 1. I’ve always fancied the idea of telling a few home truths and you’ve done it in your memoir. Did you try other titles before you settled on this one, and if so, what were they? No, the title came to me straight away. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does it's a gift because it feels like you have your book ‘hook’ straight away. As a comedic writer it is always my intention to tell the ‘truth’ as I see it, which generally means attempting to navigate the mental minutiae of the daily grind. Home Truths seemed perfect because I wanted to write a book about who we are in the place where we live, how we live there, and how how we live has changed. I often feel like the David Attenborough of the suburbs. 2. What do you see the rights and responsibilities of the memoirist to be? To avoid clichés. To ensure that their story has significant interest for a reader and isn’t a narcissistic tour de force. I think it’s important to protect the innocent as much as possible, but never to sacrifice a good story for the sake of upsetting people. If apple carts must be upturned to tell a good story, then so be it. If you can’t hack the flack, then you should write fiction and then your lies to your friends and family that none of your characters are based on them will seem more plausible. 3. I’ve always enjoyed the ‘slice of life’ that memoirs provide. How difficult was it to choose what to include and what to exclude? Writing is always about choices. You can’t include everything. That's tedious and dull and more the style of the classic ‘biography’ or ‘autobiography’. Either your book will be a big body of water that you skim over the top, or you’ll pick a point and dive right down to the bottom. Frankly I think that’s more interesting and from a business point of view its clever because memoir subjects are endless. Biographies or autobiographies kind of run out of steam because the only proper ending to the story is your death. As a comedian of 30 years I know how important choices are and how muddying the water with too much detail actually dilutes a story rather than strengthening it. I don’t know why but I seem to have developed some sort of acquatic metaphor for the memoir process. I guess you could say that was a choice too, and once I’d made it I had to run with it. 4. I was intrigued by your article about the ‘shit hole’ town you grew up in and the subsequent responses. But what stood out from that chapter was that you said the town was making an effort to ‘tidy up’ since your article went viral. Did you ever consider that your words would stir up a positive response? It never occurred to me that people would take offence. I was quite surprised by the reaction to what I considered to be a harmless metaphor paralleling the declining health of my grandmother. It surprised me how angry it made people. How that in turn fuelled anger at me and a feeling of betrayal because I had broken some unspoken code: don’t say negative things about your home town. In Australia we have a tendency to romanticise our rural areas – so much literature writes of the hope and the majesty and the simple goodness of the people. It is confronting for people when you refer to those people as bigots and homophobes and their awful town as a shit hole. Hard to romanticise that, and I guess if you’ve decided to buy property and make your life in the aforementioned shithole, it’s going to really cause some grievance towards the author. Personally I don’t really care about upsetting people. I think its good to be provocative, and in the end it’s just my truth. The positive aspect for the town was that it reinvigorated some sort of town pride and engagement in a dialogue defending the integrity of ‘shithole’. Of course my view is unchanged, it is still a shithole. It’s where I grew up. I hated it and I still do. Why is it so offensive for me to say that? I think that’s an interesting question. Like Jeanette Winterson pointed out, not everyone likes oranges. And not everyone is going to love their hometown either. |  Mandy Nolan sets great store in speaking her mind. 5. I laughed wryly as I read about your Feng shui efforts. (My bed is beneath a window, faces a mirror, and has more doors into the room than you would believe possible – six!) How much ‘tongue in cheek’ is there in Home Truths? My tongue is permanently in cheek, but it’s generally because I find most things amusing. I am rather superstitious and as much as I may ridicule a belief system, I’m the first one to try and oblige its requests. At a more philosophical level I find it endlessly amusing that we humans are so desperate to find respite from taking control of our life decisions and responsibility for their consequences that we’ll outsource the blame to bed placement. How can that not be funny! Of course it helps knowing there are people who live 100% by the rule of esoteric belief systems! 6. What does your family think of making an appearance in your book? Has it caused any interesting discussions at home? They are so used to it, they barely notice. My family has featured in my comedy ever since I first opened my mouth. Interestingly it is my friends who are nervous. In Home Truths I wrote about my first share house, and we took a lot of drugs and engaged in reckless and often outrageous sexual behaviour. We were anarchists, feminists and quite possibly at times almost criminal. All of those women now have successful careers and families and were horrified that I may have revealed more than they were comfortable with. I let them sweat it out. 7. While reading Home Truths, I got the impression that you enjoy living life to the full. What’s next for Mandy Nolan? I have about three fiction ideas I fiddle with. And two other memoirs that I want to write. I have been working as a creative person ever since I left school so ideas are never a problem for me. In fact I have so many ideas I can’t contain them. They end up on scraps of paper, written in the note section of my iPhone or on lists on my computer. I love projects. I create projects for myself all the time – I paint, I write, I come up with plans all the time. I have projects on the home front with the kids too. So I guess I will just keep all those balls in the air. Life is wonderfully chaotic and intense, and I intend to continue squeezing every last drop out of the lemons life sends me.  |
Buy links:
Paperback
eBook
http://finch.com.au/books/home-truths for more buy links to independent bookstores and chains around the country.
Paperback
eBook
- Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0U47H2
- iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/au/book/home-truths/id971662016?mt=11
- Kobo Books: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/home-truths-11
http://finch.com.au/books/home-truths for more buy links to independent bookstores and chains around the country.
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