Holden Sheppard

Thank you for having me.

Sorry, not sorry.

Yeah, my library memory would be, so when I went to high school up in Geraldton, I went to the Catholic college there and across the road was the big Geraldton library.

It was a two-story building, really cool space.

Like we don't have a lot of two-story buildings in Geraldton.

So it was like this really exciting, massive space full of books and full of just, you could just hide yourself there.

And so I used to wait there for my mum to pick me up after school and I would just spend, I'd buy some humbugs for like 20 cents, you know, lollies.

And I would just sit and just explore, like, history, not just fiction, you know, like, history or politics or just any kind of subject I could get my hands on.

And that was a lot of my teenage years, just sitting there after school in the library.

And I think that's what was being said at some point before around it's not just hiring books, it's actually the space itself that makes a library very special.

Yeah, yeah.

40-degree days a lot in Giro, yeah.

And the Wi-Fi is a big... LAUGHTER

Yeah, so Invisible Boys has just been released last week, which is super exciting.

It's pure fiction, but it's drawn from probably the emotional truth of what I went through growing up.

So I grew up gay in Geraldton and I had a very, very difficult time accepting it.

My story is less one of prejudice and discrimination and bullying and more one of absolute self-loathing.

and rejection of myself and eventually wanting to take my own life.

So this was something I wanted to explore in fiction.

It was very, very vulnerable to do it as a memoir.