Literature and loathing

BY PAT BILLINGS
William Kostakis is a smiling 19-year-old, and he should be with his first novel under his belt.
“I wanted to write, with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, about pretty serious themes ‘ death, grief, jealously and dysfunctional families,” says the Sydney University student of his young adult novel, Loathing Lola.
Kostakis finished the first draft when he was 12. He finally landed a publishing deal with Pan Macmillan at 17 after being rejected by six other publishers.
The young writer says his publisher decided to finetune Loathing Lola, letting two birthdays pass before releasing it in August this year.
“You have these young movie stars, and that is what they are for the rest of their lives. I did not want to be a marketing ploy because of my age, I would rather let my work speak for itself.”
Kostakis explains that he wrote the fist scene of Loathing Lola – a funeral – after his best friend died. “At his funeral everybody competed to be the most sorrowful and tried to privilege their own feelings,” he says, adding that the death helped him frame and structure his novel.
“At the time, everything I wrote would end up being about grief, so I decided to get it all out of my system with Loathing Lola, which I was writing at the time.”
The novel centres on 15-year-old Courtney Marlow. Courtney emotionally blackmails herself into keeping a promise she made to her deceased boyfriend, by starring in a reality TV show.
“Basically she gets stuck with something she does not want to do, but decides to give it her best shot anyway,” Kostakis says. “It is about how she tries to change herself in front of the camera and how it all backfires, horribly.”
The idealistic Courtney is tempered by twins Tim and Katie. Katie is the foul-mouthed bourbon-drinking twin.
“A lot of writers for the young adult genre try to be edgy just for the sake of being edgy,” he says.
He says the character of Katie took that “edgy” stereotype and blew it up to ridiculous proportions.
“To be honest,” he says, “I actually know girls like that.”
Although he doesn’t saturate the novel with anecdotes about growing up in a Greek family, Kostakis admits his background did play a role.
“I have actually put my grandmother in the book and she turns out to be the favourite character among most readers. I literally put her in there, word for word.”
And as if in testimony to this, Kostakis’ grandmother arrived late for the Sydney Morning Herald’s 2005 Young Writer of the Year luncheon because she was preparing a leg of lamb in case the catered function ran out of food. For Kostakis, winning the award was a pivotal event that gave him the self belief that he could write for a living.
And although he remains coy about his next novel, the novelist promises audiences that his grandmother has not outworn her literary value.