We Were Not Men: An Interview with Campbell Mattinson

We Were Not Men

Sometimes you pick up a book and only a few pages in you feel like you have struck gold. Campbell Mattinson’s glorious We Were Not Men is a rare treasure indeed.

In this interview, Mary Martin bookseller Jaye talks to Mattinson about his debut novel (a book she can’t stop raving about!) and what he is up to next.

The book centers around twin brothers, Jon and Eden, and is told through nine-year old Jon. How did you come to tell such an intimate tale of twins?

I started writing the story the day I heard that someone important to me had died, and so the initial outpouring was personal, intense and raw. The person who had died was a twin. I'm not a twin myself but my brother and I are close in age; as children we were incredibly close, though as adults we're not. My son read the book and said, 'It's like a love letter to your brother', which is pretty astute.

The book took a long time write, which inspired its own kind of late-night, hopeless kind of hurt. Basically there are many kinds of loss mixed into this story, and the best way to show loss and love and the road out is to do it personally, in first person, as honest and heartfelt as possible.

The first 20 pages are the most compelling, heart-wrenching, can't-look-away pages I have ever read, and set up the story of the two brothers in such a moving way. Are you a plotter or did the unfolding of the story happen naturally for you? (Either way, I think it's genius!)

I wish I was a plotter but I'm not. All my writing is entirely intuitive. I feel my way along. I don't move from plot point to plot point, I move from emotion to emotion and I’m always just looking to see what can be teased out. There is a brief, one-line moment in the book where the narrator steps into his (deceased) father's running shoes. No one will notice that moment but me, but I just find that one line moving.

The interesting thing about this book is that people keep telling me that it made them cry, and when I ask them what specific moment it was, they all seem to mention a different point.

This book evokes touches on many themes with such insight and tenderness, including brotherhood, grief, first love, as well as competitive swimming. Was the story drawn from your own lived experience at all?

It's a fictional story but everything in it means something to me. As I was writing the book I kept breaking down emotionally because of how real it felt. I'm not a twin and my parents are alive and yet as I wrote the book I kept asking myself: What is the truth? It's a strange question given that the book is fiction and yet I was forever, forever reaching for that truth, that essential something. I mentioned this to my wife at some point and she said, ‘Your book is about all the things you fear the most’.

“All my writing is entirely intuitive. I feel my way along. I don't move from plot point to plot point, I move from emotion to emotion.”

Campbell Mattinson

The boy's step-grandmother Bobbie is a fantastic character, with some great lines. Was she inspired by any real people?

Yes and no. She's no one in particular but then she borrows heavily from some of the people that are close to me. It's a book about twin brothers and their efforts to heal themselves following the greatest tragedy they can imagine, and yet in many ways the book is taken over by Bobbie, their grandmother, who lives every day at the very ends of her fingertips, and who has a tendency to say the funniest of things.

The book stayed with me for a long time after reading it, and I realised that while we got to know Jon really well, and knew Eden as well as his twin does, we never got to see the story from Eden's perspective. It made me want to read the whole story again but through Eden's eyes. If we were to see it through Eden's eyes, how do you think the story would be different?

Talk about astute questions! Throughout the book Jon is desperate for Eden's approval and yet, in many crucial ways, he never appreciates how desperate Eden is for his approval in return. It's the most basic of human tragedies. Jon says many times that 'we are twins but we are different' when in fact they are more similar than he seems capable of perceiving. That said, Eden is more practical, and more proactive. If Eden had told the story I suspect that it would have focussed more on winning our way out of trouble.

As a wine critic and author of the award-winning biography of Maurice O'Shea, The Wine Hunter, how did you manage the transition from non-fiction to fiction?

It's been my job for the past 20 years to taste large volumes of wines and, even when most of them taste more or less the same, to find ways to describe them in markedly different ways. This could well be the best training possible for a career in fiction writing.

Have you any advice you would like to share with aspiring authors? Something you wished someone had told you before you started?

I spent many years on my craft, on trying to create perfect sentences, on working out the ways to create beautiful paragraphs. The craft of writing is important but it took me too long to realise that the most important aspect of writing is not the structure or beauty of sentences, but rather on having something to say.

At some point I stopped writing and just got busy in the living of my life, and that time away, living, was the best thing for my writing in the end.

What have been your favourite reads during these pandemic months?

I really enjoyed Jaqueline Maley's The Truth About Her, Rachel Cusk's Second Place, and Trent Dalton's Boy Swallows Universe.

What are you up to next?

Given that it took me 30 years to write We Were Not Men, you might imagine that I feel satisfied that it's finally out. But in fact I feel the opposite. I feel hungry and restless to create more. I'm onto another tale, set along the western coastline of Melbourne, emotional, personal to me.