Page 102 of The Wedding Forecast

‘That sounds so sweet.’

‘I looked forward to it all week when I was in primary school. When we were really little, if we had a nightmare and we went to her in the night, she’d always let us in the bed, she’d never make us go back to our own beds. She wouldn’t make me go to school if I said I wasn’t feeling well. She believed you, you know, and always wanted to make it better.’ He pauses. ‘I’m saying us, but possibly my sisters had a different experience. They always said I was the favourite, the spoiled youngest child, the only boy.’

‘Well, I’m worse,’ I say. ‘I’m the spoiled only child, and I had a “go back to your own bed, you’ll be fine” mother when it came to bad dreams, but she was also a hypochondriac who would take me to the doctor for every sore throat. So kind of the worst of both worlds. But very loving.’

‘What does she think about you working in the bookshop?’

‘She is beginning to accept it, begrudgingly, although she keeps sending me links to a podcast about how to invest and manage your money.’

‘My mum was probably a worrier too, but she hid it from us.’

‘What did she think about you being an actor?’

‘She supported it completely. Dad didn’t, but that kind of made Mum dig her heels in. She wanted us to take big swings.’

‘Even when you moved overseas?’

‘Oh yeah. She told me to go. She said, “Go and do it and don’t look back. And don’t come home if you’re scared, don’t come home if it doesn’t work out right away, don’t come home if it gets hard. Only come home if that’s what you want.”’

‘That’s intense.’

‘She could be intense.’

‘And what was it like, when…when it happened? When she died?’

‘I can’t really remember it. I’ve kind of blocked it out: the call to say she’d died, the flight home. I was shaking, I remember. I couldn’t stop shaking. I was a mess, my whole family was just such a mess. And then flying back to the US after the funeral, I remember telling myself to leave it all there, try to leave the worst of it all back there in Australia.’

‘And did that work?’

‘Sort of. I had to be on the Code Blue set a week after the funeral. Everyone kept saying, “Go, go, she’d want you to do it, she’d want you to be there, don’t miss the opportunity.” And she would. But also, I never got to grieve with my family. I never got to go through her things, to share the sadness, I guess. And then once I’d left, I just never went back.’

‘That’s sounds messed up.’

‘Yeah. I had this acting coach, later, who told me to use it, to take the grief and put it in my scenes, and I did, a few times, but that fucked me up even more. So I stopped doing that. That’s the stuff I don’t touch.’

‘I think for some writers, it’s the same. If you put too much of your own trauma on the page, even fictionalised, it can start to chip away at you.’

‘Did you do that with your first book?’

‘Not really. A bit. Little snippets of your life work their way in, whether you mean to put them there or not.’ I am already wondering what I’ve accidentally put into The Scam, what parts of me will feel exposed when it’s published.

‘So was Joel right, what he said to you? About it being about him?’

‘No and yes. There was some of the tension we were having as a couple in there, and yes, we had gone on a hiking holiday, but the characters were really nothing like us. If we’d worked things out, and we were still together, I don’t think he would have thought that at all.’

‘Yeah at least with acting, someone else wrote the lines, made the character up. I just focus on bringing them to life.’

‘They’re kind of opposite vulnerabilities. Share tens of thousands of words from inside your brain or stand on stage in front of hundreds of people and have them watch your every move. Pick your poison.’

He laughs. ‘That’s why all writers and actors need to be in therapy.’

‘Have you? Gone to therapy?’

‘Yeah, mostly for stuff about Mum, dealing with the grief. It was good. It helped.’

‘I should go again. It’s been on my to-do list.’ Along with book a dental check-up, find better health insurance and do my tax.

‘You don’t have any issues,’ he says.