the aid of nurses. J.K. Rowling did more for the book than can be measured. The success of these books changed the way people thought about books and reading. Harry Potter Inc. took the book back to the days of its greatest successes – back to the days when Charles Dickens was the most famous man on the planet.

And yet suddenly, when the book seems at its most vigorous, when more people than ever are reading, when publishers and booksellers are finally making some money from the thankless enterprise, news comes that the book is ill, terminally so.

But the news is false – a rumour started by an accountant at work in unimaginative publishing house. Both the public and private manifestations of the book are well. More than well, robust. In a digital world of unimpeded exchanges of information, of open ended discourse, of perpetual updates and addenda, the book is a refuge, a closed circuit, something complete, a place where captured thoughts have ripened and matured. Truth be told, the wider public has developed the habit of thinking well about the book so that today there are more readers than ever before, reading more widely than ever before, with access to more books than ever before. So regardless of the format the wider public chooses to read – hardback, paperback or digital – until they can be persuaded that an alternative is better, the book, with it’s beginning, middle and end, is here to stay.

Were all publishing to cease and were all writers to fall silent the book would still live on. No-one can undo what has already been achieved. Our future, as our history, is permanently coupled with the book. So much so that when the end does come, it will be the end for both the book and humanity, which leaves no-one to make the pronouncement – the book is dead.


Originally published on the Booktopia Blog

A literary classic. A classic of literature. A great work. A work of genius. A masterpiece. A classic. The classics.

You know War & Peace? It’s a classic. Les Miserables? A classic, too. And Jane Eyre. And Plato’s Republic. And Moby Dick. And Hamlet is a classic, as well. We call them all classics. It’s our shorthand way of assigning them a special place. Of differentiating them from others by their value to humanity, their enduring qualities, universal appeal and their apparent excellence.

Classic. The word seems harmless enough and yet when I say I enjoy reading the classics or I prefer reading the classics, I often find I have offended someone. At first I thought it was just my manner – I can be a bit of a prig – but then I realised it was more than this. The word classic itself seems to offend people.  Sounds silly, but if I say ‘classic‘ and you hear ‘you’re an idiot‘ the word and the idea can suddenly seem far from harmless.

But why would anyone hear “you’re an idiot‘ when the word ‘classic‘ is used in conversation?

As someone who found himself in the bottom English class during the last three years of school, I have some idea how this can happen. While the smart kids in the top English classes were doing the classics – Thomas Hardy, Shakespeare and Jane Austen – we were making finger puppets.

When we heard the smart kids moaning about having to write essays on the classic writers, bitching about those impenetrable ‘texts’, and saw them biting their nails while reading the battered paperbacks in the playground, many of us were thankful all we were asked to debate was whether the thumb was a true finger or not.

But soon, we, the dummies, realised that there was a subtle change in the way the smart kids were behaving. Having read a classic work and written the attendant essay it was apparent they were pleased with themselves. A teenager does not carry accomplishment well. A certain haughtiness had crept into their manner. Those who had successfully completed their tasks now spoke of the classics in another way altogether. They had crossed into another realm, as it were. They were part of the elite now. The smartest of the smart. (Of course, socially, this meant we had to tear them limb from limb.)

I realised later, that while we were being taught to fear the classics in the bottom English classes, most of the smart kids in the top classes were being trained to hate the ‘classics’. Even those smart kids who seemed most to enjoy the experience, those who read more widely among the classics than was required, stopped reading them when their formal education was completed. Which seemed to reveal their real relationship with the books. They were a chore. They were a means to an end.

If you were in the bottom English, like I was, you may well hear – you’re an idiot – when anyone mentions the classics. It is only natural. Almost instinctual. The end result of all of those years of training. A reaction which is tinged with sadness not anger.

The angry reaction is reserved for those who read and studied the classics at school and university. Many of these people continue to live under the impression that they havedone the classics. And as many of their peers shared their experience at school they can still afford to adopt a truly proprietorial air with the subject. Whenever the word ‘classic’ is uttered amongst their circle of friends, the self-same murmurs of delight, awe and wonder are heard – both as an acknowledgement and a dismissal of the subject.

In those educated circles any further expression of interest in the classics is unwelcome. Anyone insensitive enough to pursue the subject, or worse, to declare a present passion for them, will only draw the ire of their hearers. Why? In such a moment the esteem these people borrowed when studying the classics as youths must be paid back. They suddenly stop hearing classicand hear instead - you’re an idiot. For in that moment the classics have ceased to be their tame pets and have become the beasts they truly are and the educated are revealed as frauds, of sorts. The learnt response of the educated is to lie about the minor details of their qualifications. What they have or have not read, for instance.

The trouble with such a state of affairs is this: not enough people are reading the classics for pleasure. Those taught to fear them at school approach them with an exaggerated caution. The classic is venerated as it is more often than not regarded as a symbol of intelligence. It is an accomplishment to have read one. This often leads those excluded from them as youths to make a study of them as adults. This course of action fails even if it succeeds because such readers believe they must understand every word, comprehend every idea, visualise every description and soon become either frustrated with the books and give up the task or continue out of stubbornness turning what might have been a delightful read into the equivalent of trying to decipher the Rosetta Stone and failing.

Those who have done the classics, the educated, rarely approach them as adults, but if they do (bloody book club), they do so with great impatience. Believing they shouldn’t be forced to return down that path, sure that they’ve probably read it before, but recognising that others will expect them to have read it, they read only to be reminded, making a show of reading quickly, skimming through the pages merely to rediscover ‘the gist’ of the book.

Pride and Prejudice. The two main impediments to our general enjoyment of the classics. Pride in our past glories. Prejudice against our own capabilities.

Reading the classics as adults is one of life’s greatest pleasures. And I encourage everyone to overcome the pride and prejudices which inhibit the enjoyment of them. You did not sanction these prejudices, they were thrust upon you and it is time they were discarded. And pride? Welcome the fall.

Read the classics casually. Take them as you find them. Build up a collection so that you may fit your mood to the right book. Read a few pages, if you don’t like what you read, persevere for a few more pages, then if your opinion is unchanged, try another. There is no way you’ll ever understand everything a great work has to say. If you don’t get something, read on. It may not be that important. If it is, you’ll discover more further along. The more classics you read, the more you’ll enjoy and understand. Knowledge isn’t a shot in the arm, but cumulative process. A person’s taste in literature is not fixed, either. Reading the classics will expand your tastes in literature, art, history, philosophy and on and on. The classics are not a genre.

The classics, or the greats, or literature, or however you may describe the masses of excellent writing produced by humanity, are not a homogeneous whole. They are as diverse as humans are diverse. They stomp across the narrow confines of genre, they defy such classification. Their only shared attribute is that they recommend themselves to you by their superiority as heartily as history recommends them to you by repute. In each you will see reflected yourself, your friends, your family, your hopes, your failures, your lies, your loves and your moments of disgrace.

The classics can never be done. No one has ever read all of the classics.  Forgotten classics are being re-discovered. And, believe it or not, classics are still being written. They are never a part of your past. They are never part of humanity’s past. As long as we retain our humanity they are ever present.


Originally published on The Booktopia Blog