When I walk up to Markus Zusak outside Surry Hills Library, he’s leaning against a bench in a green shirt, carefully leafing through a copy of In the Garden of North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff — one of his favourite authors. Marking The Book Thief’s 20-year legacy, he addressed fans at Sydney Writers’ Festival on May 22 with talk of his latest memoir, Three Wild Dogs and the Truth.
Literary stardom is no new concept. Zusak’s books have spent over a decade on the New York Times bestseller list, winning numerous international awards and multiple screen adaptations. Love, death, and chaos are recurring themes in his works, and yet none have peeled back so intimately as this memoir. Structured around the terrible antics of his wild animals, Three Wild Dogs is deeply raw, personal, and unconstrained. It’s a rare opportunity to “sit down at the kitchen table” with an author and hear not just about him, but about the messy — and furry — entanglement that shapes his writing life. It’s Zusak pulling up a chair saying, ‘oh boy have I got a story for you…’
Lotte Weber: Tell me the process of writing Three Wild Dogs and the Truth. Was writing from personal experience easier or more challenging than writing fiction?
Markus Zusak: It reminded me of when I first started writing, when I was 16 and I wanted to write my first book. Everything felt new. The way I wanted to become a writer was reading novels. It was like a magic act of reading a novel, knowing it’s not true but believing it when I was inside it, and I thought that’s what I want to do with my life. It’s really interesting then, that when you write something that is non-fiction, you still actually have to do the same thing. Even though they’re true stories, you still have to make the reader, or myself as the reader in the writing of it, believe it while I’m inside it. I just want to be transported to that place and so that I’m feeling it, seeing it and that I’m there.
It was a different excitement in that, I kind of knew that I could do it, I knew that I could finish it — whereas I think with a lot of the books I write, I’m never sure I can actually finish it. I kind of like that idea of pushing yourself into the unknown a little bit, but this was quite a known idea. For me the joy of it was that I’ve had these dogs that were such a big part of my life, and something that I really missed, and I got to be with them again and I got to believe that I was with them. So it was a really beautiful part of my life to write this book.
LW: In the opening section of Three Wild Dogs you talk about welcoming chaos, particularly in the form of dogs, and it seems to be a bit of an enduring theme in many of your books. Why is chaos important and how does it shape your writing life?
MZ: Well, I think we’re all a little bit addicted to chaos. I just remember some of the decisions that I’ve made, whether it is taking on a second dog when we already had a pretty full-on first dog. I think we all understand that to have full lives, we need to go out of our comfort zone. The right amount of chaos tests us and shows us where our stories are. We all want to be able to sit down and be able to say, ‘oh you’ll never believe what happened on the weekend’. The problem is we have to go through those stories first to then be able to tell the stories, but I think we also know that we’re going to find some kind of beauty in that as well.
When people say to me, ‘oh when you wrote this book and you wrote about your dogs dying, was that really hard?’, I just say that’s what I’m in it for. I want to feel that kind of intensity because otherwise what are we alive for, if we don’t have some sort of intensity in our lives? Something that we feel that we do love wholly, completely, and that we are devastated by when we lose them? That’s part of a good life. When I’m driving home from the beach, for some reason there’s just one spot that I always think of our second dog, Archer, and I always think oh my god I miss him but I also think I’m grateful that I get to miss him. I wish I had him back but at the same time it’s actually a privileged life to have something like that, that you can miss because you know you loved it. I think that all bleeds into that idea of chaos. It was tough, but it was beautiful at the same time, and I think to recognise that is a great part of your life.
LW: When you start writing your books, do you know how they’re going to end?
MZ: I basically think of the beginning, the end, and the title. They’re almost the first three things I think of every time I write a book so they give me these sorts of parameters and then within that, I start listing chapter headings. I’ll be walking my current dog out on the street, mumbling my chapter headings to myself, because what I’m always wanting is for my book to feel like it’s near me, that I can fall out of bed in the morning and land inside what I’m writing.
I like the idea that as a writer, you live in two worlds: you live in the normal, real world and then you live in the world that you’re trying to create. A lot of the time when you’re writing, you feel far away from it, and then you’ve got to walk 10 miles, beat the door down, and scratch your way into the book. The closer it is and the more readily you can be inside it, that’s when you know it’s going well. It’s the hardest thing to get and the easiest thing to lose.
LW: I love that idea of living between two worlds. Your writing is known for its vividness, almost lyrical with its arrangement of really strong, immediate words. Is this a driving force of your work?
MZ: I’m not an academic or I’m not hugely intelligent, so I always say to people ‘don’t think that to be a writer, you’ve got to be gifted in any way or have a huge vocabulary’. I don’t have a great vocabulary at all but what I do have is an understanding that you can have a small pool of ordinary words, but you put two words that wouldn’t normally sit together in a sentence and all of a sudden they burst into life. It’s a little bit like a positive and negative charge to make lightning.
My favorite line from a novel is from Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay which won the Pulitzer Prize in the early 2000s. He describes an ocean liner coming into New York Harbor and the boat’s name is the Rotterdam. He says the Rotterdam came into New York Harbor like a mountain wearing a dinner jacket, and you know, you just imagine a white suit jacket with the black buttons and that simile is so extraordinary because they’re not uncommon words but put them together and you have something amazing.
LW: Great characters are a defining feature of your novels. Your dogs seem to mirror this as larger-than-life beings, in fact, you speak of them like people. Do you connect with animals as deeply as humans?
MZ: I don’t know, to tell you the truth. I think I’m just trying to get by, especially with the animals that we’ve had because, you know, when I describe my two original dogs Reuben and Archer, I write them as gangsters, gunmen, soldiers. You’re talking about dogs and describing them in those terms, again you’re bringing these ideas together and that’s what’s quite unusual, but it’s also true because they were like that. I needed to make them like soldiers or else they would have just caused so much carnage. They were just great animals and they loved our kids, and they were amazingly loyal. So as far as connecting better with animals than with people I think I just subscribe to the idea that you just show up. I have our dog now Frosty, who’s the wildest one of all of them really, he’s the happiest but naughtiest dog we’ve ever had and he had this problem of attacking us on the street whenever we walked him and he saw another dog.
This book is not one of those ‘this is how to wrangle your dog’, I’m not an expert. It’s just me talking about my family, with no veneers, about how we’ve handled these situations. In this case, it was getting to Frosty’s level and just going okay, ‘we’re fighting for who’s the boss here and that has to be me and if I lose this, the next 10 years of our life is going to be a misery’. There’s nothing like the first time when your dog doesn’t attack you, or that dog you’ve got from the pound stops and sits instead of launching at you. I just remember giving him the hugest hug and saying ‘you’ve done it Frosty, you’ve done it!’. I know it’s quite a low bar but that’s where we had to start from. As a society, you know, all these terrible things are going on and yet we’re becoming more and more polite. We’re tricking ourselves into how civilized we are all the time and then your dog does something and you realize you’ve got to actually reach into that part of yourself to take control of those sorts of situations.
LW: Final question, is it true you hate cavoodles?
MZ: Absolutely not true. Anyone who tells you that, I’m giving you permission to get into an enormous argument. Not that anyone would ever discuss how I feel about cavoodles. I get so many people come up to me now and apologise for having a cavoodle at a writer’s festival. We just like the rough-around-the-edges dogs that cause all sorts of chaos, problems, and danger. That’s just who we are, but someone’s got to take them on, and someone’s got to take the cavoodles.
A week after our interview, I receive a postcard from Markus — a pleasant rarity for my generation to open anything in mail form. The card is titled ‘A Torrential Afternoon’, his favourite black-and-white shot of Reuben and Archer, crystallised mid–muddy avalanche in a mist-streaked oval. Striding forever, the most unruly gangsters.
