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Published on: 10/11/2003
Last Visited: 10/11/2003
Kate Wild, 32, writer
American Psycho.The Marquis de Sade.Murder in Snowtown.A body being fed through the woodchipper in Fargo.Seeing a girl's innocence curdle like off-milk after two weeks working in a Kings Cross strip joint.
Melbourne author Kate Wild is attracted to dark things.Her first novel, The Anatomy of Truth, is violent, ugly in parts and very black - the literary equivalent of a bruise.
But Wild describes her book as a fable.
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Wild didn't base the story on any particular town - although she remembers driving through a town in rural NSW, on a childhood road trip, that made her feel uneasy.
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Aged 32, Wild has spent much of her life moving between the city and the country.She was born in Melbourne, moved to Sydney when she was 18, lived in Canberra, Brisbane and Bendigo.
The Anatomy of Truth started as a creative writing assignment in 1995, as part of her professional writing degree at the University of Canberra.Since then she has fitted her writing around various moves and a job as a technical writer for a pharmaceutical company.
After experiencing the usual humiliations endured by young novelists, such as an agent "losing" her manuscript, Wild attended a writing camp run by the children's author John Marsden.
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But Wild says the shocking part is between the covers.
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The universe is not a moral entity, according to Wild.Many times she has seen bad things happen to good people and bad people going unpunished.When she moved to Sydney, she worked behind the bar at a Kings Cross strip joint.Even at 18, she "already had the idea that life was dirty".
She saw young country girls come to the Cross, starting work as innocents but leaving a lot tougher.She left Sydney thinking: "You can live life being pretty good, but life can kick you when you're down."As for the morally bankrupt of Sydney: "I saw them doing really well.It was astounding."
But Wild says her writing has always been dark, even as a child.When she was 13, she remembers, her mother read one of her short stories and warned her not to show anyone in case people thought she had been abused."Sometimes the writing is so dark, it scares me," she says."I don't know where it comes from."
After writing one particularly brutal scene, Wild was left shaken.It was months before she could return to the novel.But Wild says that her darkness is more likely to manifest itself as a "black sense of humour" rather than depression.
But, from the cosy sitting room in her house, in a quaint little town, with an apple tree, two dogs and a three-legged cat, it seems more likely that Wild has a tremendous imagination rather than a black heart and a dark life.
The Anatomy of Truth, by Kate Wild, is published by Pan Macmillan, $22.
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