A darkly humorous exploration of class, sex, and shattered dreams
Paul Dalla Rosa, the 19-year-old Sam washes dishes at the Pancake Saloon, for a paycheck that doesn’t quite cover his mounting debt and parasocial relationship with a cam boy. In, the narrator works a managerial job at a Comme des Garçons store in Melbourne, narrowly missing his big break with Rei Kawakubo.
TW: What was the process of writing your first collection like? I was curious whether you worked on the stories separately, over a long period of time, because there’s a real sense of unity between them.working on the book for seven years, but it was pretty apparent, pretty early, that I wanted it to be a collection.
TW: There’s a big focus on work throughout the book, and it’s placed in contrast with the characters’ inner lives in quite unhealthy ways. PDR: Yeah, definitely. There’s this difficult thing with literature now, which is you actually can’t represent the present without those things, because it would just be inauthentic. It’d be very bizarre to read a novel set now and nobody ever gets a text message or an email. In the history of the novel, it’s always tied to new forms of communication or technology.
Sometimes that was a worry when I was writing the book. Particularly if I was writing a story five years ago, and it had to do with something [relevant to that time], now you can be worried … like, will anyone appreciate it? Will anyone care? But that is the wrong way of looking at it. Because to understand these things, or to really think about them, takes more time. I think you have to take time to understand them, and I think art takes time.