I’m sure there’s a parable about a man who visits a spectacular art gallery and finds the artwork he’s most enamoured with to be a mirror. The lesson is something about self-absorption and it’s territory I feel I’m straying dangerously close to when I say I’ve spent a lot of time lately reading my own journals. In my defence, I’ve done it with a purpose in mind.

For the last year or so, I’ve been preparing my debut novel Denizen for publication. I wrote Denizen’s first draft in 2016 when I was twenty-two. Much of its exploration of mental health in the bush was a raw and caustic attempt to process my own adolescence by forcing my confused, unsorted emotions upon readers I didn’t yet have. When it won the 2021 Penguin Literary Prize, I’d already revised it beyond recognition from that first draft—however, illuminated by the impending glow of an actual audience, I saw that it still bore the fingerprints of that violently upset twenty-two-year-old. I don’t think this is a bad thing in and of itself; my goal with Denizen was to confront the reader with the realities of rural Australia, even if it was difficult to read. But I felt vulnerable knowing a story I no longer wholly related to would soon be out in the world with my name on it.