- Published: 7 November 2023
- ISBN: 9781761044458
- Imprint: Viking
- Format: Trade Paperback
- Pages: 400
- RRP: $34.99
Big Mouth
Extract
‘Why have you got two birth certificates? Are you adopted?’
This is my seventeen-year-old daughter, whip-smart with a street fighter’s insight. Standing among a thousand holidaymakers near the chaotic and slightly frantic Jetstar gates at Melbourne Airport seems a less than ideal spot to start revealing lifelong family secrets . . . but then again, where could be better, where could be less likely, and more perfectly inappropriate, than surrounded by the piled hand luggage and all the howling, the collective stress of holiday travel on a no-frills airline thick in the air? It is strangely right.
I nod.
‘So your dad wasn’t your dad? And your sisters – our aunts – aren’t really your sisters?’
Not quite . . .
It’s complicated . . .
‘Well, yes and no. And they’re actually my half-sisters.’
You can see the world reordering in her eyes.
‘But to me they’ve always only ever been my sisters.’
At this, you can see things start to right.
My boys look on, not sure if this is a joke or not. The woman I love just nods. Realisation spreads among us.
‘Oh, Father,’ says Sadie. ‘Don’t we have a lot to talk about?’
Big Mouth Matt Preston
A rock'n'roll memoir of life, death and growing up with the occasional scandal.
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It’s Friday 11 November 2022, around 10 a.m., and I’m sitting in a makeshift broadcast booth set up in the spare bedroom on the top floor of my house in Woollahra.
Rising at 5 am, I checked my email as I usually did, and saw this newly arrived item in my inbox:
There’re a few times in life when you know you’re witnessing history.
Bryce Courtenay will always be remembered as the writer who created The Power of One.
In early 2019 I received a call from my brother saying our mother was extremely unwell and had been taken to hospital in an ambulance
A lone figure sits astride their surfboard, like a rider on a horse, calmly balanced, scanning the horizon, searching the vast blue undulations for telltale signs of an approaching swell.
Mum pulled the white Holden Commodore over to the side of the road.
To'asavili was dreaming of cows swimming under the sea.
I didn’t keep a journal during the most traumatic parts of my life because, let’s face it, I didn’t want to remember that shit.
My writing career unofficially began at McLean Hospital, the psychiatric affiliate of Harvard Medical School in Belmont, Massachusetts.
How this new condition changes language, not we or us or ours but I and me and mine, mine alone the hollow hours.
On the crest of Hopetoun Bridge, I stop and take a selfie.
