How my mysterious childhood became a best-selling novel

Lives Less Ordinary

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.6 • 814 Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2024

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Trent Dalton discovered he was on the fringe of one of Australia’s biggest crime stories.

Back in the 1980s, when Trent was a kid growing up in Brisbane, he discovered that there was a secret underground room behind his stepfather's wardrobe. There were plenty of other strange things happening to him too. Like when he found a bundle of cash in the pocket of his bathrobe. Or there were the rumours that his babysitter was a murderer. It took Trent many years before he untangled these mysteries and found out the reality of his childhood. He used his life story as inspiration for his debut novel Boy Swallows Universe, which became the fastest selling in Australian history.

Presenter: Saskia Collette Producers: Saskia Collette and Andrea Kennedy

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Transcript

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0:00.0	On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.
0:06.9	It was an extraordinary news story.
0:09.1	The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,
0:13.7	mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.
0:18.0	One of the great mysteries in English criminal history.
0:20.7	We're still looking for Lucan.
0:22.1	It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime.
0:25.9	I'm Alex von Tundselman.
0:27.3	This is The Lucan Obsession.
0:29.2	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:34.4	When Trent Dalton was growing up, on the regular you could catch him wide-eyed, kind of spaced out and looking down.
0:46.1	Reflections were big for me, for whatever reason, when I was a kid.
0:49.9	Like, I just loved puddles.
0:52.0	I'm talking half an hour, Saskia, like, staring into a puddle.
0:55.9	This wasn't some narcissistic thing.
0:59.1	It was me trying to find other worlds, I think.
1:01.7	I had some funny thoughts, Saskia.
1:03.2	Like what?
1:04.4	I believed in magic.
1:05.5	I think I thought I was some sort of special kid inside his own little mythology because of the things we'd seen.
1:13.1	Right.
1:13.2	Because our lives were strange.
	...

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