The fictional world of Charlotte Grimshaw

Richard Lea meets a writer who is acutely conscious of the tension between fact and fabrication

guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 November 2009

Every now and then people get offended, but they shouldn't' ... Charlotte Grimshaw. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

"Oh God, did I?" With a sharp intake of breath, Charlotte Grimshaw puts a hand to her mouth, a dim recollection surfacing in her mind. She shakes her head. "The internet ... " An embarrassed laugh. "Ah shit, I did too. I'd forgotten about that."

At the heart of Grimshaw's latest collection of short fiction, Singularity, is a story set in motion by a foul look, a look that one of her characters gives another in the street, when he recognises the author of a story that portrays him and his family in a deeply unflattering light. Grimshaw has just remembered that she's written about a look like that before, on a blog commissioned two years ago by New Zealand Book Month, but that when she wrote about it last, the author who received that look was Grimshaw herself. She laughs again, this time a little more wholeheartedly, a sly smile spreading across her wide mouth. "I thought that was going to just look like I'd invented it." It's not that she's made a habit of upsetting people, she continues, but "you know, it happens". The clash between fiction and reality is a subject she returns to repeatedly in her work. "Every now and then people get offended, but they shouldn't," she says, as if it were all perfectly obvious. "Because it's fiction."

Grimshaw only began writing short fiction after publishing three novels, when a commission sparked a pair of stories on the same theme and she hit on the idea of writing a set of linked short stories. She found she enjoyed the discipline of the shorter form and put together a collection of bleak fragments of Auckland life, Opportunity, knitted together by recurring characters and incidents, all narrated in the first person. "You can read each story as a complete story, and it has its own rationale, its own beginning middle and end," she says, "but it's adding up to something bigger." It's a construction she compares to a glass bowl filled with marbles – a large structure made up of small units which touch one another, but still leave room for air.

The first-person narration was a deliberate choice, partly to explore the idea of different points of view and partly to give a sense of New Zealand voices. But it also arose because she wanted "to be able to write in the first person without having that problem where the reader thinks that the fictional voice is the voice of the author." "I wanted to have so many voices, male and female," she says, "that they were completely distanced from myself."

Born in Auckland in 1966, Grimshaw worked as a lawyer – first for a small practice with a number of clients facing murder charges, then for a big commercial law firm. She was fascinated by criminal law, partly because there's so much at stake, she says, but also because "it's all about a human situation, a human drama, always a human tragedy. If you're someone who wants to write, that's a very rich store of data." She had always wanted to write, she says, and found she was totally uninterested in shipping law, so when she moved to London in 1993, she treated the move and her young family as an "excuse to get out". Late in the evenings, with the children in bed, she began work on a novel – and discovered a curious liberation in the distance from her homeland.

"I was able to sit at night, and write about the physical landscape of New Zealand because it was very real to me," she remembers, "and because I was somewhat nostalgic about it; I was in the middle of a long London winter. The distance made it vivid."

Read Richard Lea's full piece at The Guardian online.

Singularity, by Charlotte Grimshaw, 336pp ,Jonathan Cape Ltd,