Love Overheard & Other Mysteries
Prize-winning writer Catherine Chidgey reveals a world of real-life intimacy, humour, and tragedy in her new book, The Beat of the Pendulum. David Herkt travelled to Ngāruawāhia to meet her.
“I’m having to tell a story about the telling of the story,” writes Catherine Chidgey in her justreleased book, The Beat of the Pendulum, “because telling the story isn’t enough these days.”
Billed as a “found novel”, The Beat of the Pendulum is a day-by-day diary of events, including its own writing, compiled over the course of 2016.
It is the story of Chidgey’s marriage, her young child by surrogacy, and her mother’s descent into dementia.
Often extremely moving, frequently funny, The Beat of the Pendulum also reads as the most intimate autobiographical exposure in New Zealand literature.
No other recent book takes the reader onto a medical table for the author’s cervical examination, as well as critically examining her own description of it.
“The one line I couldn’t bring myself to put in was, ‘Just parting your labia now,’’’ Chidgey tells a friend – and by writing it, promptly puts it in.
“That scene – the smear test scene – I was using it as a metaphor as well,” she says. “Not taking myself too seriously, but as a kind of a wink, that, ‘Yes, I am laying myself bare in this book.’ It felt that way too, as I was writing it.”
Much of The Beat of the Pendulum had its genesis in the recorded conversations Chidgey had with her husband, daughter, mother, and friend and fellow-writer, Tracey Slaughter (pictured above), among others.
They give the book a fresh verbal immediacy. It is the way New Zealanders really speak in the 21st century and it conveys what interests them.
“With any conversation that I recorded I asked the person’s permission,” she says. “With my mother it was a case of reminding her over and over about the project I’m doing but she was always fine with it. She always said yes.”