The former Triple J presenter’s mother died when he was 12. He doesn’t talk much about it publicly, but his new novel ‘is a way to remember her’

Matt Okine: ‘I wish we were taught as boys that it’s OK to be hurt’

Matt Okine’s mother died on a Good Friday. On the way home from the hospital in the car with family friends he cracked a joke. It’s all good, because in two days she’s going to come back, like Jesus. No one laughed. Twelve-year-old Okine realised: “People are going to start treating you differently now.” And they did.

That same scene appears in the comedian’s new novel, Being Black ’N Chicken & Chips, about 12-year-old Mike whose mother dies just weeks after a cancer diagnosis. It’s not a memoir, quite, and it’s not all sad. There are one-liners and awkward comedic pubescent scenes that one might expect of Okine the comedian and sitcom writer.

It’s light and shade. The light, silly and fictional. The shade, drawn from his lived experience.

“Playing with my friend and being called home at the last minute because they didn’t think mum was going to make it through the night. Finding her in the shower and running down and calling dad and us dragging her into the car and us going to the hospital and her never leaving hospital,” he says. “Yeah. That all happened to me.

“If it’s sad, it probably happened.”

Some of these moments were hard to put to paper. They’re not easy to read. Okine regularly draws on his personal life for his comedy, but has rarely talked about the death of his mother . Facing his sadness, there was an impulse to turn away. “But that’s when I know I have to go there,” he says. “Because that’s the part that matters. That’s the part that people will connect with.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Having a parent die when you’re young happens to a lot of people. I wanted to make an honest depiction of that whole experience.’ Photograph: Anneliese Nappa

Okine is all trademark smiles, good humour and baseball cap as he drinks his coffee in the Ultimo cafe where he wrote parts of the book. But he pauses when asked for whom he wrote it.

“Yeeeah,” he says. “I think it is a way to remember her. And I think it was also writing for people who are going through this. Having a parent die when you’re young happens to a lot of people – it doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens. I wanted to make an honest depiction of that whole experience.

“Really, it was the only story I wanted to tell.”

It had to be funny. The jokes are never far away. But it had to be as true to memory as possible.

Memories of those times in hospital with his mother incongruently came back as he returned to hospital this year before the birth of his first daughter.

“It’s funny the things that stick with you from those times,” he says. “Ask someone who has a dying person in hospital and they will tell you exactly which areas you can park in for more than four hours, or when the best time is to get a park in this alleyway. It’s just a terrible routine, and I wanted to capture that in the book; what being in hospital feels like. That feeling of sickness around you and not wanting to lift your head in the hallways and the smell of the cups – that’s the stuff that sticks with you.”

Okine’s literary double, Mike, behaves in ways that might be considered inappropriate while his mother is ill. Obsessing over girls and athletics, cracking jokes, concealing her illness. During his teen years, adolescent Matt too turned to jokes, and anger. The feeling of abandonment, of the rug being pulled out from under you by the world, cut to the core of a boy on the cusp of adolescence.

“The impetus not to cry was a big one. You just had to try and fight the sadness with a lot of jokes. Cracking jokes with people or smiling at the funeral to prove you’re OK,” he says. Even now, confronted with bad news or illness in friends, Okine will laugh and joke. It is not always well received or understood. But, he says, “That’s how people deal with stuff. Some people, anyway.”

“I wish that we were taught as boys growing up that it’s OK to be hurt and to sit in that pain for a while. And to cry. You’ll reach the outcome you want a lot quicker than if you put up a shield, because you’re the person who has to get around that shield. You’re not stopping people from getting into you. You’re stopping yourself from getting out.”

Okine “wrote” much of the book in his head, while staring out of bus windows or floating in the nearby public pool. That was before his baby was born, and time became a limited commodity.

When we meet he has spent the morning in the emergency ward of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital after a small stumble resulted in a “miniature, miniature dislocation” of his daughter’s elbow. After hospital he had to attend a book signing, and following our interview he is testing out new stand-up material at a Sydney Fringe gig. The show will be about his new parental life.

“That’s all I got,” he says.

“That’s one of the reasons why I left Triple J, because at some stage you’ve got to give it back to the younger generation and move forward. You’ve got to grow up and the things you talk about move with you,” he says.

“One day I’ll probably be talking about what my favourite retirement home is, or how cool the new Zimmer frame is,” he says. “I hope so, anyway.”

• Being Black ’N Chicken & Chips is out on 24 September through Hachette

