It was a dreary mid-week afternoon at work when Amy Lovat received the phone call she’d been dreaming of. Like all good stories, it involved a racing heart and running in the rain. However, unlike in the movies, upon reaching her car, taking the call and finding out she had just secured a book deal, Amy didn’t know what to feel.
“It’s so funny because you spend so much time imagining how you’re going to feel in that moment, but I just immediately got into my head. I was putting so much pressure on myself to feel something I just ended up… not feeling anything, because I was excited, but it wasn’t like fireworks in the sky. I remember thinking my life has just changed,
but then at the same time, it was 4pm on a Thursday and I had to run back through the rain to get into work and sit back down at my desk and for the next hour pretend that nothing had happened.”
“I used to have this blue-sky vision that you would be discovered… and then you just quit your day job and live that author life immediately, whatever that looks like. Maybe it’s going to a writing cabin in the garden every day and peacefully sitting down at a laptop to write, and it’s just so different.”
Navigating expectation versus reality is something that Amy says has been one of the most surprising parts of becoming a published author.
“I used to have this blue-sky vision that you would be discovered… and then you just quit your day job and live that author life immediately, whatever that looks like. Maybe it’s going to a writing cabin in the garden every day and peacefully sitting down at a laptop to write, and it’s just so different.”
Wearing all the hats that she does, it’s hard to know just how to introduce Amy. With her debut novel, Mistakes and Other Lovers, published in July 2023, not only is Amy now an author, she’s also the founder of Secret Book Stuff – an online book shop and subscription service that she runs with her partner Laura.
Additionally, Amy is the program manager at Writing NSW, a freelance writer and editor, a literary curator at writing festivals around the country and she lectures on creative writing at the University of Newcastle. Oh, and if all that wasn’t enough, she’s also an assistant to New York Times best-selling author Sally Hepworth. Yes, you read that correctly.
In asking Amy how she manages to do all this – I don’t know about you, but I need to lay down just thinking about it – she quickly fesses up to being a workaholic.
“I can’t help myself. I just love working, especially now when everything that I do is related to writing and the literature world. I feel like I’ve created this dream life for myself and it’s hard to pull back on anything that I do, because I love it all so much.”
This deep love of all things related to the written word is something that Amy has carried with her since childhood.
“I’ve had the dream of being a published author for as far back as I can remember,” says Amy. “I became, unsurprisingly, an avid reader once I could hold a book and I was writing as soon as I could hold a crayon. And growing up I was always writing stories.”
Be that as it may, it was during her third year of an arts/law degree back in 2010 when the idea of being a writer really crystallised for her.
“I went on exchange to Oxford University to do a creative writing program and there were thirty-five of us from all around the world, all different ages, doing a summer school program. It was the first time that I’ve been surrounded by people who cared about the same things that I cared about. That was when I really thought to myself, I can do this. This is a real thing. I can be a writer and that’s what I want to do.”
Following the exchange, Amy achieved honours in creative writing. She then deferred her law degree and secured a PhD scholarship, which she also completed in creative writing. She has, in her words, “been immersed in the industry since then.”
After coming runner up in the Varuna Pitch Me Prize 2022, Amy caught the attention of Pan Macmillan Australia, who offered her a two-book deal on that fateful phone call. With Mistakes and Other Lovers now officially out in the world, moving forward Amy is no doubt set to become even more deeply immersed in Australia’s publishing industry.
Mistakes and Other Lovers is a beautifully written ‘coming of age’ story that explores the often chaotic and confusing time of your early twenties. Told through the lens of protagonist, El O’Reilly, the story so accurately captures what it is to be straddling adolescence and adulthood: to be free but adrift, to be surrounded but alone, to be disappointing yourself and others through all the mistakes that inevitably follow.
Mistakes and Other Lovers is a beautifully written ‘coming of age’ story that explores the often chaotic and confusing time of your early twenties.
Amy started writing the book eleven years ago, when she was twenty-three i.e. the same age as El and says this period of early adulthood is something that has always interested her. So much so that she explored it during her PhD on representations of young female characters in debut and contemporary Australian fiction.
“I was particularly interested in the endings and how the journey of the character was represented,” says Amy. “Whether it was implicated that red bow. I didn’t find stories that had a neat ending to be very realistic because I think in our everyday lives, we are constantly changing and evolving and growing towards maturity and moments of awareness. To me, there is no such thing as a neat ‘coming of age.’ I think that the liminal space – that messy time between adolescents and adulthood, is fascinating.”
Loaded with desire and debauchery, Mistakes and Other Lovers delivers piercingly accurate observations around the complexities of friendships and families, community and culture, religion and intimate relationships. Though the story is fictional, Amy says she did draw on real-life experiences especially when it came to the religious aspects of the book.
“I’ve always been curious about belief systems and spirituality, and that comes from my family – my dad is a professor of theology. When I was in my early twenties, I found myself in a friendship group that had ties to a local evangelical church. I started to learn about it from them and I went to church with friends. So, some experiences that El has, I did have. The tension that I tried to bring to life in El’s journey was wanting to belong and connect and to be a part of something. The world of new age Christianity offers so much of that.”
It’s partially a love letter to Newcastle… It feels like a small town sometimes when you’ve grown up here. You feel like you can’t go anywhere without running into someone you know and you’re craving anonymity and adventure but at the same time connection and safety. It’s a great setting for this story.
While Amy and El may have started off in the same place at the same time, they haven’t both stayed there. Similarly, there may be crossovers between their experiences, but as Amy explains, that certainly doesn’t mean they are the same.
“Since I can remember, I’ve written to figure out how I feel about things, to make sense of the world and that’s really what I started doing with this fictional character named El. It’s been eleven years, so I have grown but El hasn’t. So, I had to let her stay where she was and not grow with me. When I was going through the editing, I had to be careful not to insert my thirty-something perspective growth onto this young character. I had to constantly channel El and that feels like she’s not me, but she’s of me.”
Mistakes and Other Lovers is set against the shores, cafés, and terrace houses of Newcastle. As a local, it’s a real and rare treat to read a book describing familiar haunts. Amy says she wanted to set the book in Newcastle because growing up here, it’s the place she knows best, but also because of the way it lends itself to the story.
“It’s partially a love letter to Newcastle. I certainly haven’t read many texts set in Newcastle and I wanted to give it airtime. It feels like a small town sometimes when you’ve grown up here. You feel like you can’t go anywhere without running into someone you know and you’re craving anonymity and adventure but at the same time connection and safety. It’s a great setting for this story.”
Having now realised a lifelong dream, Amy says it feels really good to have her book out into the world, though there’s a letting go process that comes with it.
“Part of me still feels like it hasn’t fully sunk in yet, even though it’s been a couple of months. People with children have said to me that it’s much like parenting, because you’re slowly letting go of your baby as they grow up.”
Writing cabin or not, with a second book to write and all her various labours of literary love on the go, it seems it won’t be long until Amy delivers again.
Words: Emily McGrorey | Photography: Caitlin Schokker
As seen in Swell Issue 18.
