The Well by Elizabeth Jolley 

For the character of Brenda Shales, I had to create an entire literary backstory, and I had great fun doing it. When I imagined the books she wrote, they might read something like The Well, Jolley’s dark and mysterious masterpiece. To detail its plot is to give the game away, but in the 1990s some right-wing loonies tried to get it removed from school syllabi because it "encourages occult activities, illicit activities, lesbian relationships, self-centered indulgence." The best endorsement you’re ever likely to read! 

Erasure by Percivall Everett 

If you want a smart and gripping literary hoax novel, look no further than this (after you’ve read I Want Everything of course). A struggling novelist writes the worst book he can imagine, as a stuff-you to the publishing industry that has ignored him his entire career. Of course it becomes an immediate hit. It’s a tender and searing exploration of race, fame and authenticity and the games Black authors must play to fit in to the market. Read it and weep and laugh until your sides split! 

An Angel at My Table & Faces in the Water 

These books capture the brutality of institutional power wielded over woman in the twentieth century better than any I’ve read. But the terrifying story of Janet Frame’s early life often obscures the brilliance of her writing, the clarity of her vision, her weird and gruesome humour. Frame’s shadow looms large over I Want Everything – not just present in the echoes in Brenda Shales’s story – but because of the kind of writer Frame is, singularly herself, as we all should strive to be. 

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 

My narrator could be construed as a bit of a shit, which can be a hard row to hoe for a novelist. How to make him relatively likeable, even as he betrays and blows up his life? How to make a character do bad things without being bad themselves? More to the point – how to make funny at the same time? Ben Lerner does a pretty good job of this, in his hilarious and hugely influential novel, and I hope I did too. You be the judge. 

Helen Garner’s Diaries. 

Is there a writer with a better voice than Helen Garner? When I was trying to perfect Brenda Shales cadence and diction, I found myself returning to Helen Garner’s wonderful diaries. Her laconic charm, her fondness for Aussie-English, her bolshie no-nonsense way of living. Without Helen Garner there would be no Brenda Shales, and I can’t thank her enough. 

The Ern Malley Affair 

No book about literary lies in Australia can avoid referencing (consciously or otherwise) the Ern Malley affair, which continues to fascinate eighty years later. Whether it’s through Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake, Michael Heyward’s splendid account of the scandal, or the poetry itself, Ern Malley teaches us so much about Australian literary culture. Cultural cringe, suspicion and veneration of fancy European ideas, our endless search for an authentic Australian literary icon. Ern Malley has it all, the best writer who never existed.