AT THE END OF DARWIN ROAD - Fiona Kidman - Random House $35

I have just spent an enjoyable couple of days reading Fiona’s memoir which Random House are publishing in March.

It transpires that Fiona and I were born in the same year within a couple of months of each other. I therefore strongly related to the times and events she describes. And of course from the late 60’s I have been involved in the book trade, first as bookseller and then publisher, and therefore know many of the people that populated her life as a writer.

Here for example are some names I noted down as I was reading - Witi Ihimaera, Roger Hall, Michael Noonan, Ian Cross, Roy Parsons, Michael King, Pat Macaskill, Sharon Crosbie, Elizabeth Alley, Sam Hunt, Fleur Adcock, Marilyn Duckworth, Rachel McAlpine, Vincent O'Sullivan, Helen McNeish, Tom Fitzgibbon, Brian Edwards, Tony Simpson, Ray Richards, David Elworthy, Margaret Mahy, Joy Cowley, Chris Cole-Catley, Phoebe Meikle, Chris Hampson, Chris Else and Bob Ross.

I read the book in several longish sittings and enjoyed it enormously. Although she is famed and acknowledged as a writer of fiction, and to a lesser extent as a poet, I believe that in this new work of non-fiction she has reached a new level in her writing.

Frank, revealing, engaging, compelling, fascinating, it is all of these things. But it is also something of a social history snapshot of an “ordinary” life growing up in New Zealand in the second half of the 20th century. I was captivated. And rather than written by some historian in a dry historical way, this is written by a fiction writer at the top of her game. The use of quotes, largely from her own prose and poetry, is incredibly well done and adds to the overall ”spice” of her story.

Inspired by a really good read I asked Fiona a series of questions about her memoir/autobiography:

Question: Fiona your first novel, A Breed of Women, caused something of a stir when first published. You describe this fuss in at the end of Darwin Road and talk about how the surprising number of people who believed they were portrayed in the novel, the rumour that you were going to be sued by someone who believed that they were caricatured in the book, the fact that it was banned from many school libraries including the one where your husband taught and so on. In your memoir you are very frank and revealing about your life and the people in it, and I wonder if you think this new book may cause something of a fuss in its own right?

Response: It's nearly thirty years since A Breed of Women appeared and I think attitudes have changed considerably. I see now that I shouldn't have been surprised by the fuss that book caused but I was. Throughout the 1970s women had begun to talk frankly to each other about their intimate personal lives, so writing about them didn't seem revolutionary but it was. I think it shocked people to see such frank comment about the issues facing women actually written down and they found it confrontational. In 'at the end of Darwin Road' I seek to tell the story of my life and how the issues affected me at a personal level. There are some parts that people may disagree with, and some views of the past that are different from the way others saw them, but I don't see it as a 'shocking' book.

Question: You largely wrote this book in Menton in 2006 while you were the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellow. Did you find it an advantage or disadvantage to be writing about your NZ life while so far removed from the country?

Response: I found a powerful freedom in France to think about the place I come from in a more objective way than when I actually live here. That old saying about ' the past being another country' couldn't have been more true than when I wrote the first draft of this book in Menton, without the daily distractions of New Zealand all around me. And of course, Menton provided an unexpected framework for the book, like looking through a lens at the life that had gone before.

Question: You clearly greatly enjoyed your time in Menton and it was an enormously productive writing time for you. Can we expect to see some fiction that is either set in or around the south of France or perhaps if not set there then greatly influenced by your time there?

Response: I have no conscious plans to write about the south of France. I am essentially a regional writer and my writing tends to arise out of the place I identify with, namely New Zealand. I did write a number of poems in Menton. A few of them have surfaced and I hope some more will be published when they have had more work done on them.

Question: How would you compare writing your own life story in which you are dealing with real people and real life situations to writing a work of fiction where you are creating characters and situations? Was it easier? More difficult? How different was it?

Response: This is an interesting question because what I discovered quite early in the writing, and especially when I had the framwork in place, was that I began to draw on fictional techniques to tell the story. The structure is much the same as a novel, with ongoing stories about 'characters'. I began to think of myself as a character in a 'novel'. The book was to have been autobiography which I now realise is different from memoir, which can be a much more selective process and allows the writer to shape the material in a less chronological and exacting way. It's no less true for being written like this.

Question: In your new book you talk of the 70’s, the feminist movement, the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Bill and the battles to get it passed, and the introduction of the Domestic Purposes Benefit and so on. What are the issues you see confronting women today?

Response: I find this very hard to answer because its likely to sound prescriptive from someone who has survived and got through to the other side, as it were. But on the whole, I think issues of life/work balance are very important. Women, having achieved a degree of equality, now work just too dam' hard. Plus, it seems to me that very young women often misinterpret freedom in a damaging way. The women's movement encouraged women to value themselves but it seems that many young women are lost and bewildered by the choices facing them rather than empowered by them.

Question: This is the first of two books that give an account of your life. Are you now working on the second part? Is this second book proving easier in that presumably it needs much less research than the first? How is it going? When can we expect publication? There will be some impatient readers out there, like me, who are keen to read the rest of your story which of course includes the larger part of your published life with another dozen or so titles, various awards collected and of course your appointment as a Dame Commander of the NZ order of Merit.

Response: Yes, I am working hard on the second volume and it's due for release at the same time in 2009. In some ways it's more difficult because the recent past is so memorable to so many people, and my own life is now quite complex and interwoven with that of so many living people. In 'Darwin Road' I was more focussed on myself. But I'm still enjoying the process.