A favourite at the Auckland Writers Festival, author Trent Dalton is heading back to New Zealand for the release of his latest novel, Gravity Let Me Go. Photo / Love Stepha
No one wears their heart on their sleeve quite like Australian writer Trent Dalton. After a rapturous reception on his last two trips to Auckland, he’s back with a new book, a new stage show and the same theme song: All you need is love.
It takes a lot to make an Aussie bloke cry in public. The cricket, of course (Kim Hughes when he surrendered the captaincy; Steve Smith when he apologised for ball tampering).
Adultery (former Prime Minister Bob Hawke), drug addiction (Hawke on his daughter’s battle with heroin abuse) and what happened to the protesters in Tiananmen Square (Hawke again).
For Boy Swallows Universe author Trent Dalton, what makes him choke up with emotion is … well, just about anything.
At his packed Auckland Writers Festival session in May, he had pretty much the entire audience of some 2000 people, including host Michelle Langstone, moved to tears. Some were still trying to compose themselves when they joined a lengthy book-signing queue in the foyer.
Langstone – an actor and one-time gannet advocate for Bird of the Year – covered some deeply personal ground of her own in the essay collection, Times Like These: On grief, hope & remarkable love, so the two were well-matched. Yet Dalton’s willingness to share and to be vulnerable startled her.
“I found myself thinking about how tired he must get, given how much of himself he gives away,” she says, describing the Brisbane-based writer as an immensely curious person who talks fast and absorbs information even faster.
“The effect is sort of like being in the company of a large weather system; you get gathered up in the wild energy and off you go.”
Brace yourselves, people, because Cyclone Trent is once again bearing down on our shores.
Next week, the 46-year-old kicks off a nationwide tour in Australia, with a stop-off in Auckland, for the launch of his fourth novel, Gravity Let Me Go – a book he’s calling his most personal story yet.
Drawing on his early career as a journalist covering the underbelly of life in the suburbs, it’s a literal skeleton-rattler about a serial killer, the power of storytelling and (his favourite topic) true love. There’s even a Gravity Let Me Go playlist on Spotify.
“Hold on to your hearts”, his publisher posted on Facebook. “Trent Dalton is back!”
Between gigs in Sydney and Hobart, Dalton is diverting to New Zealand on October 15 for an in-person session with local crime writer and film-maker Michael Bennett at The Civic in Auckland, where the theatre adaptation of his 2021 book Love Stories premieres the following night.
Expectations will be high after the fervent response to his two previous visits, including a sold-out session in 2024 that Carole Beu, owner of The Women’s Bookshop in Ponsonby, said made people weep as well as roar with laughter.
It’s rare to see all the feels so openly on display, especially with male writers, and Dalton admits he’s copped some flak for it. Even his wife, Fiona Franzmann, sometimes finds him exhausting.
“If I get criticism, it’s like, ‘Oh, he’s too much,’” says Dalton, whose record-breaking debut, the semi-autobiographical Boy Swallows Universe, was made into a record-breaking Netflix series last year. “I get that all the time. Fiona’ll say, ‘Can you just take it down a notch?’
“I do try to hold back a bit in my books, but I can’t, because I believe in the power of that stuff. Twelve-year-old me was absolutely a blubberer and a waterworks kid, and I’m going to honour that boy, who’d never believe I could be here now talking about these things.
“I’m always saying to people, please don’t be fooled by the giddiness of it or mistake my sentimentality for naivety about the darkness of life. It’s a better way of dealing with it than drinking bourbon, you know? There’s a dark opposite that’s very much in my veins.”
Set in the 80s, Boy Swallows Universe draws heavily from Dalton’s turbulent childhood on the fringes of Brisbane’s criminal underworld.
The youngest of four brothers, he was 7 when his mother was jailed on drug charges. His stepfather, a dealer who introduced her to heroin, spent several stretches in Brisbane’s notorious Boggo Road prison.
In the book, Dalton ages himself up to 12 as the endlessly optimistic Eli Bell, whose best mate is the convicted murderer and notorious jailbreaker Arthur “Slim” Halliday (played by a gravelly Bryan Brown in the Netflix series), who really was his childhood babysitter.
His mother got herself clean, only to fall into an abusive relationship with a man he refers to as “the monster”, who left her for dead in a public phone box.
Now about to turn 70, she “worked her way out of that hell” and is one of Dalton’s greatest inspirations.
It was his father, though, who ingrained in him a love of language and books – albeit his choices were somewhat eccentric. When Dalton’s mother went to jail, he gave his young son a copy of ex-convict Henri Charriere’s grim novel Papillon to read, saying it might help him understand where his mum was.
A complex, troubled man who struggled with his own demons, he died in 2016, two years before Boy Swallows Universe was published.
“That’s why it gets emotional, because I wrote that with him looking over my shoulder, in a way,” says Dalton. “If he walked into a bookshop and saw my books on the same shelves as Tolkien, he would fall to his knees and weep.
“When my old man was raising us in the 90s, when Mum was off doing time and going through difficult things, it was wild. He was drinking too much, and there were too many fights. But none of us four boys ever doubted the love.
“That theory is in every book I write. If you paint the darkness and the noise and the blood on the walls, that cheeseball notion of love being the answer becomes really true and really powerful.”
Pausing for breath, he pushes back an unruly hank of hair that looks a lot more dishevelled than in his polished publicity photos. “Sorry, Joanna, don’t let me ramble, but these are beautiful doors you’re opening. Thank you.”
All a kid needs, he once said, is a quiet house and true love. For all the trauma Dalton still carries from his tumultuous early years, at least he could count on one half of that equation.
Now, as the father of two teenage girls, he’s pulled off the double. That gets him emotional, too. “I’m pretty proud of the fact that the only reason our house is loud is because we’re all singing Taylor Swift songs.”
It’s been seven years since Boy Swallows Universe was published, selling more copies than any other debut by an Australian novelist.
In the book’s later stages, Eli is taken on by the local newspaper as a “colour writer”, mirroring Dalton’s first job as a 20-year-old on a community paper called the Brisbane News.
The pivotal character of reporter Caitlyn Spies is modelled on his wife, Fiona, a fellow journalist who taught him the proper use of apostrophes (a dash of Winona Ryder, Dalton’s favourite 90s actress, was also thrown into the mix).
On the author’s estimate, the story is roughly 60% fact and 40% fiction. Yet, in many ways, Gravity Let Me Go cuts just as close to the bone.
A murder-mystery entwined with a meditation on enduring love, it’s an often hilariously unhinged dive into the banality of evil that lurks behind the twitching curtains of middle-class suburbia.
As in Boy Swallows Universe, the protagonist is framed around aspects of Dalton’s own character, but this time in a less flattering light.
“It’s much more honest about the true nature of who I am,” he says. “There were few mistakes to Eli Bell. The kid was brave, and innocent, and really well-intentioned.
“Noah Cork is one mistake after another, and that’s what got me excited. Here’s what it might be like to be married to a guy like me.”
A small-town crime reporter, Cork becomes so obsessed with a cold case in his neighbourhood that he risks losing the one thing keeping him sane: the love of his family.
Mirroring Eli’s big brother, Gus, one of the main characters becomes mute for much of the story – a symbolic act with multiple interpretations, but most obviously a reflection of Cork’s inability to communicate with those around him.
Interestingly, Dalton went through a period of “selective mutism” as a boy – his voice drowned out, perhaps, by three older brothers in what was already a very loud house.
Despite outward appearances to the contrary, he’s a solitary and introverted person by nature, and that childhood ability to observe the world from a quiet corner has become one of his greatest assets.
In his pursuit to uncover the truth at all costs, Cork makes some choices that are morally questionable. The ethics of repackaging another person’s story for public consumption is an aspect of life as a writer that Dalton himself continues to grapple with.
“In my 20s, I was really ambitious and had this mentality that nothing matters but the story,” he says. “Noah is in a period in his life where he’s blinkered to all of that complexity, and I found that really interesting, because I’ve been that guy before.”
As with Boy Swallows Universe, the genesis of Gravity Let Me Go was an obscure phrase that randomly popped into his head.
Standing at his letterbox one day, he found himself imagining all the boring things in his street simply floating away – “the mundanity of the Australian suburbs suddenly becoming deeply profound by gravity letting us go”.
That gave him a title, and the story evolved from there. “Is it a statement or is it a request? And what if Noah has to work out what the hell those four words mean, and discover just how little he knows about his own wife.”
Unlike Cork, who’s portrayed as a bit of a hack, Dalton has won multiple national awards for his feature writing. His first non-fiction book, Detours: Stories from the Street, was a collection of profiles addressing homelessness.
For Love Stories, he spent two months sitting on a Brisbane street corner with a sky-blue Olivetti typewriter that his best friend’s mother – one of his greatest supporters – left to him when she died in 2020 on Christmas Day.
A sign by his table read: “Sentimental writer collecting love stories. Do you have one to share?” Some 60 stories he collected from random passersby made the final cut.
The book since been developed into a hit play, threaded through with a sometimes flaying expose of Dalton’s many failings in his own long-term relationship with Fiona.
Officially, the bestselling novelist is still on leave without pay from his staff job at The Weekend Australian Magazine – a psychological safety net he’s not quite ready to discard just yet.
The most recent piece he’s written is an impassioned response to an interim report on Australia’s digital economy and how artificial intelligence could be used to boost productivity.
In a joint submission with University of Queensland law professor John Swinson, he raises concerns about the degradation of human creativity and calls for writers to be given greater control over their intellectual property.
A key issue at stake is whether tech firms should be exempt from copyright rules that stop companies from mining text and data to train AI models.
Dalton recently discovered all five of his books have been harvested without his knowledge, including translations of Boy Swallows Universe in French, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese.
“It’s not even my story, you know, it’s my mum’s story,” he says. “It’s like, take the story, but why don’t you take the pain with it? All the tears my mum shed for that book, all the fear I had writing it, being scared of what people would think.
“You need all of that difficulty, all that emotion and complication to write a half-decent book. AI just steals the shiny finished product, not the ugly thing that’s behind it.”
And that, Dalton reckons, is enough to make anyone cry.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.