It was the email of my dreams! It popped into my inbox a few months ago and was from someone at the ABC, saying that as part of an oral history project, Sally Sara would like to interview me about my first book, The Battle for Bennelong.
Sally Sara! I’ve listened to Radio National Breakfast every morning for years, regarding the calm, measured tones of Sally as an essential beginning to my day. I don’t live with my partner during the week – not because he’s a prisoner on weekend release, as my friends assume – but because he lives out of Sydney. Basically, I’m in a parasocial relationship with Sally, as we spend so much time together. I’m her biggest fan.
Overwhelmed with excitement, I wrote back saying I’d be delighted to contribute. Sally’s assistant wrote to me again, asking for more details. So I sat down one weekend and poured my heart out onto the page – my inspiration, research techniques, my oeuvre. Finally, someone cared about my oeuvre!
I’ve written four books – two under my own name and two as a ghostwriter – no prizes for guessing which ones made me more money. You don’t write books in Australia for profit unless you’re a fantasy author, and I’m too old to even think about people who have sex with dragons.
Writing a book, being alone in a small room with nothing but a computer and your own thoughts, is so awful that it does, temporarily, send you mad. I wrote my last book – The Teal Revolution – over winter, clad only in an unwashed Uniqlo fleece and tracksuit pants. One morning, as I was slouching out for coffee, the local church ladies mistook me for a homeless person and offered me free bread.
Soon the assistant emailed me again, asking more specific questions. In my day job, I’m fairly familiar with AI writing, so I was surprised to see that these emails had slabs of AI text. Was the ABC so cash-strapped that the staff were using AI to write missives? Undeterred, I wrote back, explaining in great detail my “method” and “creative process”. A conversation I would have blushed scarlet to have had in person seemed perfectly reasonable on the page. Anyway, Sally and I are basically family. Couldn’t I tell her everything?
Soon after, I opened my Times app and read a story which began: “Authors have been warned about a wave of scams in which fraudsters use artificial intelligence to impersonate agents, publishers and marketers. Ian Gardiner, 76, who writes military history books, received an email from someone purporting to be from the Silent Book Club.
“One has an ego and if someone approaches you with a very well-researched review, brimming over with praise saying ‘your book deserves a wider audience’, that grabs your attention. You’ve got to be pretty hard-skinned not to think, ‘Oh that’s a nice idea’,” Gardiner said.
My stomach lurched. No, no, no – this can’t be true! I read on.
“Victoria Strauss, an author, co-founded the Writer Beware website to expose the scams. She said: “It’s the same dream that the scammers are exploiting. It plays on and manipulates the emotions, which of course is how scammers always get victims.”
As you’ve probably worked out – long before I did – I hadn’t been talking to Sally at all. I’d been communicating with a scammer. Now, these events have caused me a few sleepless nights. Despite evidence to the contrary (ahem), I consider myself to be a very rational person; listening to both sides of an argument, weighing up the evidence and making a judgment based on facts. But now I know it’s a delusion – basically, I’m a victim-in-waiting.
Clearly, it’s just dumb luck that I’ve never been in a romance scam – that’s only because I’ve never been on a dating app. I actually met my partner in real life, at a film festival, where we both pretended to like Polish movies in order to appear more attractive. But in a parallel universe, where I was single and there were dating sites for ageing, small-minded women with attachment issues, I’d be a sitting duck.
The worst part of this whole experience, apart from the extreme mortification, is that some tiny part of my lizard brain still thinks, despite all evidence to the contrary, that someone wants to talk to me about my book. So if you are a member of a very niche book club, and for some unfathomable reason wish to discuss a book about an election that took place almost 20 YEARS AGO – hit me up.
I will bring copies of the book, and money. How much would you like me to transfer?
Margot Saville is SMH deputy opinion editor.
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