In conversation with dean manning
Cover of Dean Manning’s Mr Blank.
“I'm just intrigued by how people live and what they do behind the curtains. And I think Mr. Blank's book is a little like that. It's just a glimpse into someone's life that happens quite by chance” said Dean Manning, halfway through our interview about his book. The curiosity and the urge of understanding people’s lives and legacy runs through his newest novel, Mr Blank. When we met through Zoom, Dean was thoughtful but eager to peel back the layers of the book that left readers both unsettled and mesmerised.
For Manning, a musician turned writer, writing was less about invention and more about attention. He described it as obsessive, comforting even; something to hold onto. Touring trains you to live in the moment: writing a book demands something entirely different. “You can write a song in a day, and it comes and goes and you move on,” he said. Writing was more often a practice of returning, again and again - it's a different discipline. “You keep coming back, reminding yourself to stay with it. That time, that persistence, becomes part of your story itself”.
Mr Blank follows a narrator who stumbles upon a suitcase filled with a mysterious person’s belongings: letters, love notes, photographs, memorabilia. Throughout the course of the novel, the layers of Mr. Blank himself, who he was, what he stood for, who he loved, are all revealed, against a backdrop of 20th century Sydney. Themes of identity, classism, memory and grief plague the pages of Manning’s debut, leaving no stone unturned.
The long fixation shaped Mr Blank, a novel that circles ideas of memory, identity and what are true reminders of us after we’re gone. Manning describes it as an experience, an atmosphere to be entered. The origins of the book were also closer to home than Manning first expected. “It was my father's era,” he recalled. “My father had a lot of fantastic stories about those times. And funnily, he died a month after I found the suitcase. So there were a lot of connections between Mr. Blank's life and my father's life, and so that was a gateway into the era”. Writing became both research and grieving, a way of tracing memory through fragments.
The blurring of personal and invented life gives the novel its weight. Mr Blank moves like memory itself: layered, fragmentary, at times absurd, at others deeply intimate. The question of legacy follows Manning throughout, invoking reflections on what remains of us after we’re gone and how memory can blur the line between truth and invention.
In this way, Mr Blank is not only about its mysterious subject, but also about Manning’s own reckoning with loss. The intimacy between private memory and invented life echoes on every page: Mr Blank isn’t just a character, but a vessel for questions Manning was already asking; what do we keep, what do we let burn, what do we learn from the fragments left behind?
To step into Mr Blank is to step into a life pieced together from fragments: unsettling, intimate, and impossible to forget.
Read Dean Manning’s Mr Blank, available on all platforms.
