Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. May, 2024: I watch a preview of episode one of Fake with my mother while eating a home-made TV dinner of Cantonese shrimp and egg stir-fry. On my laptop, Joe and Birdie are on their first date.
“What would you do if money were no issue?” my ex, Joe*, aka David Wenham, asks me, aka Asher Keddie. She would, she says, “write a book”. I sob.
This wasn’t a book I ever wanted to write. “You poor old thing,” my mother says, patting me on the back. “Thank god he didn’t get your money.
Is there any rice left?” Early -morning mist wreaths the forest as I arrive in the Dandenongs for one of the last days of filming for the television series based on my 2019 book, Fake . It’s late November, 2023. Emotion wells and I dig in my bag for tissues.
Too much. All of this – this “unit base”, a little temporary town at a recreational reserve, marquees and catering and wardrobe and make-up and actors’ trucks and two-way radio crackle and the hum of generators and people everywhere – because I wrote a book to try to make sense of a devastating relationship I had with Joe, a man who turned out to be a mendacious fantasist. Countless solitary hours at my computer, pouring out words for more than a year, turned into this, this huge, unimaginable thing.
Three women emerge from a marquee to welcome me – series producer Imogen Banks, co-producer Emelyne Palmer and creator and writer Anya Beyersdorf. Thes.
