I recently went to the launch of Us Karen – it was huge. There were over 300 people there and around 300 books were sold. Wow. And I realised that the secret to its success was largely down to the subject matter. The author, Richard Dove, had chosen to write about an oppressed ethnic minority – the Karen people of Burma. So I’ve done the same thing, only I’ve written about New Zealanders, a people forced to leave their homeland to come to Australia and live on the dole.
The Bits
The human heart is like a water pump.
It looks fine; it sounds fine. But if you don’t look after it, if you’re always running hot, or your system’s full of shit, your impeller blades wear down, your bushes go, your gaskets start to leak. But it still looks and sounds fine, till suddenly one day you find yourself stopped at the roadside, boiling over. You open your bonnet and you say, shit, my water pump’s fucked.
Look after your heart.