Brendan Cowell - interview

Book: How it Feels
Publisher: Picador
Price: $32.99 (paperback)

The boroughs and neighbourhoods of New York have been the stomping ground of literary heavyweights for decades, so it really isn’t a surprise to find aspiring writers renting vintage brownstones or tucking themselves into the back of village coffee shops to pen their first novel. When Australian actor and playwright Brendan Cowell arrived in Manhattan three years ago he may have been searching for inspiration but instead spent his evenings googling cures for writers block and considering ways to make a fast buck to pay his publisher back the advance.

“All I ever really wanted to do was write a book but the thought of it was terrifying,” Cowell says. “I had a year to write it and I got to New York and I was overwhelmed, it was too big,” he says and admits his first draft danced around the story he felt too scared to write. One fortuitous night while surfing the net, Cowell stumbled across some words from Ernest Hemingway that had been lifted from his memoir by a considerate blogger. “Hemingway said to just start with one true thing. Write one true thing”, he says. Bolstered by the words of the late writer and the faith of a publisher who knew he had it in him, Cowell found his voice. “I told myself to just write it,” he says. “I care about this shit, and it scares me and I need to say it. From there it was quite easy because the truth writes itself.” After closing the book on the final page of his debut novel, How it Feels, it is difficult to believe the process was anything other than effortless.

In person, Cowell is relaxed and good natured and shows no signs of anxiety, a state he says he lives in constantly. He admits he has no one to blame for this but himself. He likes to do things that make him feel uncomfortable as a way to test his creative capabilities. How it Feels is Cowell’s proudest achievement, which is a big call given his impressive CV. He is an accomplished poet and playwright winning the Patrick White Playwrights' Award for his play Bed. For three years he played the sexy, enigmatic and lion-hearted Tom Jackson alongside Claudia Karvan, Dan Wylie and Asher Keddie on the AFI award winning TV show Love My Way. He also wrote many episodes of the show with Karvan. He has starred in the hit Australian movies Noise, Beneath Hill 60 and I Love You Too. He was Hamlet for the Bell Shakespeare theatre company and most recently, was directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the Sydney Theatre Company's production of True West. He managed to write a 300-page novel amongst all of this by constantly scratching down notes wherever and whenever he could.

How it Feels is a story about four friends who have been yanked out of adolescence by the hand life has dealt them and thrown painfully into adulthood. The story begins in the early 1990s in the beachside town of Cronulla, or ‘The Shire’ in NSW where we are introduced to Neil Cronk. Neil is a want-to-be actor who punches, kicks and smokes his way to Year 12 graduation flanked by his two best mates Gordon and Stuart and his girlfriend Courtney. On graduation night, with his liver filled with booze and drugs and his heart heavy with love and loss, Neil makes the decision to leave his life in the Shire to find his place in the world. A decade later one of the friends is dead, one is famous, two are married and the once strong friendships have been stretched to breaking point.

This book is a work of fiction and Cowell wants to make that clear. This is not an account of his life growing up in Cronulla. “The scenes are created to explain how going through these experiences feels, rather than focusing on how it actually was,” he says. “Gordon and Stuart are loosely based on my best mate and my oldest mate and I guess Courtney is an amalgamation of some of the girls in my life. Neil is kind of a bit of me but he has done things I wouldn’t do or haven’t done. We share the same disposition. We both grew up in Cronulla and we both needed to go quite savagely to become a completely different human being.”

JD Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye had a profound effect on Cowell as a teenager, and like Salinger’s protagonist Holden Caulfield, Cronk is also somewhat of an anti-hero. He is a bit narcissistic, a bit self destructive and a bit unfeeling toward his mates, particularly his girlfriend Courtney. As much as you want to like him, he makes it hard. “It hurts me when people say they don’t like him,” Cowell says. “I was never aware of him being unlikeable. I didn’t realise, maybe that says something about me?” he muses. Cowell suggests Neil isn’t solely responsible for the fractures that appear in the relationships over the years. Courtney promises to leave Cronulla with Neil, but when it comes time to go, discovers she is tied there by her past. Gordon, Neil’s oldest friend, can’t forgive him for leaving and punishes him by keeping secrets. “They broke his heart,” he says. “But he loves them very dearly. They know him and he knows them. You share your youth with someone and they will always see you, you can never escape them.”

Just as he captivates on stage and screen, his readers will be equally wooed by Cowell’s talents as a storyteller and wordsmith. “I was looking forward to really writing again instead of writing a page and a half scene for that demographic, for that actor and making it 80 seconds long with no swear words for an 8.30 time slot,” he says. “As a poet as an actor it is about finding the rhythm in the sentence, which I do with punctuation. I want the sentences to be read in a certain way. A lot of writers get editors to do the grammar, spelling and punctuation check and that is why getting to the end of the process took so long for me. I am also really proud of the structure. My editor had some really cool ideas to shake it up and keep the mystery and Hitchcock of the story a bit.”

In How it Feels, Cowell captures the realities of growing up – it isn’t always pretty, it isn’t orderly and well behaved, and it can be both ugly and beautiful. He weaves his way through the messy parts of life that cause your brain to ache and your soul to splinter before he sends you careening headfirst into some pretty confronting and heartbreaking situations. “I enjoy writing dark stuff,” he says. “I like those extreme parts of the human psyche and I like their characters. When you are young you make the most ridiculous decisions and you do these dumb things.

he first line of the book was ‘This is not how I dreamt it’ and that’s life and that’s also being young. It just doesn’t turn out right. It is always just a little broken because your body and your brain is on fire and that seems to overtake the logic. I enjoy writing it because you tap into something real and I am not afraid of it I guess.” In terms of his own adolescence, Cowell confesses he was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to sex despite loving girls. “I was like 150 when I got started,” he laughs. “I turned 17 in my mid 20s but I have definitely made up for lost time. When I was a teenager I had all of my mates telling me stories about losing their virginity and I had these girls wanting to do things and I was just totally paralysed by the enormity of the event.”

Although only 34, Cowell suggests initially his reason for writing the book came from a need to capture what it was like to be young, before he forgot. Over dinner one night with one of his heroes American novelist Bret Easton Ellis, Cowell was forced to reconsider his motivation for putting pen to paper. “Bret asked me why I wrote the book, which is such a good question,” he says. “There were things that happened in my past that haunt me, there are still quite a few things that hurt me, things that I haven’t quite worked out and I think I wrote the book to have a look at that and find some answers. Brett said ‘that is why you write a book, because you want to know something, not because you want to say something’.”

This year has been a tough one for Cowell, despite his achievements. “My dog died, I lost my girl, I was like this bad Johnny Cash cliché,” he says. “I feel like I have just started a new stage of my life and I don’t know what is going to happen next. I am renovating my house, thinking about getting a dog. You know life is about the real sh*t and I think especially given what I do you can get lost in the false shit. Compared to when I was younger I have a deeper yearning for a simple life. I really value the little things a lot more now. I walked past a book shop the other day and I saw my book in the window and I was like, ‘F**k I am a novelist’ and that is a great thing, what a great thing.”