‘Most personal book I’ve written’: Trent Dalton on his new novel, the ‘garbage’ origin story of Boy Swallows Universe and why he wants to be Marty McFly

Boy Swallows Universe sensation Trent Dalton unveils his “most personal” new project yet and reveals the “load of garbage” origin story behind his global Netflix hit.

You probably know TRENT DALTON as the writing sensation behind Boy Swallows Universe – the Aussie No1 novel that became a global Netflix phenomenon – plus a string of other bestsellers like Lola In The Mirror and Love Stories.

But he’s also an award-winning journalist: so, with a deeply personal new project on the boil, he sat down for an interview – with himself. From secret books to superpowers, this is what he learned...

What’s on your horizon?

A new book called Gravity Let Me Go. It will land across Oz in late-September and I’m currently filled with my usual feelings of profound gratitude and crippling dread. The dread comes from the fact I think this might be the most personal book I’ve ever written. It’s a marriage story buried inside a murder mystery. It’s a story about a journalist, a husband, a father of two living in the northern suburbs of Brisbane who becomes so obsessed with the true crime scoop of his lifetime that he almost misses an even bigger scoop: the one about true love and the very meaning of his life.

My aim was to write something that might feel familiar to the eight-million-plus married people in this country and to the 70 per cent of Australians who live in the suburbs, while also being my version of a rattling noir-ish whodunit. Ultimately, I think the feelings of dread are a good thing because I think writers can benefit from discomfort; from working in an imaginative space just close enough to the bone to make every word matter.

‘The one about true love’ ... Trent Dalton with wife Fiona Franzmann. The couple, who have two children, co-wrote the stage version of his book Love Stories, which is bound for Sydney’s Riverside Theatre this year. Photo: Lyndon Mechielsen.

How many times have you watched Boy Swallows Universe on Netflix?

Once, from start to finish. And then I think I’ve skipped to the final scene of the final episode about a hundred times after the kids have gone to bed and it’s just me alone with the TV remote. I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to tell you that the final scene is a simple scene of a simple family eating dinner in the suburbs of Brisbane on a balmy summer night.

All I ever wanted when I was a kid was for my mum and dad to get back together after breaking up before I could even write my name. My beautiful mum and dad loved each other dearly, they just couldn’t live with each other. I wrote a semi-autobiographical book called Boy Swallows Universe that imagined a world in which they might one day be able to live together. Then Netflix came along and turned that book into a series and added on a scene at the end that showed me exactly what such a world might have looked like. It’s so beautiful to me, that scene, that I can’t stop watching it and every time I do it makes me cry tears of joy.

Maybe I think if I watch that scene enough times I might be able to convince myself that it’s real.

‘All I ever wanted when I was a kid was for my mum and dad to get back together’ ... Trent Dalton as a youngster.

‘Then Netflix came along’ ... a scene from Boy Swallows Universe, with Hollywood heavyweights Travis Fimmel and Bryan Brown, plus Lee Halley as Gus Bell and (right) Felix Cameron as the character based on Trent Dalton, Eli Bell.

Tell us a secret. What is one thing people may not know about you?

Twenty-four years ago I shared half a low-set two-room shoebox rental house with a British World War II veteran in Windsor, Brisbane, who conversed at length with his ginger cat every night after six VB tallies. To distract myself from this dear old man’s increasingly troubled nocturnal ramblings, I started to try my hand at writing a book. I called this book Armour. The title came from the fact my three older brothers and I were obsessed with the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. All the streets where we grew up in this particular Housing Commission cluster of Bracken Ridge, Brisbane, were named after Arthur and his knights. Arthur Street. Gawain Road. Percivale Street. Lancelot Street. I always thought it was so hopeful and optimistic that a place bursting daily with innumerable social sores was named after such romantic and noble figures of mythology.

I feverishly devoted 40,000 words to Armour before I wisely realised it was a load of garbage and I swapped bad writing for reading the works of good writers and, after doing that for 18 years, I turned the bones of Armour into my first novel, Boy Swallows Universe.

‘Good music always has a new revelation’ ... guitarist Will Sargeant and singer Ian McCulloch of UK rockers Echo and the Bunnymen.

Why does music always figure so heavily in your novels?

Almost every waking hour that I spend on this earth, there’s some form of a song rattling through my head. These songs fall out of me in whistles or the taps of a wooden spoon on a fry pan edge or headbanger slaps of my palms on a steering wheel and sometimes even sentences in my books. Usually one song will rotate for hours on repeat in my head until I’ve hummed it into oblivion. Today’s song has been Nothing Lasts Forever by Echo and the Bunnymen. This is because I’ve been reading edits of Gravity Let Me Go and one of the characters in the book is wearing an Echo and the Bunnymen T-shirt. This caused me to play, after I dropped my daughter to uni, my favourite Echo song, Nothing Lasts Forever, on the drive home.

Of course, good music always has a new revelation for us and today’s revelation for me was that the lyrics of Nothing Lasts Forever could actually define what I’ve been trying to say in all my books: “All the shadows and the pain are comin’ to you” …. but the good news is … “nothing ever lasts forever”.

Back to the Brighton ... Michael J Fox (left) as Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd as Doc in 1985 blockbuster Back To The Future.

If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

Time travel. I’d pull my own version of a Marty McFly and go back in time to 1982 and I’d go down to the Brighton Hotel and become friends with my dad by talking about the wonders of Lennon & McCartney and the films of Jack Nicholson. I’d tell him about the wonders of the future – FaceTime, electric cars and Billy Slater’s chip kick try in the 2004 State of Origin – and he’d be so awed by my words that he’d listen to me when I told him he should work harder on fixing his marriage.

‘The wonders of the future’ ... Trent Dalton’s next book, Gravity Let Me Go, will be out in September 2025.

Trent Dalton’s Gravity Let Me Gowill be published later this year by HarperCollins.

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Originally published as ‘Most personal book I’ve written’: Trent Dalton on his new novel, the ‘garbage’ origin story of Boy Swallows Universe and why he wants to be Marty McFly