Non-fiction
Words of Love
T rent Dalton’s book Love Stories gives voice to the ordinary, to the extraordinary. To stories of love. I’ve just read Love Stories and I love it. Actually, I love all of Trent Dalton’s books and I have only read two of them.
I can’t believe that it’s taken me this long in my life on earth to discover his writing. Though I did see the series Boy Swallows Universe on tele and was blown away. Those brothers and their love for each other. How they fought for their mother! Nicko – my husband – has read every one of Trent’s books. He’s an absolute fan and now I understand why.
Nicko also says that every one of Trent’s books is really a love story. Love is there in all of them. Love is behind all the wild, crazy, zany, painful and tragic stuff he writes about. But in Love Stories – you can just lay in the bath and luxuriate. The main story-line – love, all the way through. The bubbles, the bath-salts, a cup of tea on the ledge and the water stays warm. You never want to get out.
As the baby writer I am, I’ve learned so much about writing from the way Trent writes.
And about love. His words make me want to do a happy dance. I want to fly when I read how he gets to something you didn’t see coming, or you wouldn’t have thought was there. He uses words to pull you into the characters, their idiosyncrasies and nuances. The diary that a woman keeps in her shoulder bag to record three good things she‘s seen through her day. The man who loves pyjamas so much that he wears them everywhere (yes I mean everywhere). The young man who in Year 12 made a pinky promise with his dying girlfriend to find someone else and be happy. Yet at twenty he still can’t bring himself to make that promise.
It’s easy to see Trent loves what he does. He loves writing. He loves his family. There are heaps of things and people and places he loves. He loves asking questions and he loves to listen. These are only a few of the reasons he’s a good writer.
Trent’s books inspire me to be unafraid of writing from my heart, from my bones, from the bog I’ve been in and the places I want to fly to, dance along, sing about and swim through. When I read what he writes and how he writes it – that’s how I want to write about love and emotion and the way I think about stuff and talk about it and the ways living makes me feel. I want to write about the jumble in my head. His writing makes me want to clear it all out, give it some sense and then dream a little, live a little more, and love a lot more too. I want to throw open the shutters on a rainy day when the sea air rises up to my window and the smell of salt wafts up my big fat nose. I want to feel that pull, that call, to the water. Then I wanna run to the beach, skip along the shore, dive in and swim to Tasmania and back. Are you coming?
When we return, I’ll race home and write about what we saw, how cold and glorious the water was, how damn scared I was, but how great it was that you were there. Will you mind if you’re in my story?
I wanna run to the beach, dance along the shore and dive into the water and swim to Tasmania and back. Are you coming?
He’s a fine writer is Trent Dalton. He makes writing stories look easier than it bloody well is too, I tell ya. But don’t you just love what he did when he was writing Love Stories? Sat at a fold-up table, on a street corner in Brisbane CBD, with an Olivetti typewriter that had been gifted to him by Kathleen Kelly. When she died, she wished explicitly for the old clickity clack word-maker to be his.
So, he put a sign in front of the card table – Sentimental Writer Seeking Love Stories – and people came from everywhere. From all sorts of life’s nooks, potholes, and doorways, with stories of love that spanned the globe and the ocean, that crossed the sky and scaled the mountains and were as different as different could be. And were we not touched, was he not moved, did we not squirm a bit in our seats, did we not laugh and then drop tears? Were we not filled with hope and admiration and goosebumps while we read the stories he shared from those people who walked by and sat down beside him, or stood at his table and flung open the door to their hearts and souls, and just let him right (write) on in.
Love Stories shows us that love is about everything and everything has love in it.
Love Stories is about people, relationships and intimacy, and friendship, and pets and cities and events and objects, and war, and peace and hell and death and birth and nature and the sea and whatever it means for anyone. There is no one definition of love. No one true and only experience clinches it, because it all does.
Love is as deep as the deepest blue sea. But love too – is as wobbly as a minute-old foal standing on its own four-legs. Love is the sweetest raspberry jelly in a Christmas trifle, it’s as fluffy and melty as a marshmallow melting in a cup of hot chocolate. It’s putting your nose to a new-born’s skin. It’s the smell of coffee, the climax of an orgasm, seeing the smile of a toothless old beggar when he gets enough coin to buy his tea (or that’s what you hope he’ll do). Love is wiping my dying mother’s brow and seeing the smile that crossed her face and hitting a note in a song that I tried to send to her in heaven and feeling that note as it passed through my cranium. Love is swimming in the bay with dolphins, then drinking tea on the beach with my buddies afterwards and everyone is shivering and giggly. Love is holding Nicko’s hand as we walk the beach, and my grandson’s love-heart text.
I’ve just started reading Trent’s new book – Gravity Let Me Go. Nicko says it’s a story about love too. Can’t wait to read the words in that one.