Wonder woman: Author juggles kids, writing and the day job
Susan Edmunds tells Nick Truebridge why mums everywhere will relate to her latest book Mummy needs a Break.
Journalist and author Susan Edmunds has been that mum sitting in a restaurant. She just wants to enjoy her family meal, but the kids are not having it.
‘‘I think kids have an incredible capacity to embarrass you all the time,’’ she says.
‘‘We were out for dinner maybe a month ago and a man came in wearing an eye patch.
‘‘My son turns around, full-on wide eyes and goes ‘woah, it’s a pirate!’’ Definitely loud enough for him to have heard.’’
Edmunds is a kind of supermum.
Away from those chaotic cafe scenes, she’s been busy writing books – three have been published this year alone and another is due early 2020.
And that’s only a part-time gig for Edmunds, who balances looking after 5-year-old Liam and younger sister Olivia, 3, with fulltime employment as a news director and senior reporter on Stuff’s business team.
Edmunds’ official day job starts in her Whangarei home office at 7am.
We’re calling it her ‘‘official’’ job because she’s often juggling kids (not literally, she assures us) with work at this hour.
‘‘[Recently] on the 8am news conference my daughter came over and told [Stuff chief news director] Keith Lynch that she’d just used the toilet,’’ she says.
‘‘Dunno if he heard.’’
By the time she picks up her kids at 3pm Edmunds, one of the country’s most-read journalists, will have pumped out at least four business stories, most of which will make Stuff’s homepage.
‘‘Then I take a couple of hours, I don’t want to say off, but on my phone rather than at my desk until they go to bed at 7pm,’’ she says.
‘‘And then I go back into it, really.’’
That’s right, the kids are in bed, so it’s back to work.
Book writing time usually starts at 10pm. One thousand words a day is Edmunds’ aim during the writing phase, then a chapter a day when editing and re-writing.
‘‘I find you just have to get it out,’’ she says. ‘‘I’ve always tried to write... novels and stuff when I was younger, and I’d be like, ‘oh, this is crap’ and give up after a couple of chapters.
‘‘To write 1000 words a day, after three months you at least have a crappy first draft, and it’s terrible, but then you can re-write it.’’
Writing a book presents its own set of challenges, far removed from dealing with full-on kids, or nagging newsroom editors.
‘‘I’ve definitely had those moments of imposter syndrome, like this is just diabolical, I can’t believe anyone wants to publish this. But then you get through it,’’ Edmunds says.
‘‘I’m a member of an online writing group where everyone talks all the time about how terrible they feel about what they write. And that makes me feel better.’’
So how does she do it?
How does one juggle a stressful, deadline-driven fulltime job, two kids five and under and still manage to get three books published in one year?
‘‘I think when you have kids that need your attention it really focuses your mind and you’ll be like, ‘OK so I’ve got this time to focus on work’ or, ‘they’re asleep and I’ve got this time to focus on writing’,’’ Edmunds says.
‘‘I can’t procrastinate, I can’t muck around and talk to people, I just have to do it.’’
In 2019, as well as the novel Mummy Needs a
Break, Edmunds has also tapped out Australian and New Zealand editions of
Starting Out Starting Over: A Single Woman’s Guide to Money in New Zealand.
Edmunds says some of the inspiration for
Mummy Needs a Break came from friends whose partners were not supportive when they were pregnant.
‘‘The story was a bit of me fantasising about alternate ways we could have dealt with them,’’ Edmunds reveals.
The book’s tagline is ‘‘how could he find time for an affair when she can’t even go to the toilet alone’’, she adds.
‘‘I think all mothers can relate to that feeling of never getting even a minute to yourself even if your marriage isn’t falling apart.’’
The story centres on Rachel, a mother of one with baby number two on the way, and her surprise at learning her husband is having an affair while she raises the kids.
The book isn’t based on Edmunds, who calls husband Jeremy Tauri a ‘‘great hands-on dad’’, but some of the anecdotes about wild kids are linked to her personal experiences.
What she wants to do is light-heartedly ‘‘convey some of the pressure’’ on mothers.
‘‘Through my life I’ve had novels that were really important to me, or made me feel better when I was having a tough time,’’ Edmunds says.
‘‘And I like the idea that my silly stories about crazy kids might cheer someone up.
‘‘When I get feedback from people saying ‘oh this made me laugh when I was having a tough time with my kids’, that’s really rewarding, I guess.’’
As a mother, Edmunds says she finds it helpful to record things that ‘‘feel horrendous’’ at the time but are ‘‘actually quite funny’’ in hindsight.
‘‘But also then if it makes someone else feel better then that’s good too I think,’’ she says.
Mummy Needs a Break has just launched in 420 supermarkets in the United Kingdom, and Edmunds watched with pride as it climbed the Amazon sales charts, and appeared in bookstores around New Zealand.
But she’s adamant that she is not in it for the money.
‘‘I do enjoy writing – my friends are always like, ‘why don’t you have a break?’ and I’m like, ‘no, this is how I have a break’,’’ she says.
‘‘It’s kind of relaxing.’’
‘‘I like the idea that my silly stories about crazy kids might cheer someone up.’’ Susan Edmunds
Edmunds’ boss, Stuff’s National Business Editor Rebecca Stevenson, is quick to heap praise on her colleague. Stevenson calls Edmunds an ‘‘incredibly popular writer’’, with her articles routinely among the most read on Stuff’s homepage.
‘‘She’s also freakishly hard-working, prolific and just genuinely lovely,’’ Stevenson adds.
The pair usually start talking online about 7am and are still going at it late at night, with stories about their young families mixed in with work chat.
Money stories are Edmunds’ bread and butter, and she often rustles up real-life case studies to go with them, but Stevenson says she’s equally adept at covering breaking news in the business world.
‘‘It’s unfathomable to me how she does it all, so well,’’ she says.
‘‘I took her latest book with me on holiday and it was so good, I felt tearful thinking about Susan – how she does it is mind-blowing, really.’’