Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa’s writers, and other guests. This week: Jenny Pattrick, playwright of Hope, which runs at Circa Theatre from January 25 – February 23.
The book I wish I’d written
How to choose? Let’s say David Marr’s biography of Patrick White. I followed all of Patrick White’s Australian novels as they came out in the 50s, 60s and 70s. They were different to the British novels I was reading at the time: astonishing to me in the way plot, theme and language leapt off the page. David Marr’s insightful and deeply researched biography made me wish I’d been the one asking clever questions, having lunch with Patrick, able to capture so well that brilliant man’s life.
Everyone should read…
…and buy, at least one new Zealand work of fiction, history or biography every year – because we are a sparsely populated country and not many of our books sell well overseas. New Zealand authors need to survive.
The book I want to be buried with
The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I read this soon after it came out in 1955 when I was a practicing Christian but looking for some less prescriptive form of spirituality. I read two pages a day, summarising as I went; it was very densely argued but to me compelling and hopeful about the human condition. I’m not so hopeful now but when I die I might be able to discover how right or wrong he was.
The first book I remember reading by myself
The Pirate Twins by William Nicholson. I remember reading this iconoclastic and funny book to my younger sister when I was five and she three and we both had measles. But now that I look it up online and discover that it only contains 100 words I wonder whether I memorised my mother’s reading of the story and parroted it to Dinah. Anyway I’m going to claim that I read every word.
Utopia or Dystopia
Dystopia. Everyone’s on the Dystopian bandwagon these days because writers need to carry the message. Cormac McCarthy’s frightening The Road; Tim Winton’s equally doom-laden new release Juice; Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; our own Anna Smaill’s The Chimes; Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land – all great dystopian novels. My play Hope which opens in January 2025 at Circa Theatre is dystopian; so is my new novel, Sea Change. I’m afraid there doesn’t seem to be much appetite for Utopia.
Fiction or nonfiction
Fiction, though when researching for my own writing I love reading New Zealand historians.
The book that haunts me
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Our sunless planet. The awful roving bands hunting for human flesh. The tenderness of the father for his son. His never-flagging hope.
The book that made me laugh
Waiting For The Evening News by Tim Gautreaux made me laugh and cry. Short stories set in Louisiana. Also Plainsong by Kent Haruf, the first of a trilogy set in Colorado. Both are funny, moving, insightful. Wonderful colourful language. One minute laugh out loud, the next in tears.
The book character I identify with the most
I guess it has to be one of my own characters. Enoch, perhaps, in Catching the Current – a storyteller, singer and iconoclast who often makes mistakes. (He’s Con the Brake in The Denniston Rose.)
Encounter with an author
Back in the 90s Annie Proulx came to Wellington for Writers and Readers Week and we hit it off. She invited Laughton and me to visit her in the tiny town of Centennial, Wyoming, where we had a wonderful week avoiding the mountain lion down by her wing-seat and helping eject a porcupine which was investigating the rubbish bin in her garage. She was doing research for cowboy short-stories and one night she “entertained” us by playing about 20 DVDs of ‘Rodeo Bloopers’: details of nasty accidents, mainly, and rather horrible to us but Annie has a pretty macabre streak and took notes avidly.
Greatest New Zealand writer
Maurice Gee. Gee wrote almost all his life. He has a solid bibliography of fine fiction and young adult novels. I have found every one of his novels thought-provoking, entertaining and beautifully written. Thank you Maurice.
Best thing about reading
Books transport you into a different world. When my husband Laughton was unable to move with motor neuron disease, reading was what kept him in other places and in other people’s minds.
What are you reading right now
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger. Of course I knew about this book and thought I had read it, but when I came across it in the library and picked it up I realised I hadn’t. How lucky, because I might have found it a bit daunting if I’d read it when I was young. The language of 16-year-old Holden is both hilarious and moving; an important insight into a troubled young man’s mind.
Hope by Jenny Pattrick, directed by Lyndee-Jane Rutherford, opens at Circa Theatre on January 25 and runs until February 23. Tickets available now.