Michelle de Kretser

In 2001, my dog Gus...

In 2001, my dog Gus, a 12-year-old English setter cross, went missing in the Gippsland bush. At the time, I was still working on my previous novel, THE HAMILTON CASE, and it never occurred to me to consider the wrenching experience of losing Gus as a springboard for fiction. But as time passed, the experience began to recede from reality and acquire a literary shape. I believe this is a necessary process for translating life into fiction; at least in my case. So although what happened to Gus was the seed from which THE LOST DOG grew, almost every aspect of his story was transformed in the writing of the novel. It became a way into thinking generally about different kinds of loss, and how people—and indeed nations—are haunted by absences: by what we have lost, and what we wish to be rid of, and what we don't even realise we no longer possess.

I write slowly, and rewrite a lot, and THE LOST DOG was no exception. I've lost count of the number of drafts it went through in the thirty-odd months it took to write. I admire the purity of minimalism, but in life, as in my work, I am no minimalist. I have always loved the kind of room that contains many disparate and intriguing objects, and that is the condition to which my novels aspire. I would like to offer readers patterned writing rich in anecdotes, images, characters, sentences, ideas; the kind of stimulating and pleasurable clutter that asks to be lingered over and turned in the hand, within a fiction that takes on different aspects as time passes and the light changes.

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In 2001, my dog Gus...