The novel writer
Emily Perkins is procrastinating. She’s slugging it out penning the third draft of her latest novel but there’s so much else going on it’s not really getting a look-in. Perkins blames it on the telly. Binge watching Netflix makes it tough to get up in the morning.
That’s a problem of our times, says. ‘‘When I was a kid and in my early 20s I was always reading and writing because a lot of the time there was nothing else to do.’’
This is how she finished her first book of short stories when she first moved to London in the mid-1990s.
She had one New Zealand friend there (artist Karl Maughan, whom she ended up marrying) and had nothing to do of a Friday evening so would write short stories into the long nights alone in the big city.
It was a brilliant way to get a book done, she says.
But her procrastination may also have something to do with being busy tweaking her first play coming to Circa Theatre next month – a contemporised version of Henrik Ibsen’s classic A Doll’s House. Not exactly a light offering.
It’s a wonder the book is getting any attention at all.
She’s also co-editing a book on writing, plus working fulltime as a senior lecturer at Victoria University’s Institute of Modern Letters creative writing programme. Oh, and raising three children.
It’s enough to make anyone feel like an underachiever, which Perkins – who this year was recognised for services to literature by being made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit – is most certainly not.
She was in her early 20s when her first book, the 1996 collection of short stories, Not Her Real Name, was published both here and overseas to acclaim.
More success followed with the novels Leave Before You Go, The New Girl, Novel About My Wife, which won the 2009 Montana Book Award, and The Forrests.
Perkins’ writing took off during the year spent in Bill Manhire’s creative writing class in 1993.
He was a fan from the start, going as far as to say her prose had a Joan Didion feel about it ‘‘ ... unclotted and entertaining, but also ruthlessly observant’’.
‘‘Emily was a class act and doing something pretty new in New Zealand writing. It was a zeitgeist thing: she was in tune with her own generation.’’
She was a voice of Gen X, which was something she’s had to not so much reject or grow out of, as grow beyond, which she did, he says.
Sitting in the living room of her Kelburn home surrounded by books – shelves and shelves of them – and magazines – piles of The New Yorker – Perkins says she’s edgy talking about herself too much, despite an interview being a carte blanche to do so.
She quotes The Journalist and the Murderer author Janet Malcolm, who described being interviewed as a ‘‘narcissist’s holiday’’.
Perkins, 47, was born in Christchurch but raised in Auckland and later Wellington.
She was a big reader very early on. ‘‘I loved what books gave me. Stories gave me so many different worlds and places to be and lives to be in and things to encounter. In that sense it felt like a very rich childhood.
‘‘There were always lots of books around the house, it was a valued activity. I know people who were actively discouraged from reading, where it was something that lazy people did. It was a huge privilege to have reading actively encouraged and seen as a good thing.’’
One of the key books she recalls reading was The Brothers Lionheart, a heartbreaking story by Astrid Lindgren. She read it to her own children when they were small – they are 17, 15 and 12 now – and it had them all weeping by the end of chapter one.
She loved writing too and never went anywhere without her notebook filled with ‘‘bad poems’’.
Her fascination with fictional worlds led her down the acting path and at 16 she scored a role on the New Zealand 1980s show Open House.
Fame in the 1980s was like everything else in the 80s, she laughs, a bit lame. ‘‘A suburban train station. Manners Mall on a Friday night!’’
But the experience gave her the confidence to go on to drama school, which she loved. ‘‘By love I mean all the wailing and gnashing of teeth as well.’’
She was in the same year as Marton Csokas, Cliff Curtis and Tim Balme, but her acting career trajectory was a little less upward.
She got a few gigs but it became clear fairly early on that a career as a thespian was not for the long haul.
It was ‘‘a creeping and unignorable sense of self-loathing’’, telling her to get out, she says. ‘‘I just found myself unable to break through into the kind of roles I was wanting to get.’’
She ended up doing corporate videos, clowning for children’s parties. A gig as a pirate swashbuckling down Lambton Quay is one best forgotten.
‘‘The industry was telling me, rightly, that I wasn’t good enough to be in steady work.’’
So she concentrated on her writing instead. Getting on to Manhire’s course was a turning point.
It was here she started to identify her own voice as a writer.
Her first short story was published in the literary journal Sport. With that, she moved to London where her career really took off.
She took a job as lowly junior at Bloomsbury Publishing during the day and wrote short stories in the evenings.
London in the mid-1990s was pretty interesting. The change from a long-serving Tory Government to Tony Blair’s Labour, the Oasis and Blur wars, cool Britannia. ‘‘There was a lot of fun stuff going on in the arts scene then and the book world seemed very attuned to new writers.’’
Not Her Real Name came out in 1996 and was a hit. Here and there.
It was a real ‘‘blood-rushing-in-your-ears’’ moment when her publisher called. ‘‘I was sending in these stories but I didn’t dare to imagine they would be put into a book.
‘‘That someone got what I was saying and liked, it was a rush.’’
Home called in 2005, with Perkins taking a position at the University of Auckland and AUT while studying for her Masters in creative writing.
Eventually, five years ago, she, Maughan and their three kids moved to Wellington, and Perkins was back at the Institute of Modern Letters creative writing course, this time imparting her knowledge to the next generation of writers.
Listening to new voices coming off the page.