Award winning writer Markus Zusak has five books to his name, including international bestseller The Book Thief, which spent more than a decade on the New York Times bestseller list. It has been translated into more than forty languages making him one of the most successful authors to come out of Australia.
His latest book Bridge of Clay, is the story of five brothers, growing up unsupervised in Sydney's suburbs in a world run by their own rules. It is a project he has wrestled with for more than ten years, he told Jim Mora.
Markus Zusack Photo: supplied
Both of Zusak’s parents immigrated to Australia from Germany and Austria after World War II. He loved their stories growing up and his curiosity about the stories in our own lives has spilled into Bridge of Clay, he says.
One of the very first lines Zusak wrote for the book was: “They took on the sun and won”.
“It’s one of the things that’s fascinating to me is that you write a book and so many things come and go and there are all these foundations that you lay that you then sweep away, not realising that they are still there in some way and they’re what holds the finished product up at the end.
"All your failures and all your scratchings and everything…when you come across it in your final edits you go ‘oh God, that’s been there for 12 or 13 years’.”
Bridge of Clay didn't come easy, he says.
“I was working so hard and it sort of hit the decade mark that I’d worked on this book and nothing was changing…one of the reasons it was taking so long is I was really trying to write better than I actually am.
“It was almost like I was writing for the world championship of myself.”
That self-inflicted pressure held him up for a long time.
“My wife sat me down at the ten year mark in the kitchen, always the best stuff happens in the kitchen I find, or the best stories, and she said ‘look it’s been ten years, I think this is it, I’m giving you one week’.”
It wasn’t a week to finish, he says, it was a week to get it feeling better again.
The week came and went and Zusak ended up having to take a holiday from it.
“It came to a point where I said, I’m not going to live with myself unless I finish this book and so stop working so hard at working hard, just get in there, get your hands dirty and stop worrying so much and do the work.
“You know, you can work or you can worry.”
Photo: Supplied
After six weeks he went away for a few days and read the book; “there’s always a moment when the dam breaks”.
It was a hot and humid night in Sydney when he finished the book, “And I thought, that’s really quite fitting”.
Zusak works from home, and that’s how he likes it, he says.
“I really like the idea of being surrounded by chaos, and I think that’s where my books actually come from. Growing up in a household, being the youngest of four kids, people arguing in the kitchen, toast crumbs everywhere, dogs barking, dads yelling and mum trying to cope with the dad and all that sort of stuff.”
When he wrote The Book Thief, he wasn’t a parent. His daughter is now 12, his son almost 4.
“Your life I think quadruples the moment you have children. You say success hasn’t changed you and all that kind of thing, but it does and I think suddenly there was just so much more to lose.”
Zusak wrote his first book at sixteen, he says it could be entered into a competition for the worst book ever written.
“People say to be a writer you have to read widely, and I agree with that, but I also think you have to read narrowly sometimes as well and what I mean by that is sometimes, instead of reading three books in a month, I’ll read the same book three times… I’m working out how it all works and how this writer does this.”
He also watches the same films over and over again, preparing himself for going in and doing what has to be done, he says.
“Anything you want to get good at, you have to do the work.”
