Holden Sheppard is the award-winning author of Invisible Boys (Fremantle Press, 2019), which was published to both critical and commercial success. It won the WA Premier’s Prize for an Emerging Writer, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and was named a Notable Book by the Children’s Book Council of Australia. Invisible Boys is currently in development as a television series.
Holden took some time out of his busy schedule to talk with Jess Gately about his new book The Brink (Text Publishing, 2022), a story about a group of teenagers on their schoolies week partying on a remote island off the coast of Western Australia. The party takes a nasty turn however when one of the group is drugged and a man is later found dead on the beach.
Holden thanks so much for joining me today to talk about your new book. Let’s dive straight in. Tell us in your own words what The Brink is about.
So The Brink is about a metaphorical brink and the real Brink. So, the real Brink is an island, where a group of teenagers who are on their schoolies trip end up stranded by accident. They’re meant to go on a big leavers week trip, and they end up getting detoured onto this Brink Island.
But the metaphorical brink is that what happens on this island pushes them all to their limits. And I guess the third part – it’s a triple-whammy kind of title – the third part of this book is that they’re all eighteen, they’re all on the brink of adulthood, so everyone’s finished high school, and it’s really a book about the person you created, the persona you became in high school to survive it, and who you really are inside and trying to wrestle your own identity back from the world.
That concept of really breaking out from who you’ve been and becoming who you want to be is such a big part of the story. All of the characters in this book have been restraining themselves in some way and are sort of battling with letting those restraints go. What was it like having to revisit leaving school and rediscovering your identity?
That’s a really good way of putting it that they were restraining themselves. So for me, a lot of what I write is autobiographical in some way. The events and characters are always made up; but the emotional truths of the characters is usually something about me and something I need to process myself as I’m writing it.
So, when I was growing up I certainly felt that I had to be a very certain persona to be accepted in my family circles, in my friendship circle, by the school – you know it was a religious Catholic school – so I had to be like mild-mannered; I had to be a good high-achieving student, I had to be chaste. I had to be definitely heterosexual, and so there were all these things that I built up this persona, this really good school-boy persona, who always achieved, who always did the right thing.
And when high school ended it was kind of like, well hang on, I’m still performing this same thing, but there’s no one left to perform for. I’m performing a fake version of myself every day in real life, and I feel like my real self is inside just drowning. And it became, well it became completely unsustainable to live like that. And so eventually I started exploding out in different directions. And you do become yourself eventually. For me it took years, and what I thought would be interesting for this book, for Leonardo, for Kaiya, for Mason, is that this happens within a week. You know this happens within their schoolies week.
So I’ve assigned each of them a part of me, a bit like I did with Invisible Boys where I saw those as parts of the human experience – so Zeke was the head, Charlie was the heart, Hammer was the body. And for this it was like Leonardo was the mild-mannered side of me, but he actually really wants to find a way to be tough and to stand up for himself and be masculine and be rough. And he’s like how do I do this? Because I’ve constructed this persona who’s not that at all.
And Kaiya was good and virginal and all that, and so I was like, how do I find a way for her to grapple with sexuality, with being bad, with being the bad girl. You know, how do I do that for her. And then Mason, he’s built up as the straight footy jock, and it’s a really hard box to break out of, and I wanted him to be dealing with sexuality, with being attracted to men, and kind of knowing he’s not a stereotypical gay identity and trying to find a word for it, or trying to find a sense of “who am I?” If I’m this but I’m also this, do I exist? Can both of those things exist in the same body? I always found that really interesting.
Yeah, I found Mason a super interesting character and it’s interesting as well that you use the word exploding when you talk about coming out from that shell that you create for yourself in those teenage years, because there’s so much rage in this book. It simmers from the very first line, this ongoing rage. What was it like writing in that headspace with all that anger simmering there?
Writing The Brink was really really cathartic. Invisible Boys was cathartic in a way of releasing a lot of shame and releasing a lot of trauma and sadness and really dark emotions. The colour to The Brink is maybe more anger. It’s not this desperate, sad, heartbreaking thing like the first book.
I actually feel it’s more about this anger and these people – anger is the thing that makes you stand up for yourself, anger is the thing that makes you say no, anger is the thing that make you set up boundaries. So, this book is about anger and it’s about empowerment. I’m hoping at the end people feel empowered by these characters and their journeys as opposed to heartbroken maybe.
But yeah, that was really, the idea was to unleash all that – I don’t know, all that cringe. I felt so much cringe about who I used to be. And I think there’s a lot in the book that readers will look at it and go that’s really cringeworthy that you would reveal that you felt insecure about this.
But I feel like there’s a lot of cringe there that I identified with as a teenager as well. And I was like oh my god I was just like that.
Yeah! Because, that’s the thing as well. The teenage years are cringe, and there’s a reason that some of us are traumatised by them, and the reason we seek to revisit them over and over as readers and as writers is because we’re trying to process how can I feel better about this or how do I reinterpret what I did back then. I was very embarrassed. I was really embarrassed to revisit my teenage self because I think as well once I changed my behaviour in real life, I think a lot of people who knew me were like who is this guy? And it ended a lot of relationships because they were like, why are you acting this way? And I was like no, no, no this has been me the whole time. You know I’ve been like this kind of people-pleasey perfectionistic bullshit to survive, but now that I don’t need to, I really need you to understand that’s not who I am. You know? And that was a hard thing to get through to a lot of people who had known me personally. I think a lot of them are just not on my journey. We don’t see each other anymore because they were friends with a very fake version of what I put out there.
Sure, yeah, and I think that’s probably something that a lot of readers are going to identify with as well. That realisation that the people you spent all that time with in high school, and your whole world revolved around in high school, whether you were friends with them or not, the popular crowd who seemed like the be all and end all, look very different even in that immediate leaving of school and realising they’re not the centre of the universe anymore.
Yeah well, it’s suddenly very disillusioning that none of this mattered. But you know it did matter. It mattered very much when you were at school. But the moment you leave, suddenly those people don’t have any power and I found that really freeing, leaving high school. I was like oh thank fuck, I no longer have to stress about am I going to get mocked by these people, you know like I can just comfortably be who I am.
I think the really interesting thing about this as well, speaking as a homosexual man, is that there’s like this cultural narrative that once you come out, its like oh you’ve done that, you’ve done the work, you’ve come into your true self. And for me, that just wasn’t the case. And so, I think with The Brink I wanted to explore that identity is more than just the sexuality label. For me, it happened years later. Like for me I came out, but I was still very much trying to be the good boy for my family, and I was still trying to maintain friendships that didn’t really have any place in my life anymore.
It’s not until you go okay actually fuck everything, who do I want to be, what do I want to do? Like actually asking yourself: what do I want to do? I remember the first time I ever went to a gym, I remember just going, okay I’m going to do what I want. What do I want to do? I wanted to go to the gym. I wanted to get fit. I had never done that before. I was not a gym guy. And I just ended up going, I’m doing what I want from now on. This is my new motto for life.
And I think that’s how you blow away all the bullshit of, am I doing this for other people, and you just always come back to, well what do I want to do. Oh, this thing? Well, that’s what I want to do and I guess that’s who I am because that’s what I like doing. I found that very powerful. So, The Brink is very powerful, especially with Leonardo it’s leaning in that direction of you know, if he’s been so obsessed with what do other people want and trying to please them, what does he want. If he sits down and asks himself that question, what does he want?
What does he want? I love it. In Invisible Boys you wrote from the point of view of three young men, each grappling with their own things. In this book you write of point of view of two boys and a girl. What was it like writing from the point of view of a girl?
Oh Jess! It’s been stressful. I’ve been… it was really interesting. In some ways it was very easy to write Kaiya as a character. I don’t know if I got the female perspective right. Like her character just came out of me very naturally. And I am very male focused, more than I am gay focused even, I really like male characters and boys and teasing that stuff out. Masculinity. So, Kaiya was a surprise to me because I was like where the hell did she come from. I have no interest in really writing female characters as point of view characters. But, she just kind of dropped into my head in this story and she was just angry, and she had something she wanted to say. So, she kind of said it.
I think Kaiya probably came from, like I grew up around big family, you know, my mother is obviously a big presence in my family, I had three sisters. So, you’re constantly around those kind of judgements and criticisms, but you see the kind of versions of like the Kaiya and Val dynamic in real life. You see how women can be incredibly loving and caring and nurturing to each other, but also they can turn. They can be really caustic and if you’re out of the group they can destroy you. I’ve watched this as this little boy and gone oh my god this is fascinating. So I think that’s where Kaiya came from. She just came from that people-pleasey place of observation, and yeah I wrote her down.
Whether or not I did her justice I don’t know, but she is a real anomaly in all my – like I don’t know where she came from, I don’t know if I’ll ever do a female point of view character again, I mean I might, but it’s not planned. But yeah, all I can hope is that I got some of the elements right. And yeah, hopefully I observed enough from the women in my life to make it sound halfway passable. But you know a lot of the early readers of the book have been female, especially a lot of the staff at my publisher, like my very first readers and my agent were all female, and they were like, yeah this is good. You’ve done okay. She’s not breasting boobily around the place as the classic trope goes of the man who writes about women.
I mean I must say having read Kaiya’s character I was a big fan of the fact that you explored sexuality in women as well, in teenage women, and also rage because women and their rage is something that doesn’t get addressed very often. We’re kind of encouraged to push that down so it was really refreshing to see a chance to explore those things that are normally reserved for men and see them in a female character. I really enjoyed that.
I’m really glad about that. I think with Kaiya as well, I listen to a lot of female rock ‘n’ roll, like female-led singer songwriters. So, Alanis Morrisette or Killing Heidi – Alanis Morrisette has talked specifically about how her childhood was very much that patriarchal kind of world where she was not allowed to have sadness, she was not allowed to have anger, she wasn’t allowed to have joy. There were so many emotions that had to be repressed to be what a girl was expected to be. And so, I think that’s an influence for me artistically. I’ve absorbed that absolute rage of having really human emotions denied. And I think I relate to it as a boy. I think it happens to a lot of us in different ways. So, I think I’ve been able to go, I think I have enough experience of being squashed down and not showing myself and not being human that I can relate to that absolute rage that people like Kaiya go through.
We’ve talked a little bit about Leonardo and little bit about Kaiya. I want to talk about Mason and particularly a bit about the bogan culture that you bring out with him. Because we’ve mentioned that he’s kind of grappling with his sexuality and not really seeing himself represented in gay culture – that concept of the bogan gay guy. Tell us a bit more about that because I know you lean heavily yourself towards being a bogan and you’re very proud of your bogan nature.
Yeah I am! You know after I did You Can’t Ask That earlier this year, it aired on ABC and it was the bogans episode, I just remember feeling really chill. Every media thing I’ve done since – like before that I used to get this sense of like I’ve got to be an author guy. I’ve got to really present myself in a certain way and I’ve got to be ready to answer certain questions. And as soon as it was like officially public domain that I’m a bogan, it was just… it sounds so stupid. But I’m genuinely just really happy about that. It just made me feel like I don’t have to stress when I walk into a writer event or you know the State Library for the Premier’s Awards, I can just be like everyone here knows. Everyone knows you’re a bogan, you can just chill. No one’s going to expect anything else of you. Because I think I’ve gone into this world as a kid from a country town often feeling like I don’t belong in the literary space or whatever, and definitely in the gay space.
So yeah, with Mason I’ve tried to explore that. Part of Mason is wish fulfillment because he’s better looking than me. You know he’s the hot… you know the guy who’s actually good at footy. Like I play footy socially but I’m not good at it. So, I thought you know, let’s just enjoy a bit of wish fulfillment. Imagine if you were actually physically fit and could actually do footy really well. So that’s part of it in that regard.
But the other part of it that’s very real is that he’s reflecting my own experience of kind of growing up working class and it was a kind of blokey sort of space for my family, in terms of what boys were expected to do. And the thing that came out of Invisible Boys was like that: you poor thing, they didn’t realise you were gay and being gay is so different to that. I felt really misread by that. Because what I was trying to say was that I was one of the boys and I also like boys, and I didn’t really feel like that got across.
So, with this book, with Mason I was really adamant that I was going to reflect this bicuriosity that happens with a lot of boys – you know I was bicurious as a teenager. I liked girls a bit, I liked boys a bit. I’ve slept with men. I’ve slept with women. You know I’ve done all that. So when you’re that kind of boy who is skewed that way, being gay can be a very hard thing to wrap your head around, and it can be very stressful and daunting and triggering and all kinds of things.
I wanted to explore that with Mason in a way of you know he’s trying to reconcile his masculinity is something he likes about himself, he likes that and he is who he is, so I’m not trying to problematize it or say it’s a shield for his sexuality or anything like that. I’m trying to say that this is who he is. Also, he’s really happily, well hopefully happily, but definitely undeniably attracted to men. And that’s just part of who he is.
So, my aim with Mason is to put that on the page in a way that I don’t see, I don’t think I’ve seen it done ever, really in that way. Definitely not in Australia. But definitely when you do get introduced to gay texts or tv shows to like the masculine gay guy, it often comes with this kind of, you know it’s either a problem or it’s seen as a way of we need to get him past that and then he’ll realise he’s gay and he’s on the gay scene. You know he can be dancing to Lady Gaga and everything will be fine once he achieves that. And I’m like well Mason is never going to do that but he’s still gay so what do we call that? So that’s what Mason does.
And that whole thing of masculinity, you explore that so thoroughly in this. You know, ‘toxic masculinity’ has been the big catch word recently but I think we talk about toxic masculinity a lot when we’re talking about it’s impact on women, but your book shows quite thoroughly really just how toxic that culture is for men as well, and we see the boys in this book constantly fighting with each other in these quite nuanced ways for power, that I just found really fascinating and really interesting in that discussion space.
Yeah, I find it really interesting, a lot of times people say that in my books there’s this violence, or there’s this threat of violence, or whatever and I’m just not even aware of it. Like I’m just so used to that being normal. And so, people are like you’re putting a lot of violence in and I’m like, am I? That seems really normal to me, these are not violent interactions. But I think they probably are.
Something I really was keen on with this book was that, I wanted to unpack that idea of – I don’t like the term ‘toxic masculinity’. I know its that buzzword as you say, so people know what that’s denoting, but I like the idea that what we’re talking about when we use that term is actually just ‘violence’. Like what we’re saying is that there is an expression of this people conflate with masculinity, but actually it’s violence, it’s abuse, it’s trying to dominate one over the other. And I guess what I’m trying to show, mostly through Mason but I guess a bit through Leonardo – you know Leonardo is running through this traditional masculinity checklist of I’ve got to drink, I’ve got to smoke, I’ve got to fight, I’ve got to kiss a girl, fuck a girl, like all these things that you’re meant to do to become a man and it’s not that they’re unfulfilling but none of them are actually giving him what he needs.
And my kind of suggestion is that our sense of this traditional masculinity is not, that’s not what makes you a guy. Like trying to doing all those things, or trying to dominate all those guys, if you’re doing that, that’s violence. It has nothing to do with masculinity. Do you know what I mean? And I don’t think violence is gendered, I mean I think violence is gender neutral. Anyone can do it. But I wanted to kind of unpack that. Like this is not what being a man is. Being a man is being able to stand up for yourself. Being a man is being able to assert yourself or express yourself. Being a man is being able to be vulnerable and that actually makes you tougher. Like those things are things that I think are valuable.
And one of the things on this kind of promo cycle I’m hoping to avoid or just unpack is that term ‘toxic masculinity’. I don’t like to use it myself and part of the reason is, I know there are so many boys and so many men, especially straight, but not universally, who will shut off the moment they hear that term because they think okay I’m being told I’m bad for being a boy, and that’s not what people are saying when they use that term, but that is what they’ll interpret it as. That’s what I interpret it as when I hear that term, like oh fuck someone’s got a problem with masculinity and they’re going to give me a hard time. That’s what I do automatically. And if that’s what I do as someone who’s pretty in touch with his feelings, I’m pretty sure that someone who is not used to being vulnerable is not going to engage with what is said after that term is dropped.
So, I’m trying to talk about masculinity with this book in a way that I don’t use that term, and just invite boys and men and everyone to be able to talk about masculinity without having to drop that word first. Because when we do, I think we lose about ninety percent of guys who are then going ah they’re having a go at me, I’m not even going to bother listening anymore.
And I think you do that quite successfully. Its set up quite early on that the relationships between all of these people, not just the guys but the girls as well, are very toxic and therefore because everything about their relationships are toxic, you can have a little bit more of a nuanced discussion of what is it about those behaviours that are toxic within the masculine realm but not necessarily exclusively to masculine realm.
Yes. Yes. I think that’s the thing. I was just really keen to show that human nature is human nature, always. I just – everyone has the capacity to be really awful to each other. In an individual sense. If you talk on a macro sense, then yes, it’s more relevant to talk about patriarchal systems and what that’s done to the world and how fucked up it is and how it’s trapped men as well as women. But on that individual level in friendship groups and things like that, there is equal chance of someone being absolutely awful to someone whether they’re male or female. And I definitely wouldn’t call it toxic masculinity or toxic femininity, or toxic anything. I think it’s just that humans can sometimes be really shit to one another. So yeah, I hope I’ve done that in the kind of way that both the guys and the girls in the book are equally horrible.
Well look I wanted to move on from specific characters and ask about – I’ve heard all about second book syndrome. And obviously coming off the back of Invisible Boys which was so well received and so critically acclaimed as well being hugely adored by readers, how was it coming into a second book with that hanging over your head?
Oh, I’ve been shitting bricks for about three years now! I have. It’s just the weirdest thing and it’s very well known and it’s probably almost cliché. But it is a thing that happens. If you have a successful debut the pressure on that second book, the pressure on the second book full stop is hard. But when it does well in any given metric, you know, sales great, critical acclaim great, reader response great, and then you’re like okay, how the fuck am I ever going to achieve all those things again? And I found that very paralysing.
I read an interview with Markus Zusack about Bridge of Clay and he – he has, by the way, sold a billion times more than I have, I can’t put a patch on him, his book sold internationally millions and millions of copies – but the feeling he described was exactly the same feeling I felt with Invisible Boys which was, how the hell do I follow this up. I can’t. It can’t be done. And for him, Bridge of Clay took something like thirteen or fourteen years to write because the pressure was just absolutely so crushing. And when I read that interview, I felt like he’s sharing this because it’s what he went through but he’s also kind of like – it’s almost like advice to writers. I sort of read it like you know, don’t do this. Find a way around it. This is tough.
So, I thought okay I have to push through. Because I didn’t want to wait thirteen years to put out The Brink. You know I had to do it now. Also, I can’t afford to, I want to make a living off my writing. So, I had to write it now. So really, I just came back to completely abandoning expectations of commercial performance or acclaim or anything and just came back to what made Invisible Boys work in terms of the writing, which was I sat down and went ‘what hurts?’
And what was hurting with The Brink was – I thought this was a book about friends and friendship, that’s what I wrote about, that’s the thing I wrote on my list of things that hurt was friends. And you know Invisible Boys was ‘gay’, The Brink is ‘friends’, the third book is ‘family’, the fourth book was … I don’t remember what. It might have been sex. It might have been masculinity. Or both of them. But so that’s what I thought I was doing. But then as I unpacked it, it was really identity. It was about what those friendships and family and society bonds had caused to do to myself. Like that was a really shitty thing that I did to myself by not letting myself go out there and be myself.
So, I just had to go back to that same process. This is what hurt. I wrote about what hurt. I did my absolute best. I had people help me and advise me. And that’s the book I put out in the world. So, I’m actually feeling a lot more chill now than I have for the past three years because I’ve done my bit. I can’t control anything else after this point. The book is printed. It’s arriving in boxes in stores as we speak. So, all I can do is, I’ve done my very best as an artist, I’ve followed the same process I followed the first time, and then everything else is totally beyond my control.
Well look I’m really glad you didn’t wait thirteen years because I mean, this book is just… and it’s your signature style as well. It’s that raw, honest writing that really gets to the heart of what we’re all thinking and feeling and those experiences that we’ve had, gay or not. I think we spoke after Invisible Boys came out about how much of resonated with me even though I’m a straight woman who grew up in the city.
Yeah. Shame is universal.
Yeah absolutely. So, then the last question I have for you is, you briefly said something just then, what are you working on next?
Yeah, well in a way I did say something and in another way I don’t know if I have because you know The Brink was meant to be about friends and it kind of evolved into being about identity. This book is meant to be about – so it started with family and what that’s done to me and the trauma that’s caused, so it might stay that way, or it might evolve into something else I don’t know.
But yeah, the third book is a book for adults, it’s my first book purely pitched at adults, so there’s nothing about it that is YA. The point of view character is about to hit thirty, so he’s in his Saturn return – you know I’m not an astrology person at all but when you turn twenty-nine you evolve from the child version of yourself into the adult version of who you’re meant to be in life.
So, I thought it would be really interesting to put a character at that point. You know like shedding the skin of childhood and like who are you now and what does that do to your relationships. Which in some ways is similar to Invisible Boys and in some ways is similar to The Brink. It’s a recurring theme for me, that reinvention. But yeah this book is straight up for adults, so it will be much more graphic… if I wasn’t already.
As if you’re not already!
Yeah! I know I know. I’ve been so… someone messaged me the other day who is reviewing this book and was like ‘there’s so much sex!’ with The Brink. And I was like yes, it’s not a Holden Sheppard book if there’s not sex. But ah this one, the sex is graphic and pretty kinky. So that’s kind of cool to be able to lean into that and not have any worries about it being pitched or sold to teenagers. It’s just purely for adults.
The other interesting change I think is that I’ve stopped splitting myself into three. So, with the first two books I wrote, to be able to explore these facets of myself, I had to kind of break it into three point of view characters and make them all a little different and let each tackle something, a chunk of my own identity. And maybe that was kind hiding myself a little bit as well. Like I was trying to, because I’m writing so autobiographically, it was kind of like you can’t tell which of the three characters I am at any given time, and you can’t tell which part is fiction. And I’m not doing that anymore.
I’ve processed so much through doing that I think I just feel really unified in who I am. I understand who I am now at thirty, thirty-four. So, the character on the page is more or less me. It’s a Sicilian-Australian gym junkie with anger issues and addiction issues, and his name is Dane, and yeah I’m really interested to write in real time. To not be mining past trauma but to actually have the confidence and the balls to show up on the page now and be like this is how I am now and see what the world makes of that.
That’s so exciting and I’m so excited to meet Dane when I eventually get to meet him. And also really interesting to think about the idea that we are continually coming of age. Like we talk about coming of age as that thing that happens in your teenage years but its actually something we do over and over and over again throughout our adult lives as well. I’m really excited to see you explore that concept with somebody a little bit older. So thank you so much. Congratulations on The Brink, it’s fantastic, and all the very best for the tour.
Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure. Cheers.
The Brink by Holden Sheppard is out now with Text Publishing. Get your copy from Booktopia HERE!
