Carriageworks is an echo chamber

The talk of the festival was that nobody could hear anything. The main room of Sydney’s Carriageworks – an empty, chic converted warehouse – proved itself a poor place for a panel discussion.

A packed schedule meant three events, at most hours, were held at the same time, alongside a bookstore, a book-signing line and a cafe. Thin black curtains were the only barriers, but didn’t even stretch to the edges of the room. Sound spilled out, murmurs echoed off the roof and those in the back rows complained they could hear other events better than their own.

Ironically, a panel on the overuse of suppression orders became completely inaudible. Five minutes in, audience members were in full revolt, shouting “Louder!” at moderator Claire Harvey and the star-studded panel of Gold Walkley winners Kate McClymont, Steve Pennells and Richard Ackland.

Harvey explained it wasn’t an audio issue, it was the space. Volunteers scurried out to lower the volume of the event behind us. “Sorry,” said McClymont. “It’s out of our control.” “We’re getting two panels for the price of one,” quipped Ackland.

By the second-last day of the festival, moderators had to begin their events with a disclaimer, an apology for the poor soundproofing, and a promise that they would try and speak up. – NZ

Nobody really knows what a ‘millennial’ is

Millennials have two mothers, said panel chair and Brow Books publisher Sam Cooney: mother earth and mother internet.

The guests on the panel (titled The Millennial Condition) – Caoilinn Hughes, Evelyn Araluen and Fiona Wright – didn’t disagree. But they did express divergent ideas about what the term itself actually meant, confirming the only thing millennials have in common is that everyone has an opinion about them – including other millennials.

Cooney offered that the cut-off for a birth date to be classified as a millennial was 1996, and that the definition served to encompass the experiences of mostly white, largely middle-class people old enough to experience 9/11 and feel the effects of the 2008 recession.

For Wright, the key issue was insecurity and its resultant anxiety. “I think all of us had multiple jobs listed in our bios. To me what’s most pertinent and pressing are the conditions under which labour has changed since my parents’ generation,” she said. “I challenge anyone to live under those conditions and not be anxious.”

“I never thought about the millennial condition until I was staying in Dublin with my 51-year-old cousin,” said poet and novelist Hughes. The experience was instructive. “Within what I thought was a smallest generation there was a massive difference in how we perceived things,” said Hughes. “Healthcare, housing and education are three times more expensive now relatively than they were in the 60s.”

Araluen responded: “I was born in 1993 so I’m fairly sure I’m a millennial in terms of a temporal thing. But I feel like all the different classifications exist to me through irony ... I think the thing that is most looming and collective for all of us is that we are all going to, in our lifetime, see the massive destructive effects of climate change.” – SC

George Saunders thinks Twitter is a toxin

Booker prize-winning author George Saunders asked the audience to imagine an angry man being aggressive towards a barista. Then he said, imagine that the man’s wife had just died. And then imagine he had been a loving husband and was still recovering from her death. Suddenly a one-dimensional character – an angry man – becomes complex. We may even feel sorry for him and forgive his behaviour.

In this short exercise Saunders not only demonstrated how great writing works on the brain, but how it is a powerful tool for empathy. “Literature trains people to examine your first impression. You put yourself in someone else’s shoes … A tweet can’t do that,” he told the audience at the Sydney Recital Hall.

“With Twitter the means of expression has been altered. You get a percussive tone. We manifest as so many different selves in the course of the day – and only one identity is your Twitter identity.”

He thinks we have addiction to that mode of communication – that future generations will see it as a form of madness. “Twenty years from now we’ll say they were taking toxins in. And we pushed literature aside for this?” – BD

Your fave might be problematic, but so is cancelling them

They’re a fairly disparate bunch, but Louis CK, Michael Jackson, Picasso, Kevin Spacey, R Kelly, Roseanne Barr and Woody Allen have all been casualties of cancel culture:at one point or another, they have been deemed to have transgressed some hard boundaries and as a result, their work cannot be enjoyed without guilt. In some cases, such as Barr and Spacey, their work has been pulled off air – literally cancelled, blacklisted or erased.

But who is doing the cancelling? And for how long do our faves get cancelled before all is forgiven? Can we still appreciate art by terrible people?

Ashleigh Wilson, Osman Faruqi and Estelle Tang wrestled with this question. Not a week goes by on social media where there aren’t calls for bad celebrities to be cancelled. But as Faruqi pointed out: “We talk about it, but only a very few amount of people have the power to cancel others, like TV execs, publishing houses and literary agents.”

Instead, individuals are left to have their own reckoning about whether they will listen to or consume work from someone who is problematic. Michael Jackson was a particularly thorny case for the panellists. After the recent documentary Leaving Neverland was aired, detailing allegations of repeated child sexual abuse against Jackson, it was obvious he should be “cancelled”, said the panellists. But, asked Tang, how can you cancel someone whose influence is felt so widely, including in the music of the very non-problematic Beyoncé?

“The more I think about it, the more complicated it becomes,” said Wilson. Jackson’s music was entwined with his own childhood (“I remember watching television as a kid the first time he did the moonwalk”) – how could you “cancel” someone who was so intrinsic to your formative years? That said, cancelling someone whose work and reputation helped facilitate the abuse, as Jackson’s undoubtedly did in the case of these allegations, is part of stopping the abuse from actually happening.– BD

Jill Abramson doesn’t want to talk about plagiarism

Perhaps unsurprisingly, former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson didn’t seem keen to discuss plagiarism in her appearance alongside Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor.

Abramson’s book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, follows the fortunes of two “legacy” media organisations (the Times and the Washington Post) and two “upstarts” (Buzzfeed and Vice) as they came to grips with the commercial challenges that have wrought havoc on the industry.

The book’s release however has been marred by allegations of plagiarism, an irony too great to ignore in a book about the fight for factual reporting in the age of so-called “fake news”. Vice correspondent Michael Moynihan, among others, has pointed out that sections of Abramson’s writing strayed uncomfortably close to the work of several other writers.

When Taylor broached the subject, Abramson offered a grab-bag of excuses. While admitting to “citation errors” in the book, she dismissed concerns about factual errors as minor or inconsequential and suggested much of the criticism has come from Vice reporters apparently unhappy with her portrayal of the company.

Abramson was more candid about the role gender played in her high-profile sacking as Times editor in 2014, suggesting some of the criticisms levelled at her were at the very least flavoured by gender. That insight prompted an argument between two men in the audience that almost came to blows, when one apparently began muttering loudly about “PC feminist bullshit”, and another asked him to pipe down. – MM

Harper Collins is still profiting from Dan Mallory’s lies

Ian Parker’s explosive portrait of Dan Mallory, published in the New Yorker in February, was the most delicious literary expose in recent history. Mallory’s 2018 book The Woman in the Window, written under the faint pseudonym AJ Finn, was the first in a $2m two-book deal with Harper Collins, where Mallory worked as an editor and executive. It was an immediate bestseller, going to No 1 in its first week and sending Mallory on a book tour where, it turns out, he lied repeatedly to journalists and fans.

Some of Mallory’s lies were less malicious than others – a doctorate fib here, a JK Rowling invention there. But Parker saw a dangling thread, pulled it and ended stripping the author bare: Mallory had also, it turned out, allegedly faked his own cancer and impersonated his brother over email. And faked his mother’s death from cancer. And his father’s death. And his brother’s suicide. (There’s also a thing about urine-filled plastic cups that really must be read first hand.) Mallory apologised in a statement to the New Yorker for saying he had cancer when he did not, but has not directly addressed many of the other allegations.

But while Parker’s expose went viral, it has had little effect on Mallory’s standing or sales: the Hollywood adaptation of his first book opens in October, and his second novel is on the way. “I mean it’s not a fraud is it, exactly?” Parker posited. “He’s an imposter to some degree, he’s a faker, he tells lies fluently and effortlessly, but … you can’t be fired from being a novelist.” And it certainly hasn’t deterred Harper Collins, whose ongoing support of Mallory, Parker said, makes them “conspiratorial”.

To illustrate this idea, Parker checked Harper Collins Australia’s website for Dan Mallory’s author bio just before coming on stage. “It says, ‘Finn lived in England for 10 years’ – he did not live in England for 10 years, it was maximum seven.’”

A few days later – thanks no doubt to some fast-moving Harper Collins staffers in the audience – “10 years” had been changed to “almost a decade”. But the rest of the wording remains. – SH

Fatima Bhutto is not afraid to take on the Four Horsemen

Bhutto, author of six books including 2018’s The Runaways, opened Sydney writers’ festival eight years ago in a speech titled “Pakistan: a nation on the brink of a nervous breakdown”. On Sunday she bookended it with a focus on the recent nervous breakdown of the entire western world.

The speech was full of barbs that left you breathless: about Brexit, Christchurch, and Hollywood feminism. But the majority of the speech focused on the “rotten” lie that has been told by the west for the last 20 years: that Islam is the world’s most dangerous religion.

“At the forefront of this are a set of men who take a perverse delight from pontificating about religion, notably Islam, and they call themselves the Four Horsemen,” she said, referring to Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. “Embarrassing nickname for a bunch of middle-aged white men, don’t you think?”

To disprove Dawkins’ claim that Islam is “the most evil religion in the world”, she numbered the horrifying casualties perpetuated in wars waged by atheists and Christians: 15 to 19 million dead in the first world war, and 60 million in the second; between one and two million in the Korean war, and three million in Vietnam – to say nothing of the Laos bombings and the first Gulf war. Most recently, half a million were killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (a conservative estimate), with thousands of civilians murdered by US drone strikes in the region.

“All religions are misused to justify war and death, but the one used to kill the most over the 20th and 21st century so far wasn’t Islam. The Four Horsemen – and I’d like to see any one of them actually ride a horse – have a lot to account for their maths.” – SH

Male authors have families too

Every writers’ festival has its star, and this years was Max Porter, the UK author of 2015’s prize-winning Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, and last year’s Lanny. It was difficult to go anywhere without eavesdropping on conversations about his exhilarating, propulsive opening address.

Two days later I raced the audience out of his Q&A to buy the books before they sold out. That session, hosted by the festival’s other star, the Wheeler Centre’s omnipresent Michael Williams, was a festival highlight – notable not just for the charm of the author, but for how the conversation wove between how he writes and how he lives. It’s rare to hear a male author talk about his wife and children, and how he balances those roles with his craft. It’s even rarer to see his eyes well up when admitting how much he misses them.

The night before, on a panel about women who write, Kristen Roupenian – the author of 2017’s viral short story Cat Person – talked about how much effort she has spent over the last 18 months trying to correct a global assumption that the story was autobiographical. (The story is about a 20-year-old who goes on a bad date with a man. Roupenian was 36 when she wrote it, and dating a woman.)

“I’ll read interviews with male authors and I’ll be like, ‘How few facts am I going to get about their lives by the end of this?’” she said. “Meanwhile, the amount of personal information that was mined from me over the few months of doing publicity – that distinction is really clear.”

Playwright Michelle Law had a similar experience. “Every time a journalist would contact me to interview me about my play, which is called Single Asian Female, they’d always ask, ‘So, how autobiographical is it?’ It was like, ‘None of this happened to me! Would you ask this of David Williamson?’ You wouldn’t: you would assume he has just created a wonderful story.”

Meg Wolitzer illustrated the point by quoting Lauren Groff, who last year was asked how motherhood affected her writing. “I understand that this is a question of vital importance to many people, particularly to other mothers who are artists trying to get their work done, and know that I feel for everyone in the struggle,” Groff replied. “But until I see a male writer asked this question, I’m going to respectfully decline to answer it.” – SH