‘Way too much information, Frank’: I wanted to be Frank Moorhouse. Instead I became his biographer

‘The breadth and depth of Frank Moorhouse’s contribution to Australian literature, to activism and to fighting for writers’ rights is extraordinary.’ Photograph: William Yang

I first met Frank Moorhouse in the early 1990s when I was living in New York. We were in Washington to speak at an event I remember as being improbably titled the Festival of Australian Ideas (oddly, no one mentioned the Hills Hoist or the Esky). We hit it off over dinner. The fact that I told him I fell in love with his writing as a teenager may have affected his judgment.

I grew up in the working-class beachside town of Newcastle with left-leaning liberal minded parents. His early books were on our shelves, and I read them. The author will be forever best-known for his wonderful protagonist Edith Campbell Berry, of the Edith trilogy, but his earlier short stories gave me a glimpse of a different world: an exciting bohemia in the Sydney suburb of Balmain where actors, journalists, writers, artists and film-makers all knew each other, socialised and fought for social justice. I remember telling a bemused 15-year-old friend that when I grew up I wanted to be Frank Moorhouse.