Thirty years does not just pass. It reaps.

On the 30th Anniversary of He Died With A Felafel in His Hand.

It’s a hell of a thing, thirty years. Longer than most people who ever lived got to live. Shorter in my memory than the breath you just exhaled.

Thirty years ago, I was writing through the night, sleeping half the day, rinsing and repeating. This went on for five, maybe six weeks. On the day before I turned thirty, I put a 3.5-inch floppy disc into a messenger bag and sent it off to Michael Duffy.

Michael was one of my editors at The Independent Monthly but my only editor at The Yellow Press (later to become Duffy and Snellgrove)—the little publishing house he’d started up with the old-fashioned idea of making books that people could enjoy so we could make money.

On that not-so-floppy disc was a Quark Express file with the final print version of He Died With A Felafel in His Hand.

Well, most of it, anyway.

The previous evening, Michael called me on my gigantic brick-sized mobile phone, worried that there were too many blank pages on the grid at the back of the book. Could I do something about that?

You bet I could!

Although I had zero experience as a graphic designer or layout artist, I was roaring like a bear on whisky and stimulants after five or six weeks of crazed, sleep-deprived, two-fisted keyboard punching.

So not just yes, but FUCK YES, I could do something about that.

Deep, deep breath in.

Slowly, slowly release.

What I did, sometime after midnight, was nuke the finished layout from orbit, destroying the exquisite design finalised hours earlier by Peter Rohen, our talented, interstate and now very much asleep graphic magician.

If you ever owned or borrowed or stole a copy of that long-ago first edition—I’m not judging you, honestly—you may remember the complex flow of words around a labyrinth of illustrations and breakout text, interspersed with yet more textual and graphic elements and well, anyway, the fucking files were due at the printer in the morning and now they looked like I’d just launched them into the side of a mountain with the Large Hadron Collider which hadn’t even been invented yet.

Deep breath and… release.

These things happen, and you deal with them.

The disc arrived at the printer. The layout was mostly repaired.

But a chapter went missing.

Nobody ever noticed, and that chapter later became The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco.

The life lesson here, kids? Almost anything is survivable. (Except maybe launching yourself into the Matterhorn with that Large Hadron Cannon. Probably best you don’t do that for real.)

Any other lessons?

Yeah, thirty years goes by fast when viewed from the wrong end of the temporal telescope. I’ve written another thirty-plus books in that time, maybe more. I lost track after a while.

Returning to the stories of Felafel after so long was… weird. I’d forgotten some things and misremembered others. It was cool, though, to be able to fall back through the years and stand in those rooms and hallways again, mostly with old friends, but not always, of course.

It was tempting to completely rewrite the book because you do get better with practice, but other than picking up a few ancient typos I mostly left the original text as it was. Here and there, I changed a few things because, frankly, I had to.

I think it was Mel Brooks who said that tragedy plus time equals comedy. A mistake I made too often as a young writer was to imagine that you could achieve the same effect but with cruelty and time or cruelty and distance.

So, where I thought I’d been unconscionably cruel thirty years ago, I tried to make amends this time around. I didn’t have to change much, but I did make a few teaks, some of them you won’t even notice.

This new edition contains new writing, however. And unlike doing penance for the sins of my past, it was fun. I think the reason Felafel was successful was simply its universal nature. Writing the book, I came to understand that there were only a handful of shared house stories, but they were archetypal, and anyone who shared a house would eventually live one of those stories. Only the details would change.

Ah, but those details.

Thirty years is long enough to stretch some of those deets to breaking point. Felafel is a document of its time, and that time has passed. So, this edition comes with notes. Some are there to explain to a new generation of readers what the hell was even happening back then.

“What d’you mean you couldn’t take your phone out of the house with you?”

And some I wrote simply for my own pleasure, to fill in the narrative detail that I’d originally glossed over or left out for a host of reasons.

I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

The new print version will be released next week, but for those of you who, like me, have no more shelf space left, I’ve released the e-book everywhere. (Except for the UK and Canada, because of stupid laws and stuff.) It’s discounted to half price now for you because you are my favourites.

This universal Books2Read link will get you what you need: He Died With A Felafel in His Hand.

Finally, one last elegiac note.

Thirty years does not just pass. It reaps.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve received messages from readers expressing their gratitude for some of the books I’ve written. Some messages came from people whose parents, longtime readers of mine, were dealing with the problems that await all of us in later life. A few of them were in the hospital. It was a matter of no moment to send a couple more signed books their way, and it was a delight to hear how much of a difference that made.

One email, however, shook me a little. If I could share the details, I would, but they were very personal. Long story short, I’ll be rearranging my writing and publishing schedule so that I can get the next Girl in Time novel out in time for just one person to read it. I’m gonna dedicate that book to them as well.

Why?

Because the big thing that thirty years have taught me is the rare good fortune I’ve had being invited into readers’ imagined lives. It’s way more than mere privilege and it’s taken me most of these thirty years—or forty, if I’m counting from my very first published piece—to understand that.

I always deliberately thought of myself as a working writer. I wrote to pay my bills.

But in the end, while paying the bills was necessary, making a single reader happy is… something else and, in a way that I don’t quite yet understand, something better.

I’d have called that bullshit crazy talk thirty years ago.

But not now.

Thanks for reading. If you’re looking for a hard copy, I’ll let you know next week when it drops.