Emily Perkins: The benefit of distance

Emily Perkins spent 11 years in London, writing about her native New Zealand. She tells Katy Guest why now she is back there she can finally write about here
From The Independent, Friday, 16 May 2008

On a surprise summer day in Soho, Emily Perkins sits in her publisher's office watching a mass of off-duty Brits pinkening on a tiny square of grass outside and preparing herself to leg it across the sweaty capital to the BBC. Leaning out to close a window against the smog and raising her voice over a building site, she takes a deep breath of London air and sighs, "It's great to be back".

It seems a funny thing to miss – but as a New Zealander who has split her life between Christchurch and London, with a minor detour to New York, Perkins knows about the important relationship between distance and perspective.

The newspaper column that she wrote for the Independent on Sunday often reported how she had gratefully escaped the capital on trips to remote parts of the world – where she inevitably found herself longing for traffic jams, diesel and decent coffee.

In the 11 years she lived in London she married, had three children and wrote two novels and a collection of short stories all about the young, single and feckless of New Zealand. It wasn't until three years ago, after moving back home to Auckland, that she properly started work on her first London novel.

Novel About My Wife (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is Perkins's first to tackle the very adult topics of marriage, pregnancy and the cost of shopping at Borough Market. "I always knew it would be set in London," she says. "It needed to be." The long wait was partly because it took her 10 years to feel confident putting her new home into print – but more because it was the first story to feel rooted here. "Some of the pressures on the characters in this novel are not there in New Zealand in the same way," she explains. "Tom and Ann are experiencing a kind of financial pressure and they're at a time in their marriage... that comes with its own reality. The social pressures and anxiety become paranoia, and that experience seemed to belong here."

For the full story link here to The Independent.

Thanks to author and music historian Chris Bourke for bringing this story to my attention.

The Independent story also carried the following brief bio piece on Perkins:

New Zealander Emily Perkins started writing professionally at 24, after giving up a career as an actor and studying creative writing with Bill Manhire at Victoria University, Wellington. After she moved to London and was working for the publisher Bloomsbury, her short story collection Not Her Real Name was published by Picador. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the John Lewellyn Rhys Prize. Picador also published her novels Leave Before You Go and The New Girl, but her latest book, Novel About My Wife, is published by Bloomsbury.

Since 2004 she has lived in Auckland with her husband, painter Karl Maughan, and their children, and teaches creative writing at AUT. She presents The Book Show on TVNZ's TV One.