Author notes

From the age of fourteen I wanted to be a writer. That vague desire crystallised when I read Mrs Dalloway. Something about the prose made me feel I could do it. Obviously, I had nothing like the talent of Virginia Woolf and my mind was vastly inferior to Woolf’s – yet that book, that author, gave me a goal and career path to follow.

At first, I had no voice of my own, could only write in imitation of others. Although I felt deeply, the feeling got lost in translation to the written word. Rejection, not long in coming, hit me hard. As a child I had been taught to persevere and so, rather than read rejection as a nudge towards an alternative career, I just kept going, rather like the early pioneers in colonies throughout the world who never let themselves see they were beaten.

Even so, after slaving away at three novels and being unable to get them published, I hit the Slough of Despond. The coup de grace was the realization that some authors actually enjoyed writing novels. Me, I hated making things up. I wasn’t interested by plot. There was never a sense of an organic unfolding.

What I did enjoy was writing about people I knew. Turning my own life into a narrative. Exploring dilemmas, philosophical questions, the meaning of things.

Finally, the machine ground to a halt. I understood I was not a novelist. The sun still shone, the trees grew, the flowers bloomed. I lived in a supremely beautiful country where food was varied and plentiful, roofs over heads were the norm and I felt safe walking down the street. Why make myself miserable for the rest of my life, just because I wasn’t a novelist? The logic was compelling.

What did fame matter? Why be a millionaire? One should write for oneself – but with a reader in mind. For a year I followed my own advice. I edited some family letters and wove a narrative around them and self-published eleven copies for family members, under the title, Not a Bad Bunch. I laughed at the thought that I was writing a book for eleven people. It was my act of greatest daring yet. To find the intrinsic value of writing. To find the authentic reader.

Then I struck lucky. At the Dublin Writers Museum I was entranced by quotes by Irish writers that revealed how many of them knew each other. I wondered if the same was true of the first New Zealand writers. The idea raced around my head all that night.

Soon I started writing a book about the pioneer writers of my own country. How did the first writers fare, how did they learn to write of a place so foreign to them, so obliterating of the place they came from? What kind of people were they?

I fell in love with each of my pioneer writers in turn. They changed my experience of New Zealand for ever and provided the material for my first published book.