If your childhood was anything like mine, Diary of a Wimpy Kid was coveted in your school library. So coveted that you would often need a reservation to borrow one, for which you were third on the list at any given point for any of the given books in the series. So, when the opportunity came to see Jeff Kinney’s ‘Hot Mess’ show at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, I jumped at it. As I found my seat, I was welcomed by the sound of various children’s movie soundtracks like Madagascar and Trolls, which set the tone for what would be an event fit for both the kids and kids at heart.  

So, how did Kinney’s nineteenth book in the series get started? He explained that, with how messy the US is right now, he started to think more about what else is messy and came up with three things: food, family, and vacation. Kinney revealed that developing his book covers usually takes two months, showing that the first draft for ‘Hot Mess’ was our beloved Greg in a boiling pot. However, things were a bit different with this cover. He had an upcoming appearance on the Kelly Clarkson show, who said she was happy to reveal the cover of the latest book, so the two-month process had to all be done within one week. It all worked out, with a young fan revealing the final cover of Greg in a plate of spaghetti on national television. 

There was only one problem: the book was yet to be written. Kinney states that after the cover, his process starts with writing the jokes, then the story, then the drawings, with jokes being the hardest part for him. The place he says he oddly does his best work is in his car, parked near a cemetery in the town of Plainville, Massachusetts, where he resides. This writing process for this alone takes three months! Once the jokes and story are written, he revealed that every day for two months, he draws for a colossal fifteen hours a day. 

Kinney then decides to drop a bombshell and muses that maybe he missed his calling. He then reveals that he was thinking of opening a restaurant instead, asking the crowd if we thought that was a good idea, to which the answer was a resounding ‘No’. He laughed this off, noting that “every big dream sounds a little silly at first” before walking off. The stage became transformed into a restaurant, complete with tables, chairs, and a leafy sign with neon writing saying ‘Gregorios.’ Kinney comes back in a blazer to greet the audience with “I’m Jeff, and I’ll be your host for the evening.” 

The rest of the panel was Kinney and audience members going through a ‘hiring process.’ He did so by calling out numbers at the bottom of a drawing activity that was given to the children as they filed into the room. The first set of challenges was between a boy and his mother, racing to see who could pile the most food on their tray before trying to pull a tablecloth without moving the plates on it. The second set of challenges was with different parents and their kids trying to remember orders and getting food items in the right sequence.  

Kinney then noted that he now had waiters but no people to help advertise before asking for five parents. They were asked questions like ‘Have you ever picked something off the ground to eat?’ to determine who was the ‘hottest mess.’ Each yes answer gets the parent a giant ‘meatball’ to hold, with the parent who was the hottest mess receiving four. The parents then received Gregorios's signs and costume items to advertise the restaurant, with the winner getting a Zoom call for their child's classroom from Kinney’s studio in Plainville. 

After a warning from a surprise health inspector, the stage transforms into a kitchen with kids doing various tasks. The challenges from this part of the panel were hectic to say the least: stomping grapes, making burgers, spinning dough and stirring spaghetti sauce. Shoes were ‘put in a microwave’ which ‘shrunk them’ and there was even a robotic rat scurrying around. The health inspector returned to taste the food, only for the rat to be in their spaghetti. They then announce that Kinney would be stuck doing “juvenile drawings” for the rest of his life, prompting him to decide that he should get started on book twenty. 

Kinney does the show effortlessly throughout with a gift for crowd work and talking to the kids. Even though I’m twice the maximum recommended age, I found the show to be the furthest thing from a hot mess of an experience.