Dominic Amerena’s debut I Want Everything gleefully satirises literary ambitions in its tale of an opportunistic writer crossing ethical lines to write the biography of a famous author.
Our (unnamed) protagonist/narrator aspires to greatness and sees a bestseller in the offering when he chances upon an encounter with Brenda Shales. A cult feminist author, Brenda once burned bright in the 1970s, but subsequently flamed out into seclusion, becoming a ‘great mystery of Australian letters’.
Tracking her to a Melbourne aged care facility, the would-be biographer grants himself access to what he believes to be a literary scoop by posing as Shales’ grandson.
Both appalled and thrilled by his outrageous deception, the protagonist (and his conscience) is placed under increasing pressure as the inevitable consequences arrive.
With its twisty, fast-paced narrative and deftly playful language, Amerena finds freshness with the trope of the artist struggling to balance ego and art, as our ‘hero’ attempts to appropriate his subject’s literary glamour and fame.
A delightful black-comic mystery, I Want Everything is at its core about writing – its mundanity, its ego, its desperate dreams of success as well as literary appropriation and male entitlement.
A self-awareness persists throughout, a droll but not unsympathetic take on literary life, particularly in the protagonist’s wry reflections on the opportunism of the struggling writer (‘I was officially against prizes until I started getting shortlisted’). Later, describing the subject of his biography apparently overdosing in front of him, he confesses tellingly, ‘When Brenda collapsed, my first thought was for the book’.
Meanwhile, the presence of his girlfriend Ruth, a far more successful and productive writer, ‘pounding the keys as if her laptop had done her mortal harm’, is an ironic counterpoint to his own feckless and dubious practice.
This self-awareness is acute, right down the sinews of the writing. In context, for example, the lack of speech marks feels not just a deliberate nod to ‘hip’ stylistic trends but the would-be biographer’s tenuous claims to his reliability as a narrator: blurring the lines between what was ‘really’ spoken and what is ‘mere’ writing.
Meanwhile, the novel’s shifts between the protagonist’s and Brenda’s points of view, the latter self-consciously grand-eloquent and declarative, serves I Want Everything’s playful take on authorship and authenticity.
And yet I Want Everything feels most effective in Amerena’s exploration of the ordinary real humanity motivating its characters’ various desperate claims to glory. The protagonist’s relationship with Ruth, for example – and his evolving self-awareness of his identity within it – are written by Amerena with thoughtful, unromantic perceptiveness.
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Similarly, the harsher realities of trauma and mental illness are used to powerfully subvert the trope of the ‘capricious genius’. These include references to shock treatment undertaken at the notorious Chelmsford private hospital in Sydney’s Pennant Hills in the 1960s and 1970s – the cold (well-documented) reality of which breaks into a book that toys with the blurring of fact and fiction to startling effect.
By pursuing this emotional sensitivity, Amerena turns I Want Everything into something more than just an Australian literary satire about biography: a bleakly funny yet humane portrayal of the often complex desire to transcend the painful or mundane limitations of one’s own identity.
I Want Everything, Dominic Amerena
Publisher: Simon & Schuster/Summit Books
ISBN: 9781761631733
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288pp
Release Date: 30 April 2025
RRP: $34.99
