selected writing
This review first appeared on The Spinoff on 9 April 2019
Before the current bumper crop of radically honest books about motherhood, there was Marie Darrieussecq. Eighteen years ago in Paris, she sat at her desk, notebook open, her baby resting face down on her lap. She let him suckle on the fingers of her left hand; in this position she could hold a pen in her right hand.
This review and interview first appeared on The Pantograph Punch on 21 February 2019.
It’s an arresting title. Women in the Field, One and Two: it seems to hint at some sort of report on experience, a dispatch from the frontier. News from the field, for those of us stuck at home. Which field, though, and what are ‘One and Two’?
Continue reading “Imagined Art History: an interview with Thomasin Sleigh”
On 19 September 2018 I was on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme reviewing Stardust and Substance, VUP’s anthology about the 2017 General Election. You can listen here.
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to adapt and then record my book The Whole Intimate Mess for RNZ. It was an honour, and I’m delighted to share the finished recordings. These were read on air in November 2018. You can listen to all five episodes here.
On 14 December 2018 I was on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme reviewing These Two Hands, a memoir by New Zealand author and playwright Renee. You can listen here.
This review was first published on The Spinoff on 17 December 2018.
New York. Late 2000. Our narrator is 27. She is thin, pretty, tall, blond. White. She works at a Chelsea art gallery, her first job after graduating from Columbia (art history major), though working is optional – she could live entirely off the inheritance from her dead parents, if she chose. That inheritance pays for her Upper East Side apartment and whatever she wants, which is sometimes designer clothes, but mostly second-hand video tapes of Whoopi Goldberg movies. She tries hard not to call her douchebag ex-boyfriend, Trevor, but often fails.
Continue reading “Review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh”
I’ve been fortunate to have my writing included in three recent books that I want to share. These books all came out in 2018, concern matters very close to my heart (parenting, feminism, mental health) and feature some incredible writers. I’m honoured to be included in each of them, and I hope you’ll check them out. They’d all make great Christmas presents!
Is it Bedtime Yet? Parenting… the hilarious, the hair-raising, the heart-breaking is an anthology of deeply relatable parenting essays from a range of diverse perspectives, edited by the fabulous Emily Writes (with whom I used to host a podcast). Many of the pieces were first published on The Spinoff’s parenting page, which is where my contribution first appeared. These pieces are so real, reassuring, funny and moving. They’re just what every parent needs when they’re in the thick of it.
Women Now: The Legacy of Female Suffrage is a Te Papa Press publication to mark 125 years of women’s suffrage in New Zealand. 12 writers were asked by editor Bronwyn Labrum to respond to an item in the national museum’s collection that related somehow to women or feminism. Mine was a badge saying “Women can do Anything.” I wrote about the birth of my second daughter Ngaire and how my own conviction that I could do anything (everything?) was challenged by motherhood.
The other brilliant writers included are Sue Bradford, Barbara Brookes, Sandra Coney, Golriz Ghahraman, Morgan Godfery, Dame Fiona Kidman, Charlotte MacDonald, Tina Makereti, Ben Schrader, Grace Taylor, and Megan Whelan.
Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety is published by VUP and edited by Naomi Arnold. It features essays by people from all walks of life: poets, novelists, and journalists, musicians, social workers, and health professionals, and aims to tell the real, messy story – what anxiety feels like, what causes it, what helps and what doesn’t. I wrote about my grandmother, Lucy’s experience becoming a mother in the 1950s, and set it alongside my own, describing how my anxiety manifests. An extract from my essay was also published by Fairfax online and in several newspapers.
The other writers in the collection are Danyl McLaughlan, Rebecca Priestley, Sarah Lin Wilson, Zion Tauamiti, Paul Stanley Ward, Aimie Cronin, Michelle Langstone, Kirsten McDougall, Anthony Byrt, Eamonn Marra, Riki Gooch, Donna McLeod, Hinemoana Baker, Bonnie Etherington, Kate Kennedy, Madeline Reid, Kerry Sunderland, Rosemary Mannering, Susan Strongman, Paula Harris, Lee Murray, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Jess McAllen, Allan Drew, Yvette Walker, D.A. Glynn, Meredith Blampied and Julia Rucklidge, Ashleigh Young, Mikey Dam and Tusiata Avia.
On 26 March 2018 I was on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme reviewing Brave by Rose McGowan. You can listen here.
This review was first published in Landfall Review Online on 1 March 2018.
Elspeth Sandys has had many names. Born Frances Hilton James in 1948, she became Elspeth Sandilands Somerville on the occasion of her adoption into the prominent Dunedin Somerville clan at the age of nine months. The circumstances of her birth and adoption, and their impact on her childhood, were the subject of the first volume of her memoir, What Lies Beneath, published in 2014.
The second volume, Casting Off, starts with another name change. With her first marriage in late 1960, Elspeth inexplicably took on not only her husband’s surname, but a new first name as well – Susan. ‘Till recently,’ she writes, ‘I believed this new Christian name was given to me by my young sisters-in-law, Elspeth being too much of a mouthful, but they have assured me they had nothing to do with it. So the question of who bestowed the name on me, and why, remains unanswered. As does the question of why I agreed to it …’
In July 2017 my writing group started a collective blog on the creative process called Fixin’ to Write. Each week one of us posts about our experiences of finding creativity in everyday life. Here’s my fourth post for the blog, an experiment in “found writing” inspired by Catherine Chidgey’s The Beat of the Pendulum. It was first published on 22 February 2018.
Due to a recent tweak in my insomniac four-year-old’s bedtime routine, I now spend hours each night sitting outside her room waiting for her to fall asleep while answering the questions that run through her head while she winds down: “Mum, what’s a fawn?” “How do you spell poison?”
It’s painful, but at least it affords me some reading time, and as a consequence I’m churning through the books at the moment. One of the latest is The Beat of the Pendulum by Catherine Chidgey.
Continue reading “Fixin’ to Write: An experiment in “found” writing”
