Australian Story: June 23

Monday’s Australian Story profiles Brooke Davis who, in the face of adversity, has a debut novel set to become an international best seller.

Brooke Davis is on the cusp of being able to afford any car on the market. But the only vehicle she’s interested in driving is an old rust-bucket in which her mother Jenny was killed seven years ago.

“I’ve never had any discomfort at all about driving it, and I totally understand that probably most people would. I understand the strangeness of driving around in the car that your mum died in. It was quite a horrific scene that took place in that car. But there’s so much more to it to me than just that moment. The whole feeling of her is in that car to me and I want to be able to hold onto that feeling of her because as the years go by she kind of gets further and further away. I don’t want to forget my mum.” – Brooke Davis

It’s this kind of original thinking about death and grief – together with a sharp wit – that has catapulted Brooke Davis into becoming a literary talent who’s creating a buzz internationally with her debut novel, Lost & Found.

“It made me laugh almost straight away … But I also cried quite a bit. And the writing was exquisite, but the actual wisdom that I felt coming through the page was astounding.” – Vanessa Radnidge, Australian publisher

Even before the book has been released in Australia, it’s been sold to publishers in more than 20 countries, from the US & UK to Canada, France, Germany, Portugal and many more.

“There’s been bidding wars … and it’s not a book that’s been a best-seller anywhere yet. Usually a book’s a best-seller somewhere and people make a commercial decision. But people have connected personally with this book and they’ve connected personally with its little but very big message in a way that I’ve never seen before.” – Todd Griffiths, Australian publisher’s representative.

In this, her first-ever major media interview, Brooke Davis tells Australian Story of her background and the bitter-sweetness of seeing her book finished and published.

Brooke Davis grew up in the tiny hamlet of Bellbrae, near Torquay in Victoria.

She was particularly close to her mother Jenny who she says had a wonderful quality of making everyone feel important, as well as an “odd” sense of humour:

“She was … very, very sharp and always all over politics and history. But she was a very, very funny person and I think that’s been a huge, huge influence on me and the way I see the world.” – Brooke Davis

From as far back as she can remember, Brooke Davis kept diaries and journals, and she was always writing stories and poems in a humorous, imaginative style largely inspired by Roald Dahl. An early popular story at primary school was “The Pest”, about her younger brother. “And it was so mean,” she laughs, “and I loved my little brother.”

At the age of ten she was 25 pages into an angsty teenage novel set in America, “Summer Sadness”, when she realised, “I was ten and I had no idea what teenagers did and I really didn’t know anything about sadness either.”

But that has all changed.

After a stellar run through university, winning the University Medal and a swag of other writing awards, she was in Vietnam on the first leg of a year-long round-the-world trip when she received news that her much loved mother Jenny had been killed in a freak accident in her car. An aged care worker, Jenny had been visiting a client, leaned out of the car to pick up a newspaper, and seems to have accidentally pressed the accelerator and somehow become pinned between the car door and a gate.

In the weeks that followed, Brooke Davis found there were “all these unwritten rules and expectations” about the way in which she should grieve.

“There’s this idea that grief has a beginning and an end and with it comes all these buzzwords and concepts about stages of grief, like anger and denial and acceptance and closure. … But I didn’t feel that way and I didn’t think I ever would.” – Brooke Davis

An overseas trip with a close friend and fellow writer, Jeremy Hoare, saw the genesis of her novel that is now striking a chord with people around the world.

“The question I was trying to answer as I was writing this novel was, ‘How do you live knowing that anyone you love can die at any moment?’ And the whole novel I think became, yeah, a process of me trying to work through that.”

Brooke Davis has been financing her writing career by working part-time as a sales assistant in a bookshop in Perth, where she will soon be selling her own book. She hopes the novel will be sufficiently successful to allow her to write full-time.

8pm Monday ABC1.