I generally try to avoid the US version of The Office, as I do any US remake of a television show, as I often find them too in-your-face and more contrived than the original. The comedic memoir and collection of essays by Mindy Kaling – a writer for The Office USA, who also acts in the show as office chatterbox Kelly Kapoor – was therefore a risky choice. However, a good friend had persuaded me that her book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is funny and relatable, so I brushed aside my prejudices at the promise of a kindred spirit. My first meeting with Kaling was this:

Thank you for buying this book. Or, if my publisher’s research analytics are correct, thank you, Aunts of America, for buying this for your niece you don’t know that well but really want to connect with more. There are many teenage vampire books you could have purchased instead. I’m grateful you made this choice.

It’s a strong start to a debut book, and indicative of the tone of Kaling’s work. Smart, witty, and with the times, Kaling’s book details formative life experiences and reflections on her childhood up until her current stint as a Hollywood writer (as well as strict instructions for her funeral). The book is not structured as a detailed memoir, but rather as a series of humorous essays, lists and short asides with titles such as ‘Don’t Peak at High School’, ‘Types of Women in Romantic Comedies Who Are Not Real’ and ‘The Day I Stopped Eating Cupcakes’.

Kaling’s writing is very easy to read, as her style is straight-talking and fairly colloquial. She provides plenty of insight into her motivations for entering the field of comedy writing and acting, with her career musings particularly relevant for those familiar with the US TV comedy scene or those with aspirations to enter a similar field.

Kaling’s story is particularly interesting, as she doesn’t quite fit into the traditional Hollywood ‘mould’, as the child of Indian migrants and a self-professed ‘chubby girl’. Her musings on relationships are particularly refreshing for those who don’t subscribe to the Sex In The City stereotype, with some honest discussions about relationship dynamics presented not in a preachy manner, but as an innocuous and genuine offering of her own opinion. For example, Kaling suggests ‘happiness can come in a bunch of forms, and maybe a marriage with tons of work makes people feel happy. But part of me still thinks … is it really so hard to make it work? What happened to being pals?’

Memoirs and autobiographical pieces, personal as they are, can often fall into monotony. However, Kaling has managed to avoid this. Her snappy essays and subheadings give the reader space to breathe and reflect, and her self-deprecating and joking banter reminds the reader to not take it all too seriously. The use of photos alongside witty captions is rather enjoyable, particularly the photos of Kaling as an androgynous 90s kid in thick glasses and cardigans, and an essay devoted to what she deems her ‘narcissistic’ Blackberry photos.

While there are some genuine laugh-out-loud moments in Kaling’s book, it isn’t necessarily fits-of-laughter type stuff. Furthermore, Kaling’s references to her apparent ‘chubbiness’ eventually spill over the threshold of cute self-deprecating humour. She focuses on the subject very early in the piece, and while it begins as a joke, she refers to her weight time and time again. Such musings obviously serve as catharsis for Kaling, but hearing one person’s rants about the world and their personal insecurities can be grating at times. Nevertheless, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is full of observations that keep the pace going and readers entertained.

While the predominant theme, Kaling’s apparent ‘rise to fame,’ is interesting, the main success of the book comes from her observational essays, as they appeal to a wider audience. Is Everyone Hanging Without Me? is unlikely to create new members of ‘Team Kaling’ or a larger audience for The Office, but nonetheless, Kaling’s book is a pleasurable read, and captures the reader’s attention enough to appreciate her achievements in life so far.

Chelsea McIver is a recent Arts/Commerce graduate from the University of Melbourne and a freelance writer.

It has been a long wait between books for fans of Jeffrey Eugenides: his door-stopper of a novel Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize back in 2002. However, readers hoping for a similar multi-generational epic will be surprised by The Marriage Plot. Middlesex was a clever queering of the familial saga/generational epic, while this novel is a self-consciously conventional,  ‘straight’ narrative.

It’s the eighties, and a cast of bright, go-getting young Ivy Leaguers are on the verge of graduation. The three central characters are each getting to grips with Derrida’s theories of deconstruction while also attempting the even more complex business of deconstructing their desires. Madeleine, the novel’s archetypal ingenue, is an English major from a prosperous family in New Jersey. Mitchell and Leonard (essentially her suitors) study religion and science respectively and hail from humbler backgrounds. So far, so standard. But, this being the 1980s, and the height of the trend for post-structural and postmodern philosophy, Eugenides has Madeleine write her senior thesis on the ‘marriage plot’: the narrative principle of so many nineteenth-century novels, in which the author’s objective is to marry off the characters.

Regrettably, the reader never learn much about how or why Madeline values the classic Victorian romances, although the title for her final essay is a killer: ‘I Thought You’d Never Ask: Some Thoughts on the Marriage Plot’. What is made clear by Madeleine’s interest in the nineteenth-century novelists is that she feels unprepared for adult life in the hard-edged, deconstructionist 1980s.

No matter how is might differ from his other works, The Marriage Plot is about what Eugenides’ books are always about: the drama of coming of age.

The love triangle that develops between Madeleine and the two men is utterly predictable, deliberately so. The adoring Mitchell is, as Madeleine recognises, the ‘smart, sane, parent-pleasing boy’ she should choose, but it’s the charismatic and complex Leonard to whom she is drawn. To Eugenides’ credit, he takes these stereotypes in some interesting directions. Mitchell, for instance, is not only sensitive and devoted but also arrogant and egotistical. Leonard, who veers from manic highs to desperate lows, is also the novel’s most honest and therefore most vulnerable character.  The novel plays with the concept of convention, both social and novelistic, and Eugenides works hard to imbue his central characters with the vitality and sensitivity of early adulthood – the struggle to understand the expectations we have of ourselves and that others have of us.  At his best when it comes to young love, Eugenides – as was the case with his first novel, The Virgin Suicides – captures the sexuality of his characters vividly and convincingly.

Yet The Marriage Plot is a less striking novel than the author’s previous work, and fails to leave the same lasting impression.

In part, I suspect, this comes from the impression given by the title – that the novel’s principal theme, marriage, will also be the subject to which the author can apply the best of his literary talents. However, it is not marriage but religion and manic depression that prove to be the most prominent (and interesting) of the novel’s concerns. After graduation Mitchell decides to go to India on a spiritual pilgrimage. He joins the volunteers working with Mother Teresa only to find himself unable to fully relinquish his ego. Leonard also struggles with his inner demons: a crippling manic-depression that leaves him delusional. For both young men the possibility of outrunning the self is a much desired but impossible outcome.

The book has generated some interesting speculation on the inspiration for the two male leads. Eugenides has spoken of his own experiences volunteering in India in the eighties, and any reader familiar with the late novelist David Foster Wallace will find plenty to recognise in the character of Leonard. Like Wallace – both brilliant and depressed – Leonard also loves philosophy, chews tobacco and (against the better judgment of all) wears a bandanna.

Eugenides has said that this last feature was simply an attempt to tap into the spirit of the eighties: a reference to Axl Rose, in particular. As an explanation, it fails to ring true, particularly because Eugenides is not the sort of writer to opt for cheesy, lazy signposts like these. Eugenides’ subtle strength is his ability to capture the recent past in a gentle but evocative way. The Marriage Plot, for instance, situates the reader in a contemporary American landscape yet untouched by email, mobile phones and social networks, but which doesn’t work hard to make this point. If anything, it is the similarities rather than the differences between now and the 1980s that are striking: insecurity greets college graduates, jobs are hard to come by and moving back home to live with parents is a popular fallback option.

Even at his most conventional, Eugenides is a moving and affecting writer. The Marriage Plot turns out to be a sort of modern-day variation on those old-fashioned narratives by Henry James and Jane Austen, the twist being that the love story doesn’t wind up confirming the value of a heterosexual union but rather the enduring value of the novelistic form.

Dr Caroline Hamilton is a researcher with the Publishing and Communications program at the University of Melbourne. She has a special interest in contemporary American fiction and has written a book about the American author and publisher, Dave Eggers, entitled One Man Zeitgeist.

It has been a long wait between books for fans of Jeffrey Eugenides: his door-stopper of a novel Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize back in 2002. However, readers hoping for a similar multi-generational epic will be surprised by The Marriage Plot. Middlesex was a clever queering of the familial saga/generational epic, while this novel is a self-consciously conventional,  ‘straight’ narrative.

It’s the eighties, and a cast of bright, go-getting young Ivy Leaguers are on the verge of graduation. The three central characters are each getting to grips with Derrida’s theories of deconstruction while also attempting the even more complex business of deconstructing their desires. Madeleine, the novel’s archetypal ingenue, is an English major from a prosperous family in New Jersey. Mitchell and Leonard (essentially her suitors) study religion and science respectively and hail from humbler backgrounds. So far, so standard. But, this being the 1980s, and the height of the trend for post-structural and postmodern philosophy, Eugenides has Madeleine write her senior thesis on the ‘marriage plot’: the narrative principle of so many nineteenth-century novels, in which the author’s objective is to marry off the characters.

Regrettably, the reader never learn much about how or why Madeleine values the classic Victorian romances, although the title for her final essay is a killer: ‘I Thought You’d Never Ask: Some Thoughts on the Marriage Plot’. What is made clear by Madeleine’s interest in the nineteenth-century novelists is that she feels unprepared for adult life in the hard-edged, deconstructionist 1980s.

No matter how is might differ from his other works, The Marriage Plot is about what Eugenides’ books are always about: the drama of coming of age.

The love triangle that develops between Madeleine and the two men is utterly predictable, deliberately so. The adoring Mitchell is, as Madeleine recognises, the ‘smart, sane, parent-pleasing boy’ she should choose, but it’s the charismatic and complex Leonard to whom she is drawn. To Eugenides’ credit, he takes these stereotypes in some interesting directions. Mitchell, for instance, is not only sensitive and devoted but also arrogant and egotistical. Leonard, who veers from manic highs to desperate lows, is also the novel’s most honest and therefore most vulnerable character.  The novel plays with the concept of convention, both social and novelistic, and Eugenides works hard to imbue his central characters with the vitality and sensitivity of early adulthood – the struggle to understand the expectations we have of ourselves and that others have of us.  At his best when it comes to young love, Eugenides – as was the case with his first novel, The Virgin Suicides – captures the sexuality of his characters vividly and convincingly.

Yet The Marriage Plot is a less striking novel than the author’s previous work, and fails to leave the same lasting impression.

In part, I suspect, this comes from the impression given by the title – that the novel’s principal theme, marriage, will also be the subject to which the author can apply the best of his literary talents. However, it is not marriage but religion and manic depression that prove to be the most prominent (and interesting) of the novel’s concerns. After graduation Mitchell decides to go to India on a spiritual pilgrimage. He joins the volunteers working with Mother Teresa only to find himself unable to fully relinquish his ego. Leonard also struggles with his inner demons: a crippling manic-depression that leaves him delusional. For both young men the possibility of outrunning the self is a much desired but impossible outcome.

The book has generated some interesting speculation on the inspiration for the two male leads. Eugenides has spoken of his own experiences volunteering in India in the eighties, and any reader familiar with the late novelist David Foster Wallace will find plenty to recognise in the character of Leonard. Like Wallace – both brilliant and depressed – Leonard also loves philosophy, chews tobacco and (against the better judgment of all) wears a bandanna.

Eugenides has said that this last feature was simply an attempt to tap into the spirit of the eighties: a reference to Axl Rose, in particular. As an explanation, it fails to ring true, particularly because Eugenides is not the sort of writer to opt for cheesy, lazy signposts like these. Eugenides’ subtle strength is his ability to capture the recent past in a gentle but evocative way. The Marriage Plot, for instance, situates the reader in a contemporary American landscape yet untouched by email, mobile phones and social networks, but which doesn’t work hard to make this point. If anything, it is the similarities rather than the differences between now and the 1980s that are striking: insecurity greets college graduates, jobs are hard to come by and moving back home to live with parents is a popular fallback option.

Even at his most conventional, Eugenides is a moving and affecting writer. The Marriage Plot turns out to be a sort of modern-day variation on those old-fashioned narratives by Henry James and Jane Austen, the twist being that the love story doesn’t wind up confirming the value of a heterosexual union but rather the enduring value of the novelistic form.

Dr Caroline Hamilton is a researcher with the Publishing and Communications program at the University of Melbourne. She has a special interest in contemporary American fiction and has written a book about the American author and publisher, Dave Eggers, entitled One Man Zeitgeist.

So you’d think a group of teen-fiction editors would shudder at the thought of actually asking for pitches. And yet the one thing worse than being pitched at relentlessly is only ever being pitched the same ideas. For months all we’ve seen are werewolves, angels and dead girls narrating from beyond the grave. Our desks are groaning under the weight of grim dystopias and paranormal romances (and their love children, which we like to call ‘disnormals’), and finally we thought: is anyone even writing real-world fiction about the secret lives of teenagers? And wouldn’t it be easier if we said we wanted it?

Yes, actually. So the Ampersand Project was born.

Hardie Grant Egmont has published its share of supernatural and speculative fiction, but there’s plenty of room on our list for the sort of real-world books that we loved as teenagers. Think Forever, I Capture The Castle, Looking for Alibrandi and Tomorrow When the War Began (which doesn’t count as dystopian fiction in today’s market: discuss). Incredible real-world fiction does make it onto the shelves, of course – Graffiti Moon, All I Ever Wanted, Six Impossible Things, Stolen and Pink are some of the stand-outs – but unfortunately they’re the exceptions in a saturated disnormal market. And we’re sick of seeing these great books miss out on the coverage and sales they deserve.

We have our theories about why paranormal and dystopian fiction dominate the bestseller lists even though real-world stories are just as good. Readers have always been drawn to books that can make them feel things, either in the pants or in the mind, and other-worldly stories are particularly clever at that. But it’s hardly impossible to do when your book is set on this earth. In any case, your buying decisions might be made for you when you walk into a bookshop’s YA section and find an ocean of red and black covers, punctuated by sad girls wearing beautiful dresses in forests.

So the point of the Ampersand Project is to bring some balance back to the YA scene. We want to find brilliant writers with real-world stories that are as compelling and exciting and funny and sexy as anything else. We’re going to build the profile of this new collection so that emerging writers can use it as a launch pad for their fiction careers. And we’ll back the writers and their books with the kind of marketing support that debut authors would normally not have access to.

With nary a futuristic war zone or vampire in sight, it’s enough to get an editor excited about pitches again.

Submissions for the launch of the Ampersand Project are open until 27 February 2012 and guidelines are available here. Writers should send the first five chapters and a synopsis of their YA novel to ampersand@hardiegrant.com.au.

Marisa Pintado is a commissioning editor at Hardie Grant Egmont and the Ampersand Project.

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/AmpersandYA

Twitter – @AmpersandYA

As a writer-cum-reader, I’m prone to underlining key quotes, plot points, grace notes: all the things I admire and envy about the story in hand. As a chronic word nerd, I circle terms and phrases I’ve never met before, like nef (a model ship), or chatoyant (shifting in lustre). And as a crossword maker, I single out words with great clue potential. Like the day I realised turpentine holds two synonyms – enter and input – or that ogle is ‘go’ short of Google. Later, once the finale is done and dusted, I’ll go back through the book and jot down all these discoveries into my crossword book of spells.

With clue-making in my sights, every doodle is a kind of shorthand. Zigzags mean anagrams, like taipan/piñata/patina. DM is Double Meaning, such as moulder: the maker, and to decay. Slashes demonstrate how certain words can be broken into pieces, like harpo/on or outre/aching. A backward arrow reveals a word’s treasures in reverse, such as pampas revealing two rhymes – sap and map – when spun. Does the habit block my pleasure as a reader? Sometimes. Does it hinder my growth as a writer? Only when I let it. But the internal struggle can be ferocious.

As a teen, before puzzling became a job, I suffered the same fetish, converting Updike and Nabokov into a graphite blizzard, ransacking each novel for quotes and fertile words, or stuff that needed checking in the dictionary. Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess holds the record for deepest vocab. Back in 1985 the book introduced me to sixty-plus words I’d never seen before, from aspergillum (holy-water sprinkler) to skirl (a bagpipe blast). Günter Grass taught me glabrous (hairless); and Margaret Drabble, syllabub (cream dessert).

Nowadays I still scribble in the margins, gathering clue ammo as I read, or juicy passages to savour down the track. Mind you, after so many years of word-harvesting, the vocab frenzy has eased a tad, though a recent exception was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. A sublime book, it almost felt written in LOTE. In the space of one yarn I learnt that gryke is cleft limestone, gambrel is a gabled roof, firedrake a dragon, and pampooties are deerskin moccasins. And that’s just a fraction of the exotica.

That’s why books are rich. More than stories, they are jungles rife with letters and ideas – both the writerly and crossword kind. At least that’s my defence, HB in hand. Of course, if you want to avenge every violated author of the last thirty years, then download this post and scribble on the copy for dear life. Go on, I dare you. Zigzag and squiggle. Slash and loop. Darken the hollow of every o, underline the odd bits and turn my name into Devil Sadat or dead vitals. I deserve no better.

David Astle – alias DA on the puzzle page, and the dictionary guy on SBS’s Letters and Numbers – is the author of Puzzled: Secrets & Clues from a Life Lost in Words. See more of his verbal mania at davidastle.com, or come hear him launch the Writers Victoria’s 2012 programme at the Wheeler Centre this Friday, 9 December at 6pm.

First, the confession: I didn’t end up reading all the books competing in the Tournament. Thea Astley’s A Kindness Cup proved difficult to get a hold of, and Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children was too slow a narration for me to get through, despite following Genevieve Tucker‘s advice to approach it as I would a VCE text.

The act of reading the novels as a group, all at once, has been informative and, most importantly, enjoyable. I filled some gaps in my knowledge of Australian literature but, best of all, discovered some truly wonderful novels. Of course, there were other titles that I didn’t care for, and deciding in each round which novel I thought deserved to move forward in the competition was thought-provoking, if fraught.

In many ways, watching the tournament unfold was a bit like being a Masterchef fan: I got slightly too involved, and felt personally slighted when the adjudication didn’t go ‘my’ way. Watching Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria be dropped from the competition (twice!) and the march of Joan London’s Gilgamesh victorious through the rounds were my two main outrages of the competition; the former was a book that I love-love-loved, and the latter a book that didn’t move me at all. How did a book that first-match judge Anna Krien didn’t expect to move any further in the competition go on to defeat Garner’s The Children’s Bach and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River as well as Carpentaria? Even First Dog on the Moon’s lovely cartoon couldn’t soften the blow of the first crushing zombie round, as my favourite book left the competition for good.

But that’s what a tournament of books is all about, isn’t it? Unlike sport, where the first to cross the line is victorious, celebrating literary excellence is a more subjective caper. It’s a subject we return to again and again, whether pondering the idea of ‘portraying Australian life’ in the Miles Franklin, or questioning male-dominated longlists in prominent literary awards.

But the subjectivity of the tournament is where the real beauty of this competition emerges, because, (please forgive my earnestness!) it has created a space for discussion and reflection. Reading the judges’ eloquent book reviews each round has been a joy, even when I disagreed with the outcomes. The match commentary has been hilarious. The spectator chatter has also been enlightening and entertaining, and through it I’ve met some new like-minded literature boffins, which is fab. In short: talking about books FTW!

Of course, the fun is not over yet, and we are just weeks (days?) away from the end of the Tournament of Books. My finals favourites have all been dropped from the competition, but I’m still eagerly anticipating the grand final round.

Which title do you think will be crowned the inaugural Meanjin Tournament of Books Great Australian Novel?

Lisa Dempster is the Director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival and author of Neon Pilgrim.

Set against the romantically retro backdrop of California in the 1980s, the essay centres around the writer’s unlikely friendship with a gorgeous and popular girl called Courtney. Jon-Jon – a nickname I already felt entitled to use – remembers afternoons they spent at the beach after school in matching seashell necklaces, giggling in a shared changing room as they tried on leggings and halter-tops. With my love for the dramatic and people with more courage than me to be themselves, the story made my little heart leap. How could I not be entranced by a guy who would show up to his high school prom in a skirt, tights, high heels and red lipstick – with the hottest girl at school on his arm?

The story is expanded on in Jon-Jon’s memoir, The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, which was released in May this year. The book had been stirring up excitement in the New York literary scene since Random House gave him a ridiculously huge advance on it three years ago. In a way, he’s that very postmodern kind of celebrity who becomes famous for simply being himself. But the thing about Jon-Jon is that although he claims to have achieved nothing in his life, he’s quite brilliant. Not many people with degrees from Columbia and NYU – plus a resumé that includes a few high-profile law firms and the New York Review of Books – would call themselves a failure as he does.

Jon-Jon’s Vogue article ends with a scene twenty years later, when he meets up with Courtney again and they buy matching pairs of Billy Blues trousers. He was wearing these same trousers when I picked him up in a cab from the Sofitel, where the Melbourne Writers Festival had put him up for his stay in Australia. The cab driver, who had been warning me about how I had to be careful with this older American man, glanced out the window suspiciously. ‘That bald guy?’ he said.

Yes, that bald guy. Jon-Jon is striking to look at, with that kind of incredible coolness that comes from more than just his Gucci sunglasses. Tattoos run up and down his arms, with a chain of triangles inked across his throat like a necklace. I remember reading an article in the New York Observer that opened by describing Jon-Jon’s pelvic bones, and looking at him now in his tiny tank top and low-slung trousers I kind of understood why. With a body like an Olympic swimmer, you would never guess that he’s forty-three years old, or that he’s spent his whole life feeling insecure about how he looks. In his lipgloss and his wedge heels, he exudes a sort of nonchalant glamour that seems to say, ‘This is me, and I don’t care.’

The day before, I had approached Jon-Jon after his reading at the Writers’ Festival and asked him to sign my book. Naturally, I was horribly awkward, blushing and stumbling over my words, but he apparently found my lameness touching – and by a strange stroke of luck he invited me to spend the day with him. It was the first time he’d left the United States in twelve years, he said, but he hates exploring alone. Nam Le had given him a list of his favourite places in Melbourne, and Jon-Jon decided he wanted to go to them all. ‘It will be a day of splurging!!!’ his text message that morning said. ‘Don’t forget, I’m treating.’

Most of Nam’s suggestions involved food, so we set out on an eating safari: early lunch at Three Bags Full, second lunch at Thanh Thanh, apple strudel at Pellegrini’s, dinner at Coda, cocktails at Madame Brussels. It was quite a feast for someone who lives mostly on what he calls a ‘squirrel’s diet’ of nuts and berries. (He had even brought a stash of nuts all the way from the States with him; when I told him we actually have nuts in Australia, he grinned sheepishly and said, ‘Yeah, that’s what my mother told me.’) Still, despite his intense fear of saturated fat he loves menus, and he told me that often in hotels he’ll just look at the room service menu for hours before going to sleep.

One of Jon-Jon’s most endearing qualities is the way he finds his own weirdness so amusing. It would be understandable for someone with so many phobias and obsessions to be withdrawn and awkward, but unlike me social anxiety clearly isn’t one of his neuroses. He’s effusive and chatty and likes to cuddle – every so often throughout the day he would just stop in the middle of the street to give me a hug.

It’s a strange kind of intimacy, feeling like you know someone from their creative work, when really you don’t know them at all. Having read a whole book about Jon-Jon’s life put me in a peculiar position of wanting to get all deep and meaningful, but feeling as if I knew things I had no right to know. From his book, I knew that as a teenager he silently panicked about having a third testicle, which turned out to be a hernia. I knew that his first sexual experience was a blowjob from a brazen 14-year-old stranger in a mall parking lot. He describes himself as ‘vain, prissy, neurotic, body obsessed’, and part of me wanted to talk about how much I relate to that. Then I remembered: we don’t actually know each other. We stood on Victoria Street huddled together, his chin resting on my head, and I could feel his heartbeat through his thin cotton tank top.

At one point in the afternoon, we ended up at The Paperback Bookshop on Bourke Street. Jon-Jon picked up a beautifully bound copy of Melbourne by Sophie Cunningham and said, ‘See, this is why the book can’t die.’ He decided he wanted to buy something to support such a nice little bookshop, and we spent a good forty-five minutes trying to choose something. Then, remembering that I’d told him my mum was jealous of my getting to spend the day with him, he decided to buy a copy of his book to sign and give to her. It was such a small gesture, but it was one of the sweetest things a man has ever done for me, and if there’s one thing I would want people to know about Jon-Jon Goulian, the man in the gray flannel skirt, that would be it.

– Rebecca Howden is assistant editor of Monument magazine. Her article ‘Boys in Skirts: Andrej Pejic and Androgyny’ appears in Kill Your Darlings Issue Seven.

I waited for the literary exorcism that never came. I’d broken the news to my family, my friends, my former colleagues at an independent bookshop, fellow students in my fancy publishing course, my one-year-old cousin, that guy I met on the tram the other day … I read romance books. A lot of them. I expected someone to thrust Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom with all the fervour of a priest brandishing his crucifix. And yet, I’m still waiting for my literary day of judgment. Turns out that my friends trust my taste, even though they might not share it. And well, everyone knows I’m a sucker for entertaining and well-written books, whether it be Anna Funder’s All That I Am or Meredith Duran’s A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal.

The first romance book I bought was about an aristocratic concubine. It contained political powerplays, zingy Wilde-esque one-liners and, it has to be said, plenty of dirty sex, all set in nineteenth-century Venice. This book was Loretta Chase’s Your Scandalous Ways. I’d been directed to it by various book blogs and had finally hunted down a copy at a second-hand bookshop. It wasn’t pretty, with heaving bosoms and airbrushed abs screaming from the cover, but I convinced myself to buy it. I emerged from my house the next day a changed reader. Just as the heroine Francesca throws herself out of the hero’s arms and into a Venice canal, so too did I want to throw myself into romance books. This was a genre that could be enjoyable and challenging – thanks to the talents of some incredible writers – just like any other.

Bettie Sharpe’s retelling of Cinderella, Ember, is another wonderful example. Except that ‘wonderful’ is too limp a word to describe Sharpe’s writing. It’s harsh, and fierce, and funny. And thank goodness, Sharpe has hardened Cinderella up from the girl who thinks a pumpkin is a pretty sweet ride. But Ember has to be tough. Her mum died young, her dad’s a bit of an airhead (he dies too), and Prince Charming is so-called because he was blessed by his fairy godmother at birth to have a charm that’s irresistible. So Ember does what any girl would do. She learns dark magic so she can scare and manipulate her way to immunity from the prince’s charm. She’s not nice. She’s not soft-spoken. She’s not sentimental. Ember shows Samuel L. Jackson what a badass motherfucker’s really like. And that’s a little confronting.

After all, Cinderella’s meant to be nice. She’s meant to be valued because of how sweet, delightful and beautiful she is. Ember’s none of these things. She’s loyal, talented, intelligent and a bit of a bitch. In fact, I might bring out the f-word: Sharpe’s retelling is almost, well, feminist. Ember‘s like drinking a chocolate thickshake after a life of drinking tap water.

Not every romance book has a memorable heroine. Some of them are soft and gentle, undiscovered land for the strong male heroes to discover. And some of the heroes make you want to call Assholes Anonymous to come and pick up their escaped member. That’s why I’m so happy that one of the booksellers I worked with last year introduced me to the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books website.

The hilarious woman behind this website, Sarah Wendell, has guided me towards some fantastic books, including The Iron Duke by Meljean Brook. With zombies, Huns, zeppelins, a plot to destroy the world and a meltingly good romance, The Iron Duke is like Indiana Jones on feminist fantasy crack. But fantasy and romance combined? Kids, you’ve got to be able to disregard snide coming from two directions to read this book. But it’s worth it. Mina is a Detective Inspector with the London Metropolitan Police who is investigating a dead body found on the Iron Duke’s estate. A dead body is never a simple matter, and the plot steamrolls into battle against some crazed, yet powerful, moralists. Brook’s engaging and clean writing gets you so caught up in the story you forget you’re reading at all.

Apart from some gentle mockery directed at the cover (three words: naked man chest), my fellow indie booksellers were quite enthusiastic about my reading tastes. Some co-workers even shared them. And we ended up getting a few romance books into the shop, with Lauren Willig’s The Secret History of the Pink Carnation looking damn fine sitting next to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

It’s my professional opinion that more indie bookshops should stock romance books. Not only are many of them entertaining, they are often educational, having taught me a variety of historical insults and sexual positions. Well, not really. But I know you’ve just been waiting for me to address the big white bed in the room: the poundingly, thrustingly good sex that romance characters apparently have on a regular basis. All I’m going to say is that it’s nice to see female characters having good sex for a change. But it’s not just gratuitous. Sex in romance books functions as a plot device to take the characters to the next relationship stage, to create drama, to demonstrate character, and to also make these books delightfully salacious.

I closed Your Scandalous Ways, Ember and The Iron Duke feeling satisfied, entertained and challenged. And sometimes, that’s precisely what you want from a book.

Lauren Whybrow works in publishing (sadly, not at Mills & Boon), and spends the rest of her time reading.

The first thing I did after finishing Anna Funder’s debut novel All That I Am was to order a copy of Ernst Toller’s autobiography I Was a German. Toller features as a ‘character’ in Funder’s much anticipated book. We meet him holed up in a New York hotel in 1939, increasingly despairing of shaking the United States out of its apathy about the Nazi threat. Having failed as a script writer he spends his days dictating a new version of his autobiography to his secretary, a version that will include the interior, emotional detail missing from the first. No emotional ingredient is more important than Dora Fabian – activist, feminist and the brave soul who smuggled Toller’s manuscript out of Germany. In Funder’s version of events Dora is the great love of Toller’s life.

I was curious to know if this revised autobiography actually existed or if it was one of the narrative devices employed by Funder in the service of her story. It’s the sort of curiosity Funder’s publishers have pre-empted by emblazoning the words ‘A Novel’ on the cover of the book. This is a work of fiction, the cover declares. The story contained herein is a product of the author’s imagination and no correspondence will be entered into. But the declaration is undercut by the use of real names (Toller, Fabian, Bertold Jacob, Hans Wesseman) and the tantalising appendix on sources, in which Funder says

When Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933 my friend Ruth and her friends fled into exile. From there, they tried to bring him down. This is their story, or what I have made of it. It is reconstructed from fossil fragments, much as you might draw skin and feathers over an assembly of dinosaur bones, to fully see the beast’.

This is an open invitation for anthropological inquiry into the beast that Funder has created. Curiosity about which parts of the story were ‘bones’, and which, ‘feathers’, distracted me from the compelling, rich narrative.

As is to be expected from the author of Stasiland, the brilliant account of how the German Democratic Republic’s secret police colonised the lives of its citizens, Funder evokes the Weimar era with a tactile, even claustrophobic, clarity. Berlin has all the heady decadence one expects, complete with an evening in a night club where naked statues provide the entertainment and the patrons snort cocaine. When the characters at the centre of the novel are forced into exile by the rising Nazi machine, their dislocation in a London that doesn’t really want them (or at least doesn’t want their warnings of what is coming) is palpable. In their former lives, they were movers and shakers in the cultural and political life of Germany. In London, they must battle anonymity, language barriers and the baffling social subtleties of the English upper class. They must also be seen to honour the condition of their visas – no political activity – or face deportation back to Germany. It is a test that some will face with jaw-dropping moral courage. And some will catastrophically fail.

This is an important story. I – English born and a historian by training – knew very little about how actively the Gestapo harassed and brutalised political refugees in London. I knew a little about Dora Fabian but not enough to place her alongside resistance heroines like Sophie Scholl or Helene Moszkiewiez. There are moments in this book where readers must stare down uncomfortable contemporary parallels, such as when the St Louis is refused entry to the USA and ultimately returns its boatload of Jews to Germany. More than 250 of the ship’s passengers died in the holocaust.

The hybrid of fiction and history is not without its pleasures. For those of us with unfashionably modernist compulsions to sort the ‘real’ from the ‘fictional’ sleuthing has its rewards. It’s a pleasure Funder well understands, as she recently told me: ‘I think that detectives and novelists have overlapping areas of psychological concern – both are interested in accounting for human behaviours from the evidence we see of them.’ But the form also creates a tension that a work of straight-up fiction avoids. Just as it takes time for gruesome events to comfortably form the butt of jokes, does it take time for historical events to be treated with the licence and informality of invention? We are dealing here with living memory. Indeed, one of the characters (Ruth Becker) is based on Funder’s friend Ruth Blatt, whose extraordinary trajectory brought her to Melbourne via a German prison and exile in Shanghai.

But in Funder’s novel Ruth is not transplanted to Melbourne, but to Sydney. And she appears on the page not as Ruth Blatt – her real name – but as Ruth Becker; perhaps Funder’s nod to the liberties she has taken in imagining her life. By Funder’s own account, Ruth never spoke about her relationship with either Toller or Fabian in Funder’s presence. Fabian and Blatt were not cousins – as the novel has it – but friends. These re-workings of historical fact into imagined fiction make sense when the work is approached as a novel – that is, a form with certain conventions. So, the shift from ‘real’ Melbourne to ‘imagined’ Sydney creates a contrast between the diamantine beauty of the harbour and the grey, dour London of the preceding chapters: precisely the light-and-shade contrast that fiction works with. Making Ruth and Dora cousins is a useful shorthand for their bond and sometimes conflicted loyalty.

Wise and considered readers and critics I know are recording these ‘shorthands’ as factual on their blogs and in their articles. When I asked Funder what she made of this tendency she said that ‘there are boundless inaccuracies out there. I provided notes in the novel both to honour sources, and to enable people to go and find out what is on the historical record if they are interested’. The credentials Funder established with Stasiland perhaps account for a good part of the expectation that Funder has stuck close to the historical record in all things. Funder told me that in All That I Am ‘I made up the plot. I made up the characters’ interior lives, interactions, gestures, relationships, involvements … That said, everything that happens in it might have happened, there is nothing important in a plot sense in it that is contradicted by the historical record as I came across it.’

Funder resolved the history/fiction tensions in Stasiland by explicitly writing herself into the non-fiction narrative. She situated herself as a sympathetic, inquiring and insightful historical observer of the German Democratic Republic. In All that I am Funder is absent. She does not tell us when she is speculating, embellishing or outright inventing. We are left to ferret this out for ourselves – a process that has its joys, but can prove mightily distracting when one wants to get lost in such a fascinating story.

S.A. Jones holds a PhD in history from the University of Western Australia. She is the author of the novel Red Dress Walking and numerous essays.

About a month ago, a book called The Sending, by Australian writer Isobelle Carmody, was spotted in libraries a month ahead of its official release date. Far from the steel chains, security guards and on-pain-of-death secrecy surrounding the final Harry Potter book, the 756-page, penultimate instalment of the much loved Obernewtyn series had made it into the world without much fuss. But at fan site Obernewtyn.net, a number of the community’s 2799 members were buzzing with the unexpected news. They had, after all, been waiting for the book for three years. In a sense, some might have been waiting for almost twenty-five years.

Rewind to my childhood. My school library introduced me to many of my all-time favourite books, among them the usual suspects: Jane Eyre, Matilda, Pride and Prejudice (okay, also the Sweet Valley High books). But the first of its offerings to give me a taste of the book-groupie syndrome that would stand me in good stead for the Harry Potters was a small, unassuming paperback: Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn.

Obernewtyn, published in 1987, tells the story of an orphan, Elspeth Gordie, whose world bears the poisonous scars of a recent nuclear tragedy. Elspeth is suspected of having ‘mutant powers’ – she can read minds and speak with animals in her head – which are frowned upon by the governing Council and a dangerously cultish faction called the Herders. But someone, at least, is interested in these powers: mysterious people come to take her away into the mountains, to a castle called Obernewtyn.

I don’t remember if I’d read fantasy books before Obernewtyn – I might have been nine or ten years old ­– but I was hooked. Carmody, the eldest of eight children, told stories to keep her younger siblings in line, and the series reveals that she is an enchanting storyteller, capable of winning characterisation and emphatic world-building. Elspeth’s resilience and resourcefulness are the equal of Jane Eyre’s, and opened my young eyes to selfless heroism. The old dictum ‘books are friends’ also definitely applied here; as Mandy Brett, judging Obernewtyn for the Meanjin Tournament of Books, quipped: ‘The loner protagonist with powers is a classic wish-fulfilment vehicle for bookish adolescent girls.’

My history with the series meant that the release of The Sending had loomed on my reading horizon since its predecessor, The Stone Key, was released in 2008. And now that it’s here, and I’ve read it, I’m in some pain. Of course, part of the tragedy is that one of my longest-standing relationships is coming slowly to an end; I’ll now have to turn elsewhere for examples of interspecies parlay. But it’s not only that: The Sending is damnably slow, partly due to a HP7-like decision to split the final book into two, which leaves – I assume – the bulk of the action to the forthcoming seventh volume. This means that most of The Sending is made up of a long journey – fires lit, beasts encountered, friends well met – punctuated liberally with plot recaps that are wearying for a reader who’s familiar with the series. Yes, it’s a return to a known and beloved world, but it didn’t deliver the satisfaction I was expecting.

What effect did this hiccup have on my fifteen-year journey as Elspeth’s comrade? Not much, it turns out. Though I’m disappointed with the latest segment of the adventure, I know there’s not long to go until I find out how it will end for Elspeth. She’s not like other childhood friends, whose news one is happy gleaning from Facebook updates and social pages snaps. No, a friendship like this can only be appropriately farewelled like this: me wrapped in a Snuggie and clasping the final book, which hopefully weighs at least a kilogram; processed snacks at hand; rain beating on the window; and a do-not-disturb sign on the door. Until then, Elspeth.

Estelle Tang is Online Editor of Kill Your Darlings.