What I’m Reading Katy Soljak

I’m enjoying a colourful romp through Megan’s Dunn’s book, Things I Learned at Art School. Published by Penguin in 2021, it’s dark comic relief has been welcome following my recent harrowing experience of searching for permanent housing on Waiheke Island.

I first heard Megan read during Steamy Sessions at AWF in August. A quirky venue for the Friday night programme, we were in the lineup of writers chosen for saucy Streetside tales at Centurian Sauna. Listed as for the bold and adventurous and R18. I enjoyed her honest and hilarious live delivery and promptly bought a copy after the session ended. Nothing is spared: her parents’ divorce, working in a strip club, surviving art school and especially her life as a redhead.

I’m also reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, which I discovered during the Vonnegut documentary Unstuck in Time at the 2022 film festival. Written as a collection of memoirs, the story is ‘‘written’’ by Howard W Campbell Jr, an American who moved to Germany as a child in 1923 and became a celebrated playwright and Nazi propagandist. Full of Vonnegut’s gallows humour, I’m enjoying how the fate of Campbell is slowly unravelling, and how he tries to deny his Nazi propaganda role from his live radio shows during the war.

Vonnegut draws on his experiences when he was captured in World War II and escaped the bombing of Dresden in 1945, in a meat locker with the other prisoners. The prisoners worked bringing bodies out of the rubble.

Kurt’s morals to his story are: ‘‘When you’re dead, you’re dead,’’ and ‘‘Make love when you can, it’s good for you’’.

Katy Soljak’s first book was My First Real Pash and Other Stories. Last month her second book, It’s a Long Ride to Texas, Baby, based partly on Katy’s own experiences, was published. Set in Mexico and West Texas in the 1970s, it is the story of Gala, a young Kiwi musician, who is fleeing a relationship.