Markus Zusak: 'I was just failing and failing, over and over again'

Author Markus Zusak.Credit: Tim Bauer

In April 2014, the author Markus Zusak gave a TEDx Talk at the Sydney Opera House about the benefits of failure. Dressed smart casual, with a winning smile and self-effacing manner, Zusak recounted humorous and occasionally heart-warming stories about how, as a child, he had bombed out of his athletics carnival in front of his entire family, and how as a 20-something he had struggled to write his breakthrough novel, The Book Thief. His thesis was that failure could be enabling, prodding us to greater creative heights, and that problems weren’t problems per se, but the grit in the oyster that becomes the pearl in the shell. “Maybe the adage that positive thinking is what we need doesn’t always ring true,” he said. “Maybe what we need sometimes is just a little bit of negative thinking.” To the casual observer, Zusak appeared to be on top of the world, since only a man of such comfortable success could be so candid about failure.

In fact, Zusak was deeply miserable. It was almost nine years after the release of The Book Thief, and his much awaited follow-up novel, Bridge of Clay, was yet to materialise. Crippled by self-doubt and weighed down by expectation, Zusak had produced hundreds of pages of false starts and rewrites; he had scrapped whole sections of the manuscript and begun again; at one stage he had become fixated on the first page, which he rewrote, by his own estimate, thousands of times. He was under pressure from his publishers, who had already extended his deadline, and from his fans, who were screaming for a new book. His friends were worried for him; his wife was worried for him. He was worried for him. “It was awful,” he tells me. “Nothing I did was working. I was just failing and failing, over and over again.”

Zusak didn’t know it then, but he had another three years of failure to go. By the time he was finished, it would be 13 years since the release of The Book Thief, something close to an eternity in publishing terms. “I’m really lucky that it’s not part of my make-up to suffer depression,” he says. “Because if anything was going to take me there, it would have been this.”

Zusak gave a TedX Talk about failure in 2014 – while suffering crippling writer's block.Credit: Jennifer Polixenni Brankin

Zusak lives in Woollahra, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, in a brown brick townhouse with his wife Dominika, his two young children, Kitty and Noah, a pair of cranky dogs, and a 13-year-old cat named Brutus. The family is renting here while their home, a two-storey Victorian house around the corner, gets renovated. Despite the fact that they moved in a year ago, the townhouse still feels provisional, with a floor-to-ceiling mirror leaning against a wall in the kitchen, books stacked on the floor and little piles of Lego heaped in the corners. There are also boxes of what I initially assume are cutlery or glasses but which are actually full of what publishers call “tip-ins”, loose sheets that an author signs before being slipped into copies of the finished book. Top-tier writers might sign perhaps a few hundred tip-ins. Zusak is in the process of autographing 120,000. “I’m up to about 86,000,” he says, handing me a sheaf of them. “It’s a menial task that I can just sit down and do.” Compared to actually writing the book, he says, “it’s paradise”.

Billed by its publisher as the “most anticipated book of the decade”, Bridge of Clay tells the story of Clay Dunbar, the fourth of five fractious brothers whose mother has died and whose father has left them. The book opens with the father returning and asking the boys to help him build a bridge on his property in the bush. Only Clay takes up the challenge. If the premise sounds simple, the book is anything but, its narrative crinkled and concertinaed by Zusak’s chronological two-stepping and cryptic, often allusive prose. The result is a complex, big-hearted, multi-generational Australian epic, highly evocative and rich in idiom, that sprawls across 580 pages, much in the manner of Colleen McCullough, or Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet.

Despite the hype around the book’s release, and the fact that, in publishing circles at least, he is pretty much a rock star, Zusak is, at 43, almost entirely without ego. When I tell him I haven’t finished his book yet, he actually apologises for its length, all the while fussing about making me a cup of tea and asking if I’d like anything else, a glass of water, perhaps, or one of the triple-choc brownies that were bought especially for our interview. Dominika says he was always like this – “really humble, really genuine” – even when they met, 18 years ago. But it might also have to do with his having got his start writing young adult fiction, a genre that was then nowhere near as fashionable as it is today.

While he had been writing since he was 16, it wasn’t until 1999, when he was 24, that his first book was published. Called The Underdog, the novel has at its centre Cameron and Ruben Wolfe, two scrappy teenage brothers who battle to build a life in Sydney’s inner city. The book was followed by the sequels Fighting Ruben Wolfe (2000) and When Dogs Cry (2001). Next came The Messenger (2002), an unlikely tale of redemption featuring a 19-year-old cab driver and habitual underachiever named Ed Kennedy. But it was The Book Thief that really made his name. Set in Nazi Germany in 1939, the novel tells the story of little Leisel Meminger, who is sent to live with foster parents, Rosa and Hans Hubermann, in the fictional city of Molching. Like Bridge of Clay, the novel is populated by a cast of boldly drawn characters, including Max Vandenburg, a Jewish fist-fighter sheltered by the Hubermanns in their basement, and the foster father, Hans Hubermann, with whom Leisel bonds over their nascent love of books and words. Suffused with the claustrophobic intensity of a fable, the novel features episodes of intense suffering and survival – Leisel’s six-year-old brother dies in the first 20 pages – most of them based on stories told to Zusak by his parents, who were post-war immigrants. Most crucially, it is narrated by Death, the reaper of souls, who, rather than relishing his work, is left burnt-out by all the killing.

Zusak tells me that he never expected the book, which was released in 2005, to be so successful. “It’s set in Nazi Germany, it’s narrated by Death, almost everyone dies and it’s 580 pages long,” he says. “I wouldn’t buy it!” And yet it went on to sell 16 million copies in 30 languages, changing his life in ways he couldn’t possibly have imagined. There were jet-setting book tours, speaking gigs everywhere from Brazil to Bhutan, and a Hollywood movie starring Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson, all of it accompanied by the kind of lucre most writers only dream of. He likens the experience to being “hit by lightning”. But, of course, there was a downside. “The success of The Book Thief made me realise that the stakes were higher,” he says. “It suddenly meant that everyone was watching.”

Sophie Nelisse, Emily Watson and Geoffrey Rush in the film adaptation of The Book Thief.

Writers cite all sorts of reasons for not being able to write, or at least not being able to write anything good. Harper Lee blamed distractions, Truman Capote had a breakdown, Samuel Taylor Coleridge got hooked on opium. When I ask Zusak about his main problem with finishing Bridge of Clay, he throws his head back and laughs. “What I should do is come up with a list of the top 40 problems!”

Zusak first had the idea for the book when he was 20 and still living with his parents in Engadine, in Sydney’s southern suburbs. “I thought of the title, and saw lots of different meanings in it,” he says. “Clay as a boy’s name, clay as a material, something that can be moulded into anything but needs fire to set it.” But it wasn’t until after the release of The Book Thief, in late 2005, that he began “writing some things down”. His publisher, Pan Macmillan, set a deadline for 2010, which gave him a good four years.

And yet it wasn’t long before he ran into trouble. He wrote chapter one, about 50 pages, in the first few days, but wasn’t happy with it. “The voice wasn’t right,” he says. And so he went back to write it again. He rewrote the first page, but still didn’t like it. So he wrote it again. And again, and again, and again. Eventually he decided to look at the rest of the chapter, which he still wasn’t happy with. And so he went back to the first page, and rewrote it. “It became like an addiction,” he says.

For a time he also became preoccupied by what he saw as a lack of quirkiness. “The Book Thief was a pretty quirky book,” he says. “I felt I needed something similar with Bridge of Clay to carry it along.” Then he realised that this was a mistake: Bridge of Clay was not The Book Thief. It was more mature, more complex, more sophisticated. He told himself to trust the reader and to ignore The Book Thief. But The Book Thief would not be ignored. “One of the early reviews for The Book Thief said something like, ‘Death could use a lesson in show don’t tell’,” Zusak says. “And so suddenly, I am writing the first chapter of Bridge of Clay and I’m thinking, ‘Is this all telling and no showing?’ You start second-guessing yourself and the voices get into your head.”

Then there was the choice of narrator. The Book Thief was, of course, narrated by Death, a hard act to follow. For a long time, Zusak struggled to find a similarly commanding voice for Bridge of Clay. He tried telling the story through each of the five brothers, but that didn’t work, so he tried the mother, and then the father, and even the sister of one of the neighbours. (In the end, he tried eight different narrators before settling on Matthew, the oldest of the brothers.) Every change of narrator, meanwhile, had flow-on effects for other characters, some of whom had to be rewritten or removed altogether. “Each action had a reaction, and it usually wasn’t a good one,” he says.

According to Cate Paterson, Zusak’s publisher at Pan Macmillan, “Markus knew more what he didn’t want to do than what he did want to do. And so it became a matter of trial and error.”

Paterson and Zusak began reading through sections of the book together, and throwing around ideas. It appeared to work. As the 2010 deadline loomed, Zusak had 300 pages written, and was confident he could deliver the remaining 200 “pretty fast”. Paterson cranked up the marketing machine: she budgeted for a Christmas 2010 release. She announced the on-sale date. She even sent Zusak to Leading Edge, Australia’s largest independent booksellers’ conference, in March 2010, to read from the novel. “Then in May, at the very last moment, he emails me saying, ‘I can’t do it, it’s not going to happen.’” Paterson says she felt like driving over to Zusak’s house and “punching him in the head”. Instead, she walked around the block to calm down.

Meanwhile, Zusak went back to page one.

The novelist Norman Mailer once referred to the art of writing as “spooky”. Zusak says he has always looked at himself “purely as a tradesman”. You work every day, for as long as you can. You just sit and do it. But as the years went by without any discernible progress, he became increasingly despondent. “When he gets really stressed he sleeps,” Dominika says. “He just goes back to bed. He was never physical with letting it out, no tantrums, that’s not his personality. He just receded into himself. It was very hard to reach him.”

Zusak says he could usually divorce his feelings about the book from his family life. “You look at your kids and realise that there are a lot of good things to be grateful for.” But compartmentalising has its limits. One night, during dinner, Zusak’s then eight-year-old daughter, Kitty, told a story about how one of the girls at her school had brought in some pancakes for her birthday.

Zusak and his wife Dominika, who says he "just receded into himself" while struggling with the book.

Zusak asked her what the pancakes were like. Kitty said she didn’t know, because another girl had taken hers and eaten it. Zusak asked her what she did then. “I told her, ‘Oh, that’s not very nice,’” his daughter said. There was something about Kitty’s response, her rote acquiescence, that awoke in Zusak a veritable volcano of pent-up failure and frustration. “Well, you know what you should have done, don’t you?” he told Kitty. “You should have punched her in the face!” Kitty stared at him. Dominika said, “Don’t say that!” Zusak shot back: “No, no, that’s what she deserved. If you don’t want to get pushed around, then that’s what she should have done. Punched her in the head!”

It was around this time that Paterson went into what she calls “amateur psychiatrist” mode. “We tried various ways to get Markus going. We’d have monthly check-ins, but that just ended up driving him crazy. So then we said, ‘Okay, I’ll let him go for a year.’ That was around 2012. That didn’t work either. He didn’t get anything done.” She tried reverse psychology, and suggested that Zusak give the book away and go back to teaching. (Zusak has a diploma of education and briefly worked as a casual high school teacher in his 20s.) “He hated that idea. It just made him angry.” Paterson rang Dominika. “I said, ‘Am I missing something?’ But Dominika said, ‘Nup, I don’t have the secret.’”

Meanwhile, the family survived mainly on royalties from The Book Thief and Zusak’s speaking engagements. Dominika, who is trained in business management, handled the administrative and strategic side of Zusak’s work, looking over his agreements, liaising with his agent. But she was unable to provide creative input. “I just didn’t feel qualified in that way.”

One drizzly spring day in 2013, Paterson came to Zusak’s house to go through the manuscript. They sat at the kitchen table, and Zusak read parts of it aloud to her. After a while, she stopped him. “She looked at me, and said, so sadly and brutally, ‘You’re never going to finish this book, are you?’” Paterson wasn’t playing mind games. “She was just telling me the truth,” Zusak says. “And at that point, she was right, I was never going to finish it! But for the rest of the day, I was like, ‘I’ll show her!’ So I sat down, all energised to write, and then after a couple of hours, I was like, ‘Yeah, she’s right.’ And then I just went back to bed.”

Zusak grew up the youngest of four children in a single-storey brick home that his father, Helmut, built in Engadine in the 1960s. Markus shared a room with his brother Rob, who was two years older. Rob and Markus would go surfing together at Cronulla, or skateboarding, or they would box in the backyard, using the family’s only set of gloves. “Markus was right-handed and I was left-handed, and so he’d have the right glove and I’d have the left,” Rob says. “We played this game called One Punch, ’cause we could only punch with the hand with the glove on. He was a better boxer than me, and that would shit me, so I’d hit him with the other hand, which was against the rules.”

Helmut, who is from Austria, and Zusak’s German mother, Lisa, immigrated to Australia separately in the 1950s. Neither of them spoke English when they arrived; according to Markus, Lisa had grown up without a single book in her house. Keen to compensate, she filled the house with novels and biographies, together with a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica that Helmut, a house painter, regularly consulted. Lisa also insisted the children learn a musical instrument; Markus ended up playing piano and flute, both of them badly. (In Bridge of Clay, the Dunbar brothers are made to practise piano by their mother.)

Markus and Rob also excelled at sport, and played rugby league for local Cronulla sides. “He was pretty good,” Rob says. “Other teams would target him all the time, really bash him.” When the boys got older, however, Markus became less involved. “After the game, all the boys would go to the pub and get on it,” Rob says. “But he would come home and start writing. I actually had a go at him once, and I said, ‘You really should go out with your teammates.’” Instead, everything became fodder for Zusak’s fiction: “He kept all these big pads on his desk,” Rob says. “Sometimes I’d come home from working with Dad and tell him a story about what happened that day, and Markus would go, ‘Tell me that again, so I can write it down.’”

Zusak describes himself as a “meticulous planner”, plotting out his books by dividing them up into a number of parts, each containing an equal number of chapters. The same goes for the prose. “Everything is deliberate,” he tells me. “It’s word for word, page for page.”

Zusak’s writing now has crossover appeal, enjoyed as much by adults as it is by kids. But his books still evince the kind of earnestness common to young-adult novels. In an age of reflexive cynicism, he’s willing to risk sentimentalism in the pursuit of pure emotion, and rarely hides behind irony. This can sometimes backfire. (A review of The Book Thief in The Times in London called it “saccharine” and “overlong”.)

Zusak concedes that The Book Thief “is a bit over-the-top a few too many times”, and that, as a result, he tried to temper his instincts in Bridge of Clay. “My favourite word is ‘glorious’,” he says. “But you can only use that about five or six times across 500 pages.”

In any case, some of the best parts of Bridge of Clay are not prose but the random stabs of insight, as when Matthew Dunbar notes how he and his brothers receive one-on-one time with their mother in the lead-up to her death. “You know your mother’s dying when she takes you out individually,” Matthew says.

Zusak has an extraordinarily devoted, almost evangelical following. One reader fashioned paper roses out of her favourite pages of The Book Thief, which she then wore at her wedding. Fans are forever sending him messages of support. (“I hope Bridge of Clay is still coming along well. I’ve been too long without your words.”) This is a mixed blessing, especially when you’re trying to write your next book. “Markus appreciates the depth of people’s reactions to The Book Thief,” Paterson says. “He is eternally grateful for it and feels a responsibility to readers.” But it also meant that the longer he took to finish Bridge of Clay, the greater the weight of expectation. “It was a vicious cycle,” she says.

In 2015, with the novel no closer to completion, Zusak drove to Bendalong, on the NSW south coast, where he and Dominika own a beach house. It would give him space, a change of scene, make him see the book anew. Except it didn’t. After a week or so, he realised that the book still sucked. “It was just dead,” he says. “Dead here, dead there, dead, dead, dead.” He didn’t believe in it anymore. And so one morning he woke up, and thought: “That’s it. I quit. I’m a failure. I’m useless. I might as well go for a surf.” Out in the water, however, he looked around at the other surfers and realised that he was “way worse at surfing than I was at writing”. And so he came back in and returned to his desk.

Incredibly, he battled on for another year, doggedly pulling the manuscript to pieces and putting it back together again. He felt as if the book was squashing him – physically squashing him. “I remember seeing a friend of mine and she said, ‘Yeah, you look little.’ And there was a real emphasis on that word, little.” He considered handing back the advance, just walking away. Deep down inside him lay what he calls “a barren wasteland of failure”.

Was he angry? “Yes!” he says. But not in the way you might think. “You know how when something really bad happens, you might throw your coffee mug or whatever and smash it. But when something really, really, really f…ing bad happens, you are beyond that. You are so much more angry that you are actually hit by a state of calm. That’s where I was most of the time.”

In May 2016, Dominika staged an intervention. “I was worried for him,” she tells me. “The book was destroying his soul. So I said, ‘You and Clay need a break. You have one week to make it happen and get it back on track, otherwise we’re not writing this book.’”

Listening to Zusak recount all this, it’s hard not to laugh. Indeed, Zusak himself laughs, but that’s mainly because it’s all over. The book did get finished. Zusak found a way through. His sanity was saved, not to mention his marriage. Zusak says that “a big part of the solution was learning to embrace the fight. I realised that for 12 years, the book had beaten me up and pushed me around. I realised that I had to learn to love the writing again, but on my terms.”

While he wouldn’t want to repeat the experience, he believes that taking 13 years to write a book was, in its own way, a good thing. “I wouldn’t trust it if it hadn’t been really hard to do.” One of the things he is most happy about is that he didn’t simply re-create The Book Thief. And that he kept going. Oddly enough, it hasn’t deterred him from embarking on another novel. “It actually made me appreciate writing more.”

One of Zusak’s favourite pastimes is to rewatch certain movies, some of them several times a year. He particularly likes My Life as a Dog, a Swedish film based on a novel by Reidar Jönsson about a 12-year-old boy who is sent to live with relatives. But his all-time go-to film is Chariots of Fire, the 1981 historical drama, based on the rivalry between two British runners, Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, in the lead-up to the 1924 Olympic Games. “I know Chariots of Fire is much parodied and joked about,” Zusak says. “But that’s ’cause it’s great!”

He loves the scene where Abrahams first sees Liddell run: “I’ve never seen such drive, such devotion in a runner,” Abrahams says. “He runs like a wild animal. He unnerves me.”

Sometimes, when he is writing, Zusak returns to that scene, replaying it in his head. “I think, ‘Write like that,’” he says. “‘Commit yourself completely.’”

Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak (Picador Australia, $33) is out Tuesday.

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