Launching into the weekend of the Sydney writers' festival, Annabel Crabb hosts a panel entitled Humour and Debauchery with a Few Manners in Between, with three of the leading international guests of the festival.
It's a strangely curated panel: is Gary Shteyngart the humour, Irvine Welsh the debauchery, and Sandi Toksvig the "few manners in between"? Was Toksvig, whose most recent book is a history on manners called Peas and Queues, expected to give us an overview in etiquette when it comes to Shteyngart's humour and Welsh's debauchery? Some interesting comments are made, many laughs are had, but without a clear focus for discussion, in the end little remains explored by the panel, and little is discovered by the audience. A fun night out, certainly. An illuminating one? Perhaps not.
Because of this, the most interesting things we hear are the anecdotes about life, rather than about writing: Shteyngart on his ex-girlfriend, who moved to Florida to date Shteyngart's doppelganger, before she took his ear off with a hammer ("Maybe she just wanted to tell you apart," suggests Welsh); one of Toksvig's "few" drug stories, where she ate half a cannabis biscuit and went to bed; Welsh on discovering "let's have a couple of beers" in America means two beers, "in the UK they mean two days".
He goes on with this theme. "You can't say the word cunt in America," he says, launching into re-enactments of all the times he has said it in the US to shocked and offended friends.
But why would you want to, asks Toksvig. "Why that word? Why does it have the power?"
"I think it's the consonants," Welsh replies matter-of-factly. "Cunt," he says, emphasising its end. "When you say the word prick it just floats off."
"So what we're doing now," Crabb tells the audience, "is making sure none of this filmed material will be used anywhere."
Later, when Shteyngart has joined the three on stage, he excitedly relates "I was at the ABC and they let me swear on the air!
"I said the word 'budgie-smugglers!'" he says with glee.
Occasionally, themes in the careers of these three very different writers converge. Struggling slightly to speak to the theme of the event, Crabb asks: what is the etiquette about writing about real people?
"Well, there is a legal department at Radom House," Shteyngart says with both relief and frustration.
After telling us every psychopath in Edinburgh thought Trainspotting was about him, Welsh puts this on the reader. "I tend not to consciously put real people into novels," he says. "And the most grotesque things that happen in life you don't want to put in your book."
"I'm ashamed to say," says Toksvig, "I've done hideous pen portraits of people I don't like in my novels. And they'll say 'oh, that person was hideous,' and I'm nodding and I'm thinking, 'it's you, you fool!'"
Again, convergence is found as the three explore writing in their second language: English after Danish and Russian for Toksvig and Shteyngart, respectively, and American English for Welsh. "I think of Russian as a secondary soundtrack I hear," says Shteyngart. "My first soundtrack is Kraftwerk."
Shteyngart, who brought with him on to stage a "Xanax medley with klonopin sprinkles" certainly seems to be having the most fun on stage, and gives me my favourite moment of the evening as he relays seeing his first wombat. "It has been Gary's dream since being a child in Leningrad to hug a wombat," he says, playing up his childlike wonder.
"All day long, Gary dream of hugging wombat. And yesterday it came true."
Not quite debauchery, perhaps only a few nods to manners, but certainly a lot of humour.
