Author interview: A hard-hitting story of middle-aged love from the author of ‘The Slap’

Author Christos Tsiolkas was wondering what it would be like if you had to start a new relationship in your 50s

Christos Tsiolkas: 'I was thinking about love, and of us, as a group of friends, wondering: If you’ve been rejected, can you trust again?' Picture: Zoe Ali

• The In-Between 
• Christos Tsiolkas 
• Atlantic Books, €11.82/ Kindle, €5.54

One night during lockdown, Christos Tsiolkas was woken from a dream by his partner, Wayne, who told him to get out of bed and start writing. 

He was at the early stages of a novel, working out what he wanted to say, and how to say it.

And in his sleep, he was miming a man shuffling through his wardrobe, feeling his ties.

“Wayne knows me very well,” says the Australian, on Zoom from his friend’s apartment in London. “It must’ve been 3.30 in the morning, and I’d dreamed the image.

“I went into the kitchen, grabbed a notepad, and scribbled down three or four lines. Then I could go back to sleep.”

Now 58, Christos met Wayne when they were both 19 — and they’ve been together since, but he was wondering what it would be like if you had to start a new relationship in your 50s.

“I’ve got dear friends who have had, maybe, three relationships — or maybe they’ve had one, and never more, but they’ve all experienced love, and also heartbreak, and that risk of love: It’s a dangerous emotion. You can really hurt your partner and they can hurt you.

“I was thinking about love,” he says, “and of us, as a group of friends, wondering: If you’ve been rejected, can you trust again?”

Wayne and I often laugh and say we never could. But if you had to, what would it be like?

The book opens as Australian-Greek Perry is getting ready for an internet date. A returnee from France, he’s been badly hurt by his French lover, a married man, and he’s nervous.

There’s a spark between him and his date, Ivan — but when, later, they’re in a taxi, Ivan makes a derogatory remark about the woman in a rape case, and Perry, shocked, wonders if the two of them have a future.

He almost lets the moment go. But, taking a risk, he admits the comment offended him, and when Ivan divulges the horrific event that prompted his attitude, Perry understands, and the relationship between the two deepens.

The two men are very different: Ivan was married and has a daughter, and now a granddaughter. 

He’s led a more insular life, and a much less comfortable one, than his new lover, but he shares the deep hurt of recent rejection.

Perry seems uncomfortable back in Australia. As someone whose parents migrated from Greece, does Christos share his cynicism?

“He is my alter ego,” agrees Christos. “He took a choice I might have taken, long ago, to live somewhere else. 

“When I was younger, I had a romance about Greece and London; I thought, this is where culture happens; this is where life and arguments happen. 

“And there is still an element of that. When my country is being reactionary or racist or ugly, I am Perry. But Australia is home,” he says. “I love the weather and the landscape.”

A playwright and screenwriter, Christos has written nine novels — but he is best known for his fifth, The Slap, which became a hit television show.

On March 9, 2020, celebrating 35 years together, Christos and Wayne arrived in London at the start of a six-week odyssey around Britain and Ireland.

“It was a dream,” he says. “On March 16, we were on the Isle of Bute, when we looked at the news and realised we had to get out.”

After a deal of panic, they got home to a very strict lockdown in Melbourne.

And though that time was devastating for many, Christos enjoyed the sheer space it gave him.

“I hadn’t read like I did since I was 15,” he says, “when you had those summer holidays where you picked up a book and were reading all day. 

“And it gave me an opportunity to go back to a lot of the cinema I love. 

“I watched the director Erik Rohmer’s films, that I didn’t know well when I was younger. In films like Claire’s Knee, he gives the relationships space.”

You realise that he trusts the audience to be patient and silent, and trust that things are going to be gradually revealed.

Inspired, he took from this for the novel.

It’s structured in five chapters, each one a year apart and consisting of a day and a night, and this works brilliantly, showing the reader all they need to know about the developing relationship.

A playwright and screenwriter, Christos has written nine novels — but he is best known for his fifth, The Slap.

When he wrote it, he had accepted that he would be a part-time writer, that he would never hit the big time. (He was also working as a vet nurse, writing three days a week.)

When success hit, he was 45, and he didn’t, immediately, enjoy the moment.

“There was a stumbling,” he says. “A confusion. I remember wondering, ‘Should I write something that’s like The Slap, part two — a kind of child of The Slap — or should I put something out that was experimental and unreadable?”

Barracuda, a brilliantly wide-ranging novel, about a swimming prodigy, gained rave reviews, confirming Tsiolkas as a writer to reckon with.

Grappling with the issue of success and failure

“It’s about success and failure, and I don’t think it’s accidental that it’s about success and failure,” says Christos, who was grappling with the issue.

A key scene in The In-Between is a dinner party. at which Perry is introducing his lover to his best friends, Cora, and her partner, Yasmin.

He’s anxious about the encounter, and his fears seem justified when a toxic atmosphere develops. 

A heterosexual couple, Jed and Evelyn, make up the party, and the obvious attraction between Cora and Evelyn adds to the tension.

The conversation, inevitably, turns to children — one that Ivan contributes to, leaving Perry adrift.

“I’m a very proud uncle, and I’m very happy not being a parent, but what does it mean for Ivan, as a father and grandfather, in a group that parenting is part of the experience of life?”

He says that this was the hardest scene in the book to write — but he’s done it beautifully, with an innate understanding of all the female characters.

“Years ago, a Turkish writer said, ‘if you dare to be a writer, you have to be bisexual. I don’t mean who you sleep with, I mean you have to be able to occupy the feminine and the masculine. You have to be able to write men and women.’ That stayed with me.”

Back in the 1990s, Christos became involved with a company called Melbourne Worker’s Theatre, and he loved it.

Those actors taught me some of the methods actors use to get into parts.

“I found that revelatory. When I was writing that dinner party scene, I was actually thinking, ‘how is Yasmin sitting? How does Cora laugh, and how does Jed hold a cigarette?’ 

“They seem like small things, but it’s a way of getting me into a character.”

Christos is working on a project in the State Library in Victoria, in Melbourne, based around his mother’s generation of women.

“I want to tell their story without sentimentality, though not in a deliberately ugly way. I just want to tell it honestly.” 

There’s also that postponed trip to take across Britain and Ireland.

“This morning, I did a long walk up to Greenwich. It’s close to where I’m staying. 

“I saw the observatory, but thought, ‘I won’t go now. I’ll wait until next time and Wayne and I can do it together’.

“I love John Boyne,” he says.

“I think he’s a wonderful writer and an amazing human being. I want to spend time with him in Ireland, and I’ve got wonderful friends in Scotland too.”