Stefan Merrill Block survives interviews by turning himself into a character from a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Where Ellis uses his public image in fictional entities named Bret Easton Ellis, Block needs his character, Stefan Merrill Block, to learn the peculiar process of talking about the 26 years he has spent on this planet.
It's not that he is the hermetic writer dragged into the spotlight. The genial Block's articulate answers are disrupted less by shy pauses than jokes and his eagerness to start again with another idea.
More established writers tend to steer interviewers towards the questions they have answered frequently in the past if the hack fails to head straight for obvious, oft-aired issues. With his well-received debut novel, The Story of Forgetting, out since April, Block has yet to polish his stock interview spiel. He is actually thinking about his answers.
'I wrote the book in a series of first-person voices. In a way, doing interviews is just like putting on another voice,' he says over a coffee on the shore of Sydney Harbour. 'I can't quite talk like myself or take it seriously as something that's happening to me or about me. It's too overwhelming to think that people would be thinking about me so much. Stefan the author is a separate entity to Stefan the person.
'I just went into my first radio interview and totally whiffed it. I felt like such a failure,' he laments. 'It's just not part of my skill set. It's especially hard with the first book. There's no oeuvre yet. The interviews have to focus on the person's biography because there's nothing else to talk about. You can't talk about how your work has changed or how you've grown as an artist.'
Block thought he was done with pondering his memories in public. His novel reworks his upbringing in Texas as his grandmother faded into Alzheimer's disease. Block and his family live with the strong possibility of inheriting the disease's ruthless erasure of memory and cognitive function before it kills.
He could have turned out a misery-lit memoir on the wait for Alzheimer's to find him. We have to wonder whether a publisher would have had Block's ideas herded towards non-fiction if he had pitched his book in the early stages of writing. But Block naively pushed on with a novel that explores more of his situation than non-fiction might have reached.