It’s Wednesday, 2.38 p.m. I’m sitting at my desk writing to you, the reader. There are so many things I want to tell you.

I’m going to start with this: when my friend Chris Somerville got his book published, I went to his launch and asked him to sign my copy. He wrote: To Oliver, I hope this doesn’t bore you. I thought that was a good thing to write. It seemed honest — as if he wasn’t trying to hide anything. He was just saying how he felt.

And I want to tell you how I feel too. I never dreamed I would have a book published. But now I need to tell you another thing: not everything in this book is true.

The other night, some friends and I were having beers in my backyard. We were talking about the differences between fiction and nonfiction. I told Jack that I thought nothing was really nonfiction because memory is fallible. I said, ‘We could all go home tonight and try to write down exactly what happened and each person’s story would be entirely different.’ Jack agreed. Kailana said, ‘Memory has to be subjective because if it wasn’t, if we remembered everything, we would probably go insane.’ And then I began to think about bad things: about death and car crashes and being truly lonely. These were things that had happened to me and to people I’d known in the past. Things mostly independent of this book; things I’d dealt with but no longer wanted to remember. Then I stopped talking, and Olivia took my hand under the table. She said, ‘Memory has to be fallible. There are some things we need to forget.’

And then the mood shifted and we kept drinking and laughing and drinking, and eventually everyone went home, and Olivia fell asleep, and I tried to sleep, except I vomited a few times in the bathroom instead.

Over the next month or so, Jack and I kept talking on Facebook. We agreed that the term ‘nonfiction’ was really just designating the intended mode for reading a text. Jack said, ‘You read the newspaper in “nonfiction mode”, whereas you read Harry Potter in “fiction mode”. But, y’know, it can be anything. Like, some people read the bible as fiction and some as nonfiction.’

When Jack and I met at The Cricketers Arms in Surry Hills a few days later, we agreed that thinking about texts in terms of fiction or nonfiction was missing the point. While perhaps the label ‘nonfiction’ might encourage a writer to represent events verifiably to some degree, it seemed to us mostly a tool marketers and booksellers used to sell books — in relation to memoir and creative nonfiction, anyway. Jack said, ‘The fact that we need to make a distinction kind of feels like the product of needing to simplify our output for the sake of sales.’ I told Jack this thing the writer Scott McClanahan had said: ‘I never look at a painting and ask, “Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?”’ and Jack liked that. We watched an interview where the writer Juliet Escoria interviewed Scott McClanahan and we decided we’d like to have a beer with Juliet Escoria and Scott McClanahan.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to lie to you. This book is designated as nonfiction because most of it is factually accurate, and this was the mode in which I wanted it read. There are things I misremembered and exaggerated and invented, but the emotional truth is always present, and to me, that truth carries more weight than factual truth.

So now, for the sake of being honest, let me tell you the things I knowingly misremembered and exaggerated and invented.

Characters

• The character of Lisa is based on my girlfriend at the time, but the real Lisa lived in Sydney, whereas I lived in Melbourne. While much of the dialogue between ‘Lisa’ and me is taken from real life, it has been reconstructed from memory. Sixty-two per cent of the text messages and Facebook posts between us are unchanged. Some were edited for narrative purposes.

• Greek Martin Sheen never worked at KeepCup. He was based on two people I know. One is a friend from Brisbane, and the other a person I met while travelling in South America. I put them together and made someone new. I made someone new but in a way recreated or explored something old — the fact that homophobia still exists is something that is fucked and needs to change.

• Mark’s character was based on two people I used to live with. I took elements of personality from one and a series of events that occurred with another. I made these people unrecognisable because I was scared of them finding out. And I guess in many ways I still am.

• Mother Hen’s character was based on someone who worked at KeepCup. We didn’t talk that much. I spent a lot of time at the factory in my head, not doing anything except banding and plugging and imagining things going on around me. In many ways Mother Hen was real, but in other ways she was only real to me.

• Bear, Mum, Dad, Brigitte, Sofia, Alfred (the mouse), Peter, Mick, Anna, and Kasey: everything that happened, past and present, with these characters was presented with the least amount of misremembering or exaggeration or invention I’m capable of.

Events

• ‘Lisa’ and I didn’t meet for the first time during an online reading hosted by Steve Roggenbuck on Spreecast. We’d met several years earlier, when we were both dating other people. Then some time passed. We both stopped dating those people and started talking online sometimes. We met properly at our friend Bryan’s birthday at The Cricketers Arms in Sydney. Then I returned to Melbourne. A month later, ‘Lisa’ visited me. All the nerves I felt and wrote about came from this month-long wait to see her.

• At the end of Chapter Three, after my reading at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I actually went to the pub with Emmie and Emilia and Emma. I felt nervous that I’d done a shit job. I couldn’t think about much else. We drank some beers. I remember feeling itchy. I don’t think we talked about Shia LaBeouf.

• ‘Mark’ never put out mousetraps. I think the mouse lived with us for less than two months before he died in the toaster, but it could have been longer. RIP Alfred.

• ‘Lisa’ and I never went to see Spring Breakers. I saw that with my friend Katia. ‘Lisa’ and I did go to the movies together though. One time I brought Indian food. I don’t know why. We sat down and I was trying to balance the Indian food on the arm of my chair, but it didn’t balance. Nope. It just spilled all over her. It was fairly intense. Sorry, ‘Lisa’.

• At Snooze, I never exploded through the roof, leaving the outline of a human who once existed somewhere. ‘Lisa’ and I never flashed each other, either. It only occurred to me after leaving that it would be a good thing to do. And oh God, I wish I’d done it. Oh God.

• ‘Lisa’ and I never drove to Docklands to play minigolf. We had plans to, but it never happened. We did fool around in a housemate’s car though, in the middle of the day, when no one was home. Also, I did not hand-surf people from the car that day. I did hand-surf people from the window of a taxi one time at midnight somewhere in the city, though.

• The Australian guy I met in Argentina who lifted weights never said, ‘For, like, no money you can get these Thai bitches to bring you food and also fuck you in your twenty-dollar-a-night hotel room.’ That was someone else: a bartender I met one night in Sydney. I asked him how he was and he said he’d just come back from Thailand. Then he said the thing about bitches and food. Also, the guy I knew from Argentina never pissed on any McDonald’s counters. That just seemed funny and I wanted to write it. He did, however, piss all over his room one time when he was sleeping. He was actually a nice guy. But I had to make him look bad for narrative purposes.

I can’t think of anything else. But maybe you can! If you can, please write to me at oli.rob.ver@gmail.com and I will write to you and we will write to each other until we meet where you can buy me a beer and arm-wrestle me, if you want. I promise I will lose. But then I will go home and add you to my ongoing short-story collection called I Can Successfully Arm-Wrestle Anyone in the World, Even You and I will tell everyone how I won and how it wasn’t even a competition and maybe hit the gym buddy.

Just kidding, I would never do that. Honest.

And now we are at the end. This is it. I can’t believe we are here. I want to thank Emmie Rae for everything, for everything. I want to thank Katia Pase for reading my drafts and for always being there. I want to thank Geoff Lemon for being Geoff Lemon, and Kat Muscat for believing in me. I want to thank my family for putting up with me throughout this whole thing: I love you I love you I love you.

I want to thank Toby Skyring for letting me tattoo my name on his arm and his name on my arm. I want to thank Jack Dunbar for being the smartest, sweetest guy I know, and for all his ideas and creative input, his brain. I want to thank Kailana for her thoughts. Kailana, you are incredible. I want to thank Jessie, my dog, for being a dog and for being smelly and wonderful.

I want to thank Ian See and Toni Jordan for writing reference letters, even when they were so busy and didn’t have to, and all those who gave blurbs for their kind words about the book.

I want to thank everyone at Scribe, especially Julia Carlomagno, for being incredible and for making me think, and Henry Rosenbloom for taking a chance on me and this book — truly, it means the world to me — and Allison Colpoys and Jenny Grigg for the cover design.

I want to thank the beautiful Olivia Claire Chin for existing in this world and for being so patient and understanding. You’re going to do so many incredible things.

And, finally, I want to thank you. For reading this book; for even making it to this sentence. I want to send you kisses through this page somehow. A series of platonic kisses that land on your cheeks and your lashes and eyelids. I’m sending them now.