Former newsreader opens up about Trouserless Under the News Desk by Boolarong Press
Australian TV star Mike Higgins has been on the road spreading the word about his new memoir: Trouserless Under the News Desk.
Forever Young Autobiographies caught up with him to find out more following the book’s released in June by Boolarong Press.
Higgins has been a familiar face on television for over 25 years.
He was the long-time news anchor for Channel 7 in Queensland but also made award-winning documentaries to be awarded a United Nations media peace prize.
But the broadcast journalist became the news a number of times.
Namely when he went on the run from drug traffickers who he feared would kill him and for filming a story at a nudist beach in the raw.
More recently Higgins had another threat to his life.
In 2008 he was diagnosed with a very rare form of blood cancer – Primary Peripheral Cutaneous T-Cell Lymphoma, Unspecified – and was told he had a 16 per cent chance of survival.
Higgins had four years of chemotherapy, underwent a bone-marrow transplant and nearly died.
His survival stunned doctors who dubbed him the Miracle Man and said not many patients had “done it tougher”.
“I hope the book will be inspirational to people or anyone going through any sort of a challenge, whether it’s cancer or another illness or a psychological challenge,” Higgins said.
Keep reading to find out how he wrote the book, what were the project’s highlights plus Higgins’s tips for starting your own memoir, autobiography, biography or life-story project.
Mike Higgins: The writing process
I’d started writing a memoir about my early life in radio, because my early days in media were rather funny, and then when I found myself in hospital undergoing treatment.
The most intense writing period took place when I was in hospital for the bone-marrow transplant.
During that eight months of hospitalisation, when I nearly died, I started to scribble stuff about my treatment and about all the feelings that had come up.
I was writing on the backs of menus, scraps of paper, bits of toilet paper and tissues.
Whatever I could get my hands on.
It just came together very easily because in hospital, in the cancer ward, all the armour drops away and people are really open, honest and authentic.
They’re really in a situation where any artifice in their life is pointless.
You find a lot of really heartwarming connections in the cancer ward because people are dying around you.
When you’re in the midst of that and you’re seeing an empty bed next to you the next morning sometimes it really does open up a lot of heartfelt conversations.
Then when I showed my writings to some people they organised it and I got an arts grant to employ a person to type it all up … and found a publisher.
As far as writing goes I love the process. I find it enjoyable.
And as a result I’ve had fantastic reviews and reactions to the memoir.
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Loving the rewards of writing
I’ve been married and divorced twice and I get on very well with my exes.
But during all this I happened to meet a lovely lady in the cancer ward.
She’s doing treatment and we’re very hopeful, with fingers crossed, things work out.
Even at my ripe young age of 74 you just don’t know when you’re going to bump into someone who you really click with.
Also this morning I was driving along in the van (which has promotional signs about the memoir) and this car behind me was tooting and waving an arm out the window.
I thought maybe I had something hanging out the back of the van or I had the lights on or something.
But no, these people just wanted to tell me how much they loved my book.
That was really lovely to get that sort of feedback.
And especially because those two people had had cancer and they were inspired.
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Mike Higgins’s favourite part of his memoir
The on-the-run story was perhaps the most fun part to write.
It was the one that raised the most headlines around the country.
I went into television very young.
In fact at 21 years of age I was leading the prime time Monday-to-Friday six o’clock news at Channel 7 in Sydney.
But then I came to Brisbane and got married.
My first marriage didn’t last very long but I did run into a few criminals.
Basically they asked me to fly from Brisbane-Sydney, Sydney-Brisbane once a month carrying a suitcase full of drugs and for that I would get a Ferrari and a unit on the Gold Coast.
Now when I refused outright, because hard drugs have always been abhorrent to me, they threatened to shoot me.
So I took off from my job at Channel 7 (Brisbane) and went bush.
That made headlines all over the country because I didn’t tell the bosses of the Seven Network that I was running away.
The police went up and broke open my (work) locker and Channel 7 listed me as a missing person.
So I had the Sunday Sun’s ace crime reporter, I had the police and I had Channel 7 all looking for me.
Eventually the Sunday Sun caught up with me at Mt Isa where I was working as a disc jockey under an assumed name.
I went back to my job because while I’d been away the ratings had gone down and the station wanted me back to pump them up again.
So I was very lucky I got my job back.
I was even luckier because I discovered much later … that both the guys that had threatened to shoot me were dead.
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Final say
Mike Higgins enjoys the writing process and will have another book out next year: a novel drawing on his childhood upbringing in a puritanical religious sect.
The keen writer said he would love for his books to inspire others to record their own stories.
He said “writing is rewriting” and suggested being ready to write at any moment.
“I carried a little pad and pen in the glovebox of the car,” Higgins said.
“If I had an idea – for even one sentence, an idea for an anecdote that I wanted to include or an idea for some sort of lesson that I wanted to impart – I would pull over to the side of the road and write it down.
“It’s no use hoping that a book will write itself.
“It really does require that you sit on a chair and either work at your computer or with a pen and keep on writing, even if it feels a little bit silly.”
Higgins had one final creative tip for new writers: make notes about your dreams.
“It is really a good way of connecting with your deepest feelings,” he said.
“If you are going to write you want to write something that is authentic and deep from the heart.
“Writing down my dreams kept me in touch with what was going on internally.”
Higgins’s memoir Trouserless Under the News Desk is available online and in all good bookstores.
Happy writing!
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Your say
Mike Higgins wrote about beating cancer in his book. What is one challenge you have faced in your life? I’d love to hear about it. Send me an email or leave a reply in the comments section at the end of this article.
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This article first appeared on the website Forever Young Autobiographies.com.