When Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon met on a blind date on 9 May, 1992, they both knew this was it. Within three weeks, they were engaged. But on Tuesday night, during a Sydney Writers festival talk, they admitted that powerful as that experience was, 23 years of marriage later, memories are not enough.

“Knowing that we had started that way, with this intense certainty and this rush, got us through for a long time,” Chabon said. “But what we’ve tried to do over the years is establish something right now.

“How are we talking to each other, what tones of voice are we using, how much time are we actually spending together looking each other in the eyes? Not on our screens – really taking a hard look at our interactions.”

The pair interviewed each other at the Seymour Centre dressed in full Melbourne cup garb – “in honour of the first female jockey” – structuring the night as narrative, with all the turning points of their inextricably linked private and writing lives.

Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon on stage. Photograph: Prudence Upton

Between them, the couple has produced 19 novels, three non-fiction books, two story collections, 20 screenplays and teleplays (“mostly unproduced, some produced,” said Waldman), countless essays and, recently, Chabon’s lyrics for nine songs on Marc Ronson’s latest album. Oh, and four children.

Though Chabon came to global attention with his Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Harvard law graduate Waldman gained notoriety for less glamorous reasons, after an essay she wrote that said she loved her husband more than her children was picked up by the New York Times, resulting in “venomous online comment threads” and an appearance on Oprah.

In the essay, the self-proclaimed “bad mother” wrote about “all these women I knew in sexless marriages ... I thought the reason why was that they had been very good mothers, had prioritised their children more than anything else, and that I had somehow failed to do that. I failed to prioritise my children over my husband. And while I loved my children dearly, I wasn’t in love with them.”

The couple admitted “payback is a bitch” – their eldest daughter is at university, Waldman explained, “and not only is she a writing major, but she is going to write a narrative non-fiction memoir”.

“I imagine this is going to be quite a turning point for us,” Chabon quipped drily.

They also discussed the plot walks they take together, talking the story through “beat by beat to figure out what’s wrong with it,” reading and scribbling DB on manuscripts (for “do better”), and the moments they each realised they had broken free from self-imposed limitations.

For Chabon, it was his novella, Final Solution, about an elderly man, once a great detective in London in the 1880s and 90s, now retired to Sussex (and later revealed to be you-know-who). The book, written in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson, with chapters from different points of view, went as expected: there was a solution, a murderer and someone who steals a parrot.

The only one who saw the murder committed was the parrot. “And the more I thought about it, the more I thought the only solution is to go into the parrot’s point of view,” said Chabon. “I just didn’t have the nerve, I thought people would think it was wacky.”

At the time, Chabon was corresponding with Salman Rushdie, “who is not my best friend or anything, I was just trying to get him to participate in an anthology” and thought: Rushdie will have the answer! “And so I laid it out and said I think I’m going to need to write a chapter from the point of view of a very intelligent parrot, can I do that? And he wrote back a two word reply: ‘You must.’”

Chabon realised he could write from anyone’s perspective – even the screaming African American mother giving birth in his last book, Telegraph Ave. “I knew it was okay to try to expand your powers of point of view thanks to Sir Salman.”

Waldman experienced her own turning point writing her novel, Love and Treasure, which takes place against the backdrop of the Holocaust. She was anxious not to play into the “Shoah show” of Holocaust art, she said, and felt a terrible lack of authority and authenticity. Waldman had lost extended family members, but she felt presumptuous in undertaking the task.

In Budapest to research Yugensteil art, she interviewed a Hungarian man in a local cafe. On hearing Waldman’s story, he revealed he was Jewish and that, as a child during the war in Paris, he escaped being sent to the concentration camps when the Nazis arrived because he had been dispatched to the country to recover from whooping cough.

His mother was able to acquire papers that said she was a Catholic Hungarian, so they moved back to Budapest and settled in Buda, rather than Pest where the Jews lived, and his mother presented herself as Catholic. “The problem was,” Waldman explained, “she had a son and he wore on his body the evidence of their religion. So she put him to bed... and he stayed in bed for the entire length of the war, until the siege and liberation of Budapest.”

Shocked at the man’s tale, Waldman asked why he hadn’t recorded it. Hungarians say the war was difficult for everyone, he replied, “but you can write my story”.

“At that moment all the worries I had about my right to address this massive topic just faded away,” Waldman said. “I felt what Michael felt, as a writer, that any story you can imagine, you have a right at least to try to tell.”

