Graeme Simsion

Pictured: June and Dennis Simsion with Graeme Simsion

Graeme Simsion traded life as a data modeller for the creative pursuit of writing fiction – a move that grabbed international attention with the success of his debut novel, The Rosie Project, which has sold more than a million copies in forty countries around the world. His mother died when she was 59 – the same age he was at the time of this interview.

People ask if I have any regrets in my life and, always, the first thing I say is: ‘I didn’t speak at my mother’s funeral.’

I was 32 when my mother died, so she didn’t have a chance to meet my kids. She has been out of my life for a very long time. I think it has had a bigger impact on our kids than on me, in that my father remarried and then didn’t have a lot to do with our kids when they were quite young. I think he connected much more with her grandchildren, as I think happens when men remarry – they drift towards the family of their new wife, instead of their own.

I think, if my mother had lived and the world had gone as we had hoped – and she and my father had stayed together as you would expect – our kids would have had that additional con­nection with my side of the family. It’s an impact that creates lots of ripples.

I think there was a lot of unfinished business with my mother, in the sense that I hadn’t ever really let her know how much I appreciated what she did for me. I think I was probably pretty ungrateful and I hadn’t communicated that. Mum had always been supportive. I was very busy getting on with my own life.

It was just one of those things that happen quite quickly. She had cancer but we didn’t expect that she would die so suddenly. She was more ill than her doctors, or any of us, had realised and the funeral happened sooner than we had been preparing for.

I thought that my father would speak but he didn’t and so we had the minister speak instead. He clearly did not know my mother well and it was, from my point of view, a bit shabby. I was really upset and angry, in retrospect, that she wasn’t given a proper send-off.

I sat there thinking: ‘I should really be up there to do this better.’ The minister was doing all he could but it was like one of the introductions that you get when you speak at a conference or something – like someone has got the piece of paper in front of them and they are reading off it and there is no heart in it. I was sort of sitting there thinking, more than anything else, the solution would be my father’s funeral, which I expect I should still be alive for – he turns 90 next year. It will be a very small funeral because his friends are gone and so that will be my chance, I think, to sort of talk to the family about how I feel about both of them.

One of my colleagues asked me, for God knows what reason: ‘Do you have any regrets in your life?’ She would have only been in her twenties at that time and I was probably in my late forties – and I told her about the funeral.

A few months later, her father died in a car accident. He was a well-known person – a well-connected person – and she got up at the funeral and did this fantastic speech, so, I thought, in a way, that my regret had been able to translate into something worthwhile.

Because my father remarried quite quickly – within twelve months – after my mother’s death, the memories of my mother have been swept away a little. You get those two extremes where my father might have chosen to mourn for the rest of his life – he was in his sixties – and, you know, the house would have been a shrine and we would have felt awkward going in there. Or, the other extreme is what we had – he got on with a new life and she disappeared and all the memories were pulled out of our lives quite quickly.

It was difficult, so we lost not only concrete things but also emotional things you can’t ever get back. I have some bits and pieces of her jewellery and that’s about it. Because my wife only met my mother on a few occasions, she didn’t really get to know her in any substantial way so we don’t have that connection of shared memories either.

I have two siblings – both younger, both girls, both still living and making their own lives. My younger sister was still living at home when my mother died and she left home very shortly after that. I think she feels it most acutely that her mother wasn’t around for her. I think for women particularly, when they have children and are in that very early stage, when they are looking for someone who can look after their children, the mother is the first port of call.

I think, with parents in general, everybody has got a different trajectory. There are some guys I know who have been very close to their mothers all the time – relationships where you see that bond between mother and son is not only very strong but also very open – and they say things like: ‘I love my mother, she is the most important person in my life.’

I think that, for me and my mother, it was probably true that the bond was very strong but because I came from an Anglo-Saxon background, you didn’t express that. Also, I think, in the Anglo-Saxon world, there is not this thing about mothers loving their sons more than their daughters. It was probably the other way around.

I grew up in New Zealand until I was twelve and then we moved to Australia. Our conventional middle-class family meant that my mother didn’t go to work. Now it is the norm within the middle class that both parents have careers and work.

There was a whole nuclear family sort of model there that I very explicitly didn’t want to follow. I think, even if society hadn’t seen this massive switch towards women in the workforce, I would have still been interested in finding a partner who was engaged in other aspects of the world, rather than being a stay-at-home mother. I didn’t want to marry ‘her’.

I didn’t see my mother and father having, for want of a better word, an intellectual relationship. My mother was a long way from being stupid – she was an intelligent woman who was a secretary of the town clerk in Auckland before she had kids. I am sure her IQ was similar to dad’s IQ but both of them grew up in circumstances where boys were privileged and women didn’t pursue their own careers.

In my own life, I didn’t want to go home to someone who looked after the kids. I was interested in someone who was an equal in every sense and I expected that I would do my share and she would do hers. In that sense, my parents’ relationship was in no way a role model for the one that I wanted. It wasn’t problematic in a big way – it just wasn’t what I was looking for.

I didn’t appreciate that she was always there for us when we got home from school – it was just normal: I saw my dad’s job as going out to work and hers as staying at home. I didn’t sense that her job was more onerous than my father’s but I certainly sensed that it was less respected.

When we moved from New Zealand to Australia it was because my father had an opportunity for a job over here. There was some consultation that went on but I think ‘no’ would have been the wrong answer from her. I felt very displaced but not as displaced as my mother. I think, in retrospect, my mother was probably clinically depressed when we came to Australia. She was close to her family, she had friends – she would have been in her late thirties when we moved to Australia, almost forty. So, it was a difficult time in life when you reassess and stuff and, of course, she didn’t come here as my father did and immediately go into a job where you have all those sorts of supports waiting for you.

Dad was very busy with a big project and working long hours and Mum was so unhappy. In many ways, I think that created some separation between me and her, as I sort of forged my own path.

I was twelve, and it was very difficult for me because I was in a class with kids two years older than me. In those days, you went with the academic standing, rather than social standing, so I was socially very displaced – all of which was to prove useful to me later in life because I was able to write a book about a guy who was socially displaced. And even though I didn’t have Asperger’s syndrome, I had a sense of what it was like to not be one of the gang – to be bullied and all those sorts of things.

I was forging a pretty independent sort of life. Not inde­pendent physically, in the sense of leaving home, or even being particularly adventurous in travelling or anything by myself – but emotionally and intellectually, I was pretty self-contained.

The great thing I had from my mother was acceptance – during every age, and, I think, of all three of us. She had some very strong sorts of moral values but, given that I wasn’t visibly stepping outside of those, she was just openly supportive.

My father had ambitions for me, which were not of that kind of ‘my child will be a doctor’ or ‘my child will be a whatever’ – it wasn’t like that. It was more that he instilled a sense that a real man can do certain things – you’ve got to be able to do carpentry, you’ve got to be able to ride a bike – and I was, physically, a pretty awkward sort of kid.

My mum was never on my case – whatever I wanted to do, that was fine. You know, if I wanted to collect coins, or stay in my room, or whatever – it wasn’t that she didn’t care, it was just that she was accepting of who I was. Whereas, I think my father had a clearer idea in his mind about what a boy should be. I have to say, though, that was probably good for me to have those two influences in my life. If I only had my mother, I think I would have missed out on some things that were probably character-building, you know. And if I had only had my father, I would have probably felt that I couldn’t develop those parts of me that didn’t fit the mould.

I think that I am a pretty accepting person – my wife would say that is the example my mother set for me. Maybe it was that I needed acceptance and therefore I would naturally give it to others. I think it’s interesting.

If you were bullied, then there are two likely outcomes. The first is that you understand what it is like to be bullied and therefore you make sure that others are not bullied as you get more power in your life. The second is that you choose to bully somebody else. I think you see that in schools – that, actually, some of the worst bullies have been bullied themselves and simply find someone further down the social hierarchy to set the mob on. I have probably touched on the second one a couple of times in my life, to my shame. But I have also become someone who is pretty accepting of other people and I think this has affected my parenting in a big way.

If you were to ask what my mother gave me, I think I’d say that, in the parenting of our children, my wife Anne and I have adopted a very similar model to what my parents did, but with our gender-roles reversed. I tend to be the ‘whatever you want’ parent. Anne went through a much stricter sort of upbringing in terms of being told: ‘You need to be a doctor, you need to be something important.’ I don’t think I ever put those expectations on the kids. Anne would say I don’t set them any boundaries but they would say that the boundaries were always there, in terms of subtle expectations of proper behaviour and so forth. Anne would be much clearer: ‘You can’t do this, but you can do that.’

My mother talked a lot about her origins, about her family and the family history, and I wasn’t really interested but it was obviously important to her. The iconic story in her life was that her own mother died at the age of fifty-nine. So, it was a really big deal – my mother came of age at the same time her mother died. In her eyes, her mother was on an absolute pedestal.

When we grew up, she told us a lot about her mother and we didn’t relate to it because she was dead and we were young, you know – it was not something we wanted to deal with, particularly. ‘Your grandmother is in heaven,’ she would say. We would be thinking: ‘Don’t bother telling us this – we don’t need to know.’

She died of cancer and of course my mother had this thing about her mother dying at fifty-nine, and then my mother proceeded to do the same thing at fifty-nine.

Now, I realise that my mother had just wanted that legacy to go on – that’s why the stories were important to her.

In New Zealand, all of my mother’s siblings are now dead – three of them, including my mother, died within three months and the last one died quite a few years ago, at ninety. My sister who’s two years younger than me stays much better connected to all the cousins through Facebook.

I am currently fifty-nine and Anne gave me a bit of a hard time about it. You worry about this, but not consciously. The women have not done well in my family. My father’s mother died at thirty-five in childbirth, so it is not a good link all around, really.

I’m fortunately in pretty good shape but it does remind you that life is finite. I did a talk at the Brisbane Writers Festival – Letter To My Future Self – and I decided to address myself at eighty-nine, which is thirty years on, and my dad is eighty-nine now, so that was actually quite uplifting to think that there could be thirty more years for me. I could start playing the piano now and I have thirty years to learn to play. I still feel that, with a bit of luck, I will live a very long life and still have a lot of time to do things. My mother died too young.

So, what would I say to myself at eighty-nine? Well, I would finish by saying: ‘I hope you learned how to play the bloody piano – you have had enough time to do it.’

I certainly feel that I have enough time to write the books that I want to write. It is nice to think that I would live long enough to have grandchildren and be known to them and have a role in their lives. Our kids are now in their twenties and this is all stuff on the horizon.

When I had my first book published, my father said: ‘I never knew you had this bent.’ He looked astonished. ‘Why on earth would you write a book now?’

I confided a great deal in my mother when I was young. I didn’t feel I had to hide things from her and I think she had a pretty good sense that I had those sorts of mixed talents. When I was at intermediate school in New Zealand, I was actually dux of the school and the headmaster called me in and said: ‘You are an unusual person because you have strengths in both the scientific side and also in writing and, at some point in your life, I guess you are going to have to decide which path to follow.’ But I just thought it was a ludicrous statement at the time – obviously, I was going to follow science.

But all through my career, I’ve written, I’ve spoken, I’ve communicated and it has probably been the most important string to my bow, really. I am not a brilliant scientist but I am a very strong communicator.

I think I was twenty-two when I left home and, really, I was pursuing other things, so I would call my mum once a week or she would call me. I was very consciously separated from the family and building my own life and my mother had the ability to see through all of that. I think my partner sees through me and my kids see me pretty well. I don’t have stuff to hide, particularly. What you see is what you get.

Obviously, when Mum died, my father was very upset. It didn’t knock him off his perch – if anything, it made it easier for him to be the patriarch. He no longer had to care for my mother in the last few months of her life because she was becoming quite dependent and having medical problems.

Now as my father has aged and he is in a nursing home, I guess I am the senior member of the family – but it doesn’t have the same meaning. My sisters are in their fifties too and have their own families and their own capabilities – I don’t think there is a need for a family leader.

I have married twice and both times my partner has been a professional, educated, intelligent woman, making her own life and expecting me to pull my share of the weight in all things. I have been very happy about that arrangement.

I have a book that is in the editing stages at the moment and there are two important mother characters in there and my wife thinks I based both of them on her mother – you know, the dark side and the good side. There is always probably a little bit of truth in that – you are always inspired by people around you but I don’t think I have written a mother character yet who has been driven much by my own mother. Possibly, I think with Don Tillman’s mother in The Rosie Project, there is probably a bit of my mother in her but, you know, nothing that would jump straight out at you.

Had I known she was going to die so young, in the last years of her life I would have engaged more with her, and shown more interest in some of the things that she was interested in that I tended to brush off. I think that I could have probably spent more time with her.

There is one really strong memory of my mother, although it might be more about me than her, really. When my grandfather died, the funeral was on the fifth of November 1965, which was Guy Fawkes Day, and back in those days you used to do fireworks. My dad said: ‘We are not going to do the fireworks,’ and my mum came home and she said: ‘We will do the fireworks.’ I remember she was tremendously upset at the death of her father – she just held her parents in such an extremely high regard, and as a nine-year-old kid, I wasn’t connected to how much that mattered. I just took the death of my grandfather pretty much in my stride. I mean, to me, he was an 86-year-old smoker who was coughing all the time and he was on the point of death anyway, in my mind. But for my mother, it was her Dad and she loved him so much – and now I look back and see that extraordinary emotion, and her sense to still be a good mother and let the kids have their fireworks, was something very significant. It was a very small incident, really, but it just popped into my mind.

In the sixties and early seventies, you didn’t drink wine with meals at home, you didn’t ever go out to restaurants – money mattered a lot and you reused things. I remember my mother bottling and preserving everything – nothing was wasted – and if there is anything that is a carryover from my mother, in particular, it’s that I have this thing about using every bit of food we have. It translates to me in quite a perverse way, really. We might have chicken stock that I know will only last a few days, so I will go out and buy all the other ingredients to make the soup. Or, we’ll have an avocado that’s getting soft and so I will go out and make sure we have the rest of the ingredients to make a guacamole.

If I go to the fridge and there is mouldy food, it hits me in some way that we are being irresponsible. That is probably the most living legacy of my mother – that every day it hurts me in a fiscal way to waste food.

After dinner my mother would wash the dishes and I would dry the dishes and we would always have conversations. I told her all about the stuff I was interested in – about maths and physics and that sort of thing. I don’t know what level of comprehension she had for that but she knew I was excited about it and interested and she gave me an audience. She never said: ‘Oh look that’s boring, Graeme,’ or: ‘Why do I want to know that?’ She just listened to all of it and if I had tried that with anybody else, you know, I would have got ‘shut up’ or ‘not interested’ or ‘why are you telling me this stuff?’

That was just my time with my mother – although I bet my sisters would say that they dried the dishes too, and it may well be true, but my memories are only of the nights when it was me doing them. It was my time with my mother and something that was always there. I felt that it was fantastic.

We have a deal with our kids now that, once a week, we have to have dinner around the table together. They are adults, still living at home, and they are both still students. One of the deals about being allowed to live at home with free rent is that we have dinner and you can bring your partners and we sit around this table. In that way, we are preserving a little bit of that connection – having those conversations. It is important.