When a novelist wins a major award, a kind of erasure takes place and a new fiction is created: that of the preternatural talent, the cultural seer slowly crafting parables that tell us more about ourselves than we can see. What fades from the story is that, until success arrives, life for writers is usually precarious, impoverished, and frankly a bit shit.
Man Booker winner Richard Flanagan’s most recent novel, First Person, is based on just such a period in his own life. In 1991, the hard-up Tasmanian author got a call from Australia’s greatest con man, John Friedrich. Friedrich had a proposition: that Flanagan ghost-write his autobiography before his trial for fraud began in six weeks. If Flanagan could deliver, he’d get $10,000. Three weeks after the call, Friedrich…
