I had the pleasure of sitting down with Graeme Simsion to talk about his latest title The Rosie Effect, following on from the successful The Rosie Project. You can watch my interview with Graeme or read the transcript below.
BH: I’m Barbara Horgan from Boffins and today we’re very lucky to have Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project and the recently published The Rosie Effect here, and he’s popped in to Boffins for a chat. Welcome to Boffins Graeme, great to see you again.
GS: Great to see you again – in Perth!
BH: Now firstly I’d like to thank you. These are tough times in Australia and around the world, and to be able to do, as I did, get on a bus, go to work reading The Rosie Effect and be completely absorbed in it, laugh out loud and have people look at you in a crazy way, and forget everything except Don and Rosie - it’s a very special gift you've given me and your readers. Thankyou very much.
GS: Well, thank you very much. We need a bit of light to go with the shade. But I still like to feel that even in a book like this, where there’s obviously a lot of overt humour – that’s most people’s reaction to it, laughing out loud and so forth – you still put something behind that, so that if people want to read it a second time or think about what they’ve read, there’s something there to think about, there’s some emotional content as well.
Agreed. Now we had a very enjoyable lunch earlier this year and I can recall that you mentioned that you weren’t going to write a sequel. What changed your mind?
Two things I guess. I was well down the track with a second book that had nothing to do with the Don and Rosie story. But a lot of people were saying “look, the happy ending is sweet, but it's a little contrite. In real life, this couple would not survive.” I took exception to that. I wouldn’t have given them that ending if I didn’t believe in it. And you meet couples who are...people who are much more extreme than Don Tillman who’ve made successful marriages, successful upbringing of kids and so forth, have jobs...you know, they’ve built lives for themselves. So there’s different strokes for different folks there. But I didn’t have a way into it creatively. And then I was out with my writers’ group celebrating the pregnancy of one of them, and I thought that could be Don’s next challenge.
Before publishing the Rosie Project, did you contact the Asperger’s network?
I certainly did. Mainly in Australia, but I got out to a number of Asperger’s and autism spectrum organisations in Australia, plus I contacted about ten people in Australia and overseas who had family members with Asperger's or who identified themselves as having asperger’s, and got their feedback and it was tremendously supportive.
Since the book’s been published, the feedback from the Asperger’s community has exceeded my positive expectations, if you like. I thought it might go 80/20. But almost nobody from that community has come back with a problem with the book. I’m tempting fate obviously, going on camera and saying that, and there will be people I’m sure who have an issue. But to date it’s been people who take offense on behalf of the Asperger’s community, of which they are not a part.
Or occasionally, people with kids with very very severe autism, we’re talking about kids unable to look after themselves in the most basic ways. Because we now talk about a spectrum and their kid’s on the spectrum, Don’s on the spectrum, and we’re having a laugh – sometimes at Don’s expense, let’s not kid ourselves – they’re saying, “I don’t want people laughing at my kid’s expense.” To which I’m saying your kid is not Don: Don Tillman is a very high-functioning person who would see himself as being in a minority, not as being disabled in any way.
I agree. Have you started a new novel, and are Don and Rosie in it?
The answer is I'd actually started that new novel before I started The Rosie Effect. I was actually as far as a full draft. Not with Don and Rosie in it, but its working title is The Candle, and it’s a story of a relationship rekindled after twenty-two years. So a man and woman meet in Australia but he’s a visitor, she’s married, so it's not going to anywhere – well not that far anyway. But they carry the torch, both of them. This was the lover, this was the one. And then twenty-two years later, thanks to the internet, they meet again. So we follow their story there.
But will there be another Don and Rosie Hudson story? Possibly, but I want to give it another five to seven years, to enable the outcome of the Rosie effect – which we know is a pregnancy, so you can work that out – to grow into a situation where we have a family that we can look at and explore those dynamics.
I’d love to know how Don would cope with a tantrum toddler!
I want this to be the third and last book. I don’t want this to become Adrian Mole. Not that there was anything wrong with Adrian Mole, but my desire as a writer is not to be writing Don Tillman: The Prostate Years, or whatever.
No, I can understand that. Now how are the film rights progressing on The Rosie Project? I know it was originally a screenplay, so have you had any input into the actual writing of the screenplay?
Yep, I wrote it. Which was great. Now, we're talking about Hollywood here, so I got to write the first two drafts, that was my contract. After that they can do what they like with it. They can throw it away and start again, if they want to. They’re not under any contractual obligation to stay with what I had. But the way it works there is that the credits – which is what I’m now interested in I guess, having been paid – are based on my original screenplay and how far it is from what they shoot. So if the new screenwriters change it completely, I don’t get a credit. But they look at structure, they look at characters, and I find it hard to believe that they wouldn’t stay pretty close at least to the current set of characters.
Absolutely. Now two scenes in the books - the cocktail scene in the Rosie Project and the playground scene and subsequent arrest in the Rosie Effect. How much research did you do? Because they’re very special original scenes.
Not very much, to tell the truth. People always ask how much research did you do into Asperger’s syndrome, and the answer is 30 years in information technlogy. Now that's a little glib, but I didn’t do any reading on the topic. I didn’t want Don to come out of a textbook. I also studied physics, I hung out at chess clubs, so I’ve hung out with some fairly serious nerds. Many of them probably with Asperger’s further along the spectrum than Don Tillman. So those were the people I channeled as I created the Don Tillman character. I need to say, I don’t identify as having Asperger’s myself, but I certainly hung out with a lot of people who did.
So sorry, your question...
The cocktails - do you make a lot at home?
Oh yes! The research for the cocktail scene. I based it on, or it was inspired by, a dinner party where I played the part of a snobby wine waiter who just pontificated on the wines. I’m a bit of a wine buff, so it wasn’t terribly hard for me to do. When I wrote it in the book, I thought making Don a wine buff would just be too much out of character for him, too much of a one-joke thing, so I moved the wine to cocktails and had more fun with it.
And also because the people who have cocktails are different to wine buffs?
Well, quite. And look, my research was Wikipedia basically. I knew a few cocktails, looked up a few cocktails, and away we went.
And the one where he was arrested in the park – the only real research I there was into the laws in New York about being arrested. And it’s pretty straightforward. I was in New York, one of my New York friends had said you’re not allowed to go into the park without a child under the age of twelve. I wandered around until I found a playground with exactly that sign on it. Had a look, it’s on Tenth Avenue, and that is the playground, in my head, where this takes place. With a central island of foliage. I can see it.
I’m not a good visualiser. So for me when I’m writing it helps me a lot to actually have a real place in mind, a real house, a real university, real streets, and then I just set them in those places. I don’t want to be trying to imagine the logic of the architecture while I’m doing these things.
You can just imagine Don in the circumstance of trying to become the best parent he can, doing that!
He would study children! I won’t say always, but often with Don, his behaviour survives logical scrutiny. Why wouldn’t you? He wants to learn about kids, he goes and watches some kids. Shouldn’t people have a safe place to watch kids? And so on.
In the 1980s I visited France at some stage, I had a day hanging out in Paris and I remember going along to a kids’ playground, sandpit, those sorts of things, and just watched the little kids out playing. I was taking photos! I mean today you couldn’t do it. But nobody worried. I was a tourist, just having a look. [Waves] Hi!
Now you’ve told me before that you wrote some short stories to hone your craft as a writer. Have you thought of writing a collection of short stories?
I have to tell you – come on, you’re a bookseller – they sell very well, don't they?
Ah, they can. If you've got a bookseller that knows and understands the value of short stories...
You've answered my question! If you’ve got a bookseller that knows and understands the value of short stories. And perhaps we don’t have as much of that as we would like. Look, it’s a straightforward commercial thing: if my publisher would like me to do a collection of short stories, that’d be a lot of fun. I’ve published a dozen short stories, maybe a little less, some are what you’d call apprentice pieces and I perhaps wouldn’t like them out again, but I quite enjoy writing short stories.
It’s a great way to experiment, and to get yourself...as I was doing the Don and Rosie books it was great to have them out there, even if they predated the Don and Rosie books, to say I’m not just a one-trick pony who only writes one character, and must therefore be that character, and so on.
Now what countries have you toured with your books, and have you had a similar reaction in each of those countries?
I toured the US and UK about five times each. I had a short trip to Canada, to Hong Kong, Italy, to France, the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand. The reaction in those countries seems to be very, very similar to the reaction in Australia when I’m out there speaking to the readers. I’m not so sure how it goes down in Taiwan...it hit number one in Taiwan, but when I spoke to journalists there, the questions they were asking didn't have the underlying current of “this is hilarious” as you might have got in say Germany or Italy.
Thanks so much Graeme for coming in. You've brought a lot of joy, understanding and laughter to your readers.
Thanks very much Barbara. Great talking to you.