Adrian posted a link to the article ‘The Novel is Dead (This Time it’s for Real)’,
written by author Will Self and published in The Guardian that confirms some of my long harboured fears. (You can read the article here).

My father is a diagnosed workaholic, but before he was that, he was a boy growing up in a highly dysfunctional family in Melbourne’s outer Eastern suburbs in the 60s and 70s. His mother was a young Italian woman, 20 years younger than her husband, who could fly off the handle at any moment, chasing her three children around the sun room with a feather duster before clutching each child to her chest violently and sobbing about how much she loved them. For all her eccentricities, she valued family above all else, which is partly why she remained in a difficult and likely loveless marriage to a deaf and reclusive war veteran for over 50 years.

On the seemingly innocent Peacock St where my father grew up, dysfunction seemed to be a common theme behind closed doors. Throughout the 20 years he spent living on that street, he gathered information about all that went on from eavesdropping on whispered evening exchanges between neighbours, or gleaning what he could from the ambulances parked temporarily across the road.

He has since relayed these stories to his own children, which is how I know about the alcoholic who shot his wife and then himself at the kitchen table after finishing a pint of VB, or the charming and well known restauranteur who hung himself from his wardrobe railings.

Behind the manicured rose bushes and cups of tea shared between neighbours, children running under sprinklers in the stinking heat and drives around Burwood in my grandfather’s powder blue Valiant, backs sticking to the tan leather and seatbelts rubbing on necks, it seems my father grew up in a melting pot of simmering discontent.

These stories have entertained, educated, moved and enlightened us as Dad’s told them throughout the years, his unique wit and knack for timed exaggeration taking the downright disturbing to pointedly comical. And with every story about what went on, either from his own family or the families that he grew up among, he’s promised to one day get it all down and write a memoir that captures an era of such unique dysfunction and preserves it forever.

Thinking about my father’s memoir, currently nowhere near to being physically manifested, I can imagine it so clearly that it feels as if it already exists. It is so important to me to have this piece of history captured and represented in ink and paper, a history of my family and a history of a bizarre subset of humanity, and I can visualise so much of it on the page typed out in my father’s witty, dry prose, that the idea of it not eventuating feels very foreign.

When I imagine holding this book, seeing its cover, passing its spine in the Australian fiction section of Readings Carlton, one thing is very clear. It is not a story made for a kindle, or an iPad, or any type of e-Reader that you might watch middle aged women hold close to their chests on the train, blushing slightly at the racier parts of 50 Shades of Grey. That is a novel to be read electronically. I can also cope with any children’s series, university textbooks, any type of manual, crappy fem-lit crime fiction or anything by Dan Brown.

I will never be able to come to terms with reading for pleasure on anything that doesn’t let me turn its pages by hand. If there’s no potential for paper cut related eye watering, there’ll be no tears of another sort either.

If what Will Self is saying is really really for real, the idea that I will never be able to read my father’s unborn memoir in a non-computer format saddens me more than I can say.