To be honest, I was still dining on details of The Salt Path scandal, when I began I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena. I Want Everything is more a story about a literary mystery rather than a scandal per se, but either way, it’s all in the juicy details (and because of that, I’m loathe to say too much about the plot for fear of giving anything away).

We meet our unnamed narrator, an aspiring but grossly undisciplined writer, as he leaves hospital (why, we don’t know) and heads to his local pool for a swim. There, he spots Brenda Shales, a reclusive author whose two experimental feminist novels attracted a cult following, before she disappeared from the public eye amid a plagiarism scandal. Knowing that the scoop of a lifetime is in front of him, the narrator becomes determined to have Brenda tell him her full story, and in doing so, propel his own career. And what begins with a white lie, turns into something much greater.

The characters are compelling – in some ways overly obvious (is Amerena poking fun?) but then I wondered if this was all quite serious… There’s skill in that.

The narrator’s partner is the ‘…Melbourne-famous’ essayist, Ruth (here I paused and considered how much of this novel is auto-fiction – Amerena’s partner is essayist, Ellena Savage).

Since we got together, I hadn’t written a sentence fit to print. Despite my fine words to Ruth, writing now felt like passing a kidney stone.

Ruth’s dominance over the narrator – which plays out in all sorts of ways – is an interesting aspect of the novel, and speaks to broader themes of gender and ambition. Ruth’s interactions with the narrator are spliced with Brenda’s history, providing a contrast between the misogynistic seventies and the present.

I delighted over scenes that included the narrator’s closest friends – Linh, a former experimental playwright turned arts administrator, their partner Simon, who is ‘…even more of a failed novelist’ than the narrator, and their needy whippet, ‘…Aloysius, named for Sebastian Flyte’s teddy from Brideshead Revisited‘.

I loved spending time with Simon, because he made me feel good about myself, as both a boyfriend and a writer.

The snowballing of the initial lie gives this novel energy but the underlying themes, notably shame and guilt, and how they present in a person’s life, were what held my attention – the narrator constantly comparing himself to others; Ruth’s complex relationship with her mother, particularly after she writes an article about her which is deemed ‘daughter-boarding’ (a hit-piece by young women against their mothers); and the reasons for Brenda’s ‘disappearance’.

…this hairshirt of guilt fit me like a second skin. But deep down, did I feel guilt? Or did I feel guilty about my lack of guilt? A sort of meta-guilt?

I really enjoyed this book – is at satire, serious, or massively self-conscious? I still don’t know, but I suspect book groups will be in a frenzy over it – so much to talk about, starting with a favourite question – who owns a story?

Better to participate in the sham (sham, shame, what was the connection there?).

4/5

Ruth and I had met at a dinner party in Northcote two years prior, the other guests all writers, upright literary citizens, who together were a bitchy bunch, venting attention-starved spleens over jackfruit quesadillas and citronella candles, griping about who was getting what grant and why they didn’t deserve it, whose middling Oz Lit novel was most worthy of contempt.