There was a time when success, that kind of flash bulb-popping recognition, seemed beyond Debra Oswald's grasp.
When our paths last crossed six or seven years ago she was trying to sell a television series about an a cappella group with the British actor Robson Green attached. It seemed a project of great promise, and came close to being made by the ABC. It was hard for Oswald not to take rejection personally, and difficult not to sympathise with a writer whose living was beholden to the whims of accountants.
That was then. Debra Oswald sits before me, the co-creator and head writer of Channel 10's prime-time comedy drama Offspring, for which she won the 2011 NSW Premier's Literary Award, and a 2014 industry award for best TV screenplay. The series has wrapped up if all the speculation is correct but Oswald is not telling, pressing two fingers to lips to impress a secret she has sworn not to tell. Instead, she is engaged in the build-up to the release of Useful, her first work of adult fiction, one that bears Oswald's creative signature of a story about messy human entanglements told with heart and a liberal dash of humour.
"This might seem a little wet," Oswald leans in, "but I love these characters and I've lived with them for three years now and I want other people to meet them, and I'm impatient like a child about that. I want other people to meet Sullivan."
Nina Proudman, the 30-something obstetrician and heroine of Offspring, might have been mates with Oswald's new leading man, even lovers, but it is doubtful she would have considered him husband material. Sullivan Moss hangs out on the edge of adulthood, an overweight, unfit drunk existing under the illusion he has endless time to construct a functional life.
At his lowest ebb, Moss attempts to commit suicide, fluffs it and wakes up in hospital concussed and searching for a reason to live. He comes up with the idea of giving away his kidney to a complete stranger to atone for his mistakes. The idea of a failed suicide bid came to Oswald three years ago between writing seasons three and four of Offspring. She finished the book last year after wrapping up series five.
"If we accept that religion is just an interesting collection of myths that can be more or less useful then we have to construct our own ethical framework and Sullivan is, in his very messy way, one little person doing that."
Oswald writes the kind of novel in which any reader might find an echo of their own life, finding comedy in human imperfection but making a judgment about the real cost of moral vanity as a driver of good works and what we value in each other. It's hard not to feel a certain kinship with Sullivan, who is the worst of ourselves - the self-doubt, pomposity and self-absorption - but wants one last chance at redemption.
"I think we all have a capacity to relapse and regress to the worst way of seeing ourselves until external evidence comes along [which tells us otherwise]," says Oswald.
"There is a point where he doesn't realise how much he has achieved. He gets cocky and that leads to trouble. He loses track of the important figures in his life and follows the wrong person. People have sex with the wrong people. I specialise in excruciatingly awful or embarrassing sex, which, can I put on the record, is not from personal experience."
Useful and Offspring are high points in a long freelance writing career in television and children's fiction. Theatre was, and is, Oswald's first love, but she hasn't written a play since 2009. There were some successes with the likes of Gary's House, which is still in production, Dags, Mr Bailey's Minder and The Peach Season but for one reason or another, a fact that still baffles her friends, Oswald never made it big.
She taps her chest when the matter is raised: "Broken heart, broken heart," she says, attributing the scar tissue to the adolescent importance she placed on becoming a playwright. Oswald well remembers making the declaration to her parents, a salesman and a bookkeeper, when she was 12, then later "lying on the bed, crying and thinking, 'I'll never be a playwright, my parents are still married and I live in Carlingford'.
"I just thought I had no chance. It didn't stop me though. I had this mixture of defeatism and self doubt and this sort of dogged persistence and naivety. I'm still naive; I'm still surprised that people are not nice. You'd think by now I'd know."
Oswald's long-time partner is ABC radio presenter Richard Glover. They met in 1979 through friends at Australian National University when she was 20 and he 21, and wrote radio comedy together before he went into journalism while she worked at the plays, the children's fiction and television.
"Even though I'm known for a romantic comedy, I'm not a romantic person. I'd like to think I'm a soulful person but I don't believe in girly romantic things at all, I don't believe in romantic destiny," Oswald says.
"When I was younger I didn't think anybody was going to pick me and fall in love with me, I thought I had to put in such an incontrovertibly solid application to be a girlfriend that I would get an interview.
"I did get an interview, I got a second interview and got the job."
Glover is one of her first readers; they bounce ideas off each other and she credits him with steering her through dark moments of self doubt. It's a united front that friend and fellow author Geraldine Brooks says is genuine.
"He listens to my ideas," says Oswald of Glover, "even when they are half formed, the poor man. We have that for each other. I'm fortunate that way." She pauses, and chuckles: "Then again, you can't entirely trust the view of someone who is hoping to have sex with you."
When Brooks had breast cancer, Oswald was her go-to girlfriend. "Partly because she's a hypochondriac and, as a result, very well-read on medical issues," says Brooks, "but mostly because she could always make me laugh and never spoke to me in a church-pew voice, or suggested eating radishes as a cancer therapy."
Oswald has got over the hypochondria, she says, her fear of death falling away as her sons grew older and self-reliant, though her interest in all things medical came in handy as she researched the subject of non-directed organ donation. It's rare thing she discovered, has been legal in NSW for several years, and is considered mitzvah in the Jewish faith.
The interest in children's fiction peaked during the delight of living her sons' boyhood experiences and she wrote three Aussie Bite books and six novels for teenagers. Oswald missed the trend to young adult fiction but the genre no longer draws her though the heroic boy misfits and underdogs of those stories, and her tendency to forge character from occasional moments of absurdity, are present in Useful and Offspring.
Anne Tyler and Patrick Gale are favourite authors and in her writing Oswald says she strives to "be true, with a clear gaze but with tenderness". Her penchant for writing funny and "excruciatingly awkward moments" is about showing what it means to be human in a "very essential way".
"It says a lot about our desperate need to be taken seriously and loved," she says. "I worry sometimes that there is this idea out there that if something has joy in it or playfulness in it that it somehow reduces the thoughtfulness or intelligence of it, and I don't believe that is true. If possible as writers we should use as broad an emotional palette as possible."
In a way, Useful, says Oswald feels like her debut book. There is a second book underway, and she will head off to London in March in search of - useful - screenwriting opportunities.
"I certainly have a sense of 'I'm only going to do a few more big things, so they've all got to count and they have all got to be worth doing and as enjoyable as they can be'.
"I'm too old to do something because it will lead to something else. Everything has got to be for its own sake. Actually, it's very liberating."
Some time after the a cappella project went on indefinite hold, Oswald spent a few months with a psychologist to talk through her writer's block and conquer her anxieties. By the time Offspring came along she had reached a point of trying not to define her creative life in terms of commercial success.
"After this many years I know there is so much chance in it," she says. "I don't think I'm a failed theatre writer who gave up. I had a long and satisfying career in theatre but that period is over for me for the sake of my creative sanity and flow."
Oswald shares with her father, who died in 2006, a tendency to moodiness, she says. Like him, she finds herself at the mercy of an overactive imagination "in good and bad ways, in terms of anxiety and fear but also as a creative outlet". She admires son Joe's emotional equanimity.
"For me the protection against all that stuff about career and whether people want you or don't want you is that once my head is in a story and I love those characters, even if they are flawed and difficult, that keeps me going."
Useful is published by Penguin Australia, $32.99.
And Another Thing: Oswald has the pseudonym Jocasta in Richard Glover's popular column in The Sydney Morning Herald.
