‘A sibling's suicide is like an explosion in slow motion'

Novelist Richard Mason still hasn’t fully recovered from his sister’s death but, he tells Megan Lloyd Davies, it led to him creating a foundation which has transformed so many lives

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It’s tempting to read Richard Mason’s life like one of his fictional characters. Elite education, book deal at university and more than 3 million copies of his first novel sold. Twenty-five years on, he’s published four more acclaimed novels and we talk while he’s in Australia researching a new show for Apple. So far, so gilded.

But our initial Zoom conversation is also cancelled because Cyclone Alfred is battering eastern Australia and Mason has had to flee the place he was staying after a fire broke out. Our second attempt cuts out midway when power lines go down.

It’s a neat encapsulation of two themes – one part charmed life, the other seemingly out-of-the-blue destruction with traceable roots – that sum up Mason’s life. Running in tandem with all the success and acclaim is a story of intergenerational mental illness, anguish and his beloved sister Kay’s suicide.

“A sibling’s suicide is like an explosion going off in slow motion because there’s the original blast and then the ripple effects that go very, very, very slowly over decades through the people who are left,” Mason says when we finally talk.

He rarely gives interviews any more. In the year after his first novel, The Drowning People, was published to huge hype in 1999, he spoke to 1,800 journalists, travelled internationally and was featured in Vogue. At just 21, it left him exhausted and suffering crippling panic attacks.

“Our civilisation says you’ll be happy if you’re famous, but I absolutely hated it and thought I was going crazy because I had all those things I’d been told I should want. But the fun wears off very quickly and then you’re just left with the relentlessness of it. These days, I value my privacy.”