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?
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
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
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 
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. 
On 19 February 2018 I was on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme reviewing This I Would Kill For by Anne Buist, the third in her ‘Natalie King, Forensic Psychiatrist’ series. You can listen 
On 31 October 2017 I was on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme reviewing the first volume of Philip Pullman’s new trilogy following up the His Dark Materials series, La Belle Sauvage. You can listen 
On 18 August 2017 I was on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme reviewing The Book of Emma Reyes, a memoir in correspondence by Colombian painter Emma Reyes, translated by Daniel Alarcon. You can listen 
Last week’s “Break the Silence” series by Olivia Carville in the New Zealand Herald was intended to start a national conversation about youth suicide. Are we not already having that conversation? From my own high school days, some 20 years ago, I remember much handwringing and hyper-vigilance about peers who were at risk of self-harm; we all talked about it then. These days we have 13 Reasons Why, (everyone’s talking about that) and news media are slowly but surely breaking down the legal wall that prevents them reporting in detail about suicide. Yet suicide is still, according to the blurb on the back of Sarah Quigley’s new novel, the “last taboo”, and in The Suicide Club she is the latest to enter the conversation.