"Living day by day, pulling stuff out of your arse."

Mostly, I've left Tim Winton to other chaps. I read Cloudstreet a few thousand years ago, because everyone else was, but it didn't quite fly with the Oxbridge/Albionesque/ and-did-these-hills-in-ancient-times/Elliot/Thackery/Waugh/Greene phase I was going through at the time. About three years ago I read The Riders, and loved it — adored it even! was transfixed by it! — then forgot about it, and him, completely.

So goodness me but I was rather surprised to find myself listening to Tim Winton talk about his new novel Breath at the Anatheum Theatre in Melbourne the other night. My mate took me — got freebies, you see, she said, tapping the side of her nose with one of those pencils with a rubber on the end of it. And I loved it, I loved him, I bought his book and now I'm loving the book. He began very breathy himself. Nervous and hesitant, in fact talking about being nervous, but apparently happy to give it a crack one more time. He's been doing these author appearances for a long time, but he seems to pretty much hate them. He was badly dressed and a bit fat and of course he still has his horrible hair. He shouldn't be an attractive man, but then there's talent and charisma and all that stuff. He has that. He looked out of place, in a building.

What was interestingest was the way in which he concealed this learned lyricism behind his fish 'n chips mateyness. He'd be talking about keeping good surf breaks secret or the trauma of middle-order kids, then suddenly string together seven words that, individually, I'd probably have to look up in a dictionary, but in sequence and with context and his own economical poetry transmitted some amazing insight that made the audience gasp and mummer. He doesn't look clever, but he's very clever. Very nice too. He seemed like a very nice man.

He had some lovely insights on writing: "Living day by day, pulling stuff out your arse." Later: "I have to. I need to earn money. There is no Plan B. There has never been a Plan B." (Later, ruminating on this lack of a Plan B, he mentions his son, something about seeing his sins revisited. It made me think, someday the son will be the father's age, and he'll say, "My father saw in me the thing that drove and tormented him.")

Before he started working on Breath, he was working on another novel that he could not make work, and it turned him "in hate with the world, in anguish, getting myself in to hell's own tizz".

His favourite writers are Mark Twain and Faulkner and another I can't remember.

He says: "The day you finish a book is simply the day you decide to finish. For everybody's sake."

So, anyway, I'm reading it now. Breath, I mean. Tell you about it when I'm done.