Growing up I thought that being a ‘real’ reader meant reading dead American men. This feeling was reinforced each year by the school English syllabus and the texts cool young women read in films. In my early teens, I read Hemingway, Salinger, Kerouac. I bought the $10 orange Penguin editions from Borders at Bondi Junction Westfield, and then I read them on the bus, hoping to be seen for what I imagined myself to be: a serious person. Over the past decade or so, I have learned that the conventional characterology of literary seriousness is a lie. I have also realised that I find far more appeal in playing the fool; in refusing to reciprocate language that chains us into fucked-up traditions.