In around 1994, the author Matthew Condon called me to commission a short story. Neither of us could have guessed that it would lead to six stories and a novel, and now this book.
At that time I was the author of one collection of short stories to which reviewers had mostly responded negatively. (Negative’s a mild word for their responses, but it was my book, so allow me that.) It was already out of print and my prospects weren’t great, so I was in the habit of saying yes any time anyone asked me to write for an anthology.
Matt was co-editing ‘Smashed: Australian Drinking Stories’ and he probably called me twentieth. While I was grateful he was calling at all, being called twentieth came with its challenges. He wanted each story to feature a different drink, but he had already given away beer, white wine, red wine, champagne, scotch, bourbon, rum, gin . . . the list extended as far as Parfait d’Amour and absinthe. So I said, ‘Yes, I’d love to be in your anthology, and I’ll call you back if I can come up with a drink you haven’t covered.’ Within minutes, I remembered something about Créme de Menthe (it was seriously embarrassing, I was seventeen at the time, I’d just started uni . . .).
When the right fiction came along to fit with that cringeworthy moment, I had ‘Green,’ the opening story in this book. It went into the anthology and readers responded to its three main characters—Phil the anxious med student, Frank his classmate whose confidence is never in doubt and Phoebe, Phil’s very British mother.
Not long after that, Penguin asked me to write a story for their summer reading anthology, which had a working title of Sizzle. I applied that to these characters and came up with ‘Sausage Sizzle,’ a faculty orientation barbecue at the beginning of second year.
Writing that second story made me realise it wasn’t over. I was up for more, with only one rule in mind: each story had to feature Phil, Frank, Phil’s mum and a green drink.
By the time I started putting together my 1999 short story collection Headgames, there were four of them. The book was almost finished when my publisher lined up a meeting in Melbourne. I was expecting to tell her that I was close, but still one story short. The night before, I went to my first film premiere after party, and out came the green vodka jelly shots. I made a klutz of myself and the last piece of Headgames duly fitted itself into place. I had five Frank and Phil stories in there, four set in the early 80s and one in 1999.
I thought that was it. I went off and wrote Perfect Skin. I finished it and told myself to take a break. For the first time in years there was no new idea buzzing around.
The next day I was driving across town to meet friends for lunch and ended up stuck in traffic behind a truck from Ian Diffen’s World of Tyres and Mufflers. There was an outlet near me and I’d never thought much of it until then, when the sign was in my face. And it got me wondering, ‘World of Tyres and Mufflers? Who is there who thinks that’s some kind of world?’ And my mind turned to someone else’s World of Lighting and Horseland and I realised that, all over the suburbs, there were people dreaming planet-sized dreams and I hadn’t even noticed. So I wondered what would be the dumbest-sounding—but plausible—World I could think of. Dumb and succinct. And with a solid blokey name at the front.
Along came Rod Todd’s World of Chickens. And I thought, ‘Who would work there? It’d be the 80s, a failing takeaway chicken place. It’s exactly the kind of place Phil and Frank from the ‘Green’ stories would work.’ By the time I got to lunch, I had to park the car and make two pages of notes.
World of Chickens came out in 2001. Phil and Frank had themselves a novel.
It subsequently came out in the US as Two To Go, and work began to adapt it into a film. Then another idea started bugging me. I wanted to put all the Phil and Frank stories together.
Then I decided I wanted even more. I wanted a brand new story—Phil, Frank and a fleeting appearance by Phil’s mum, three decades after Phil and Frank were chem prac partners in first year. They’re facing fifty, each in his own way, each still dreaming his own dreams.
All I needed was publishers to come to the party, and I found them in Exciting Press (whose Will Entrekin started calling this the Ultimate Author Edition) and Allen & Unwin’s House of Books. Thank you both for seeing that there was life in these characters and in this idea. And thank you Will for suggesting that we make this the Ultimate Australian Edition too. Since 2001, when a photocopy of Perfect Skin arrived with 256 Post-Its on it, my work has been Americanized for the US market. With the passage of time, and editors, the process has become more subtle and fewer changes have been made. This time Will wants to keep the Australian tone, and so do I. But trust us, America, you’ll hardly feel a thing—other than feeling that you’re reading it all in an authentic voice.