Pittwater Life August 2023 Issue

Author Q&A
Rick’s second novel ends a
long road between chapters
A journalist/writer/editor for more than four decades, Rick Feneley’s first
novel Sly was published in 1995. More than a quarter of a century later his
second novel Life After Ted has hit the bookshelves to great peer and critical
acclaim. Interview by Lisa Offord
Q: Tell us a bit about
yourself…
I was born in Bulli in 1962
and raised there, the youngest
of seven kids. Our dad was
a local GP and surgeon and
he delivered just about every
baby in the neighbourhood, so
all my mates slipped through
his fingers. Dad delivered
a few of his offspring, too,
if they happened to arrive
in an unholy rush. It was a
free-wheeling childhood,
from the surf to the
Illawarra escarpment, and
this landscape inspired my
first novel, Sly, published
in 1995. My childhood was
also somewhat interrupted
by Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but
intensive radiation eradicated
this cancer.
Q: What inspired you to
write Life After Ted?
After Sly, I’d always planned
to keep writing novels, but life
got in the way. I persevered
instead with the kind of
publishing that pays bills,
journalism, while my wife,
Donna, and I raised two
daughters at yet another
beach suburb, Bondi, which
has been our home for 35
years. And Bondi, the setting
for Life After Ted, was a large
part of its inspiration. The
essence of the story came to
me in a couple of sleepless
hours one night about eight
years ago: Ted is dead before
the first page, having been
killed in a surfing accident,
but three days after his
funeral, his son, Seb, finds
his 70-year-old mother,
Connie – Ted’s wife of
40 years – in bed with
another man. Connie has an
explanation, but she’s not
ready to share it with her
judgemental son. Seb is a
born-again Christian; Connie
is an atheist. They’ve never
been especially close, but now
it becomes toxic.
The Local Voice Since 1991
BEACH
BACKGROUND:
Author Rick
Feneley.
Q: How did it all come
together?
I’m not one of those writers
who can write a chapter
during his lunch break from
his day job. I quit my day
job at The Sydney Morning
Herald in 2015 and started
writing Ted the next day.
In the next few months, I
had tens of thousands of
words down, but I knew I’d
eventually need to work
for a living once again, so
I accepted the offer of an
investigations job at SBS.
And for the next year I wrote
not a single word of fiction.
The novel stopped. The only
answer was to quit that job,
too. Casual sub-editing shifts
sustained me for the next
couple of years until I had a
first draft of Ted completed.
Q: Describe your writing
habits?
I write in my study at home,
unless I’ve made a point of
escaping Sydney to write.
Wherever it is, I do my best
writing in the early hours
of the day. Some days I’ll
write for only three or four
hours, other days for eight
hours or more, but it’s that
early burst that’s typically
most productive. That goes
for editing, too – and a huge
part of the ‘writing’ is in
the editing and rewriting,
AUGUST 2023
for which you can add on a
couple of years to the process.
Q: Why so long between
novels?
As I said, life did get in the
way – work, family, mortgages,
travel, and some long stretches
of couldn’t-be-stuffed – but
I regret none of that. I did
write another manuscript in
between Sly and Ted, most of
it in 1996 in Ireland, where
we lived for that year with our
young daughters. We had a
wonderful year. The wouldbe
novel was less wonderful.
It never would be. The
publishers wisely rejected it. (I
blame the Guinness.)
Q: Any interesting feedback
from readers?
I imagined it would be a
comedy about grief. It
became more tense than that
in the writing – a family ordeal
– but I’m glad, nevertheless,
that readers often tell me they
find themselves laughing
aloud… I’ve had quite a few
emotional readers, people
moved to tears. Happily, they
tend to be the same people
who laugh out loud.
Q: Anything else?
Oh yes. This year, six weeks
before my scheduled book
launch, and five days before
Donna and I were to board a
plane for a holiday in Greece,
I felt a bit strange. I went to
emergency, and they didn’t let
me out of hospital for the next
27 days. The real scar of my
childhood – the scar tissue
created by my radiation,
which had saved my life – had
also calcified parts of my
heart. Now, 50 years later, it
almost killed me. I needed
urgent open-heart surgery.
But that, too, saved my life. So
the good news? I made it to
my own book launch. Just.
*Life After Ted (Echo
Publishing, RRP $32.99) is
available now.
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