KIWI WRITER'S RIVETING ROMANCES
Readers are falling for her unique voice
By her own admission, Catherine Bennetto has packed it in. There’s been big TV directing gigs on Shortland Street and CoronationStreet. She’s lived in many countries around the world. And most notably, she fell in love so quickly, she found herself married after 10 months.
So when it comes to writing books about love, Catherine, 40, has plenty of material to work with. But she’s the first to admit there’s something distinctly missing from her two hugely successful novels and that’s New Zealand, despite writing them from her home in picturesque Queenstown.
“I suppose I was never going to write about a Kiwi girl zipping around Auckland,” she laughs. “Trust me, I love New Zealand, but that’s not terribly interesting to me. My heart has always been in London and that’s where both of my books are based. ”
Writing has been a passion for Catherine since the very start. She tells Woman’sDay during our photo shoot that she recently found pages upon pages of make-believe stories she wrote as a child.
“I’ve always wanted to write,” recalls Catherine. “But I suppose it was about finding the right time in my life. I didn’t think I’d found my voice in my 20s to really have that authority. But I just had to be patient.”
Moviebuzz
The journey to making that dream a reality might not have been smooth, but it was definitely adventurefilled, she admits. In fact, Catherine, raised in Titirangi, West Auckland, always laughs when she thinks about her degree in design and biomedical science.
“I had no idea what I was going to do with science,” chuckles Catherine. “And then one day, my dad was working at Fox Studios in Australia as a project manager in construction and I walked on set of TheMatrix and I just felt this real fizz.
“I knew then I wanted to work in the industry. I worked for free for a while before I got the gig for ShortlandStreet.”
It’s there she met her director husband Edd. Both in their 20s, they had a whirlwind romance and got hitched quickly before quitting their jobs to travel the world. To date, they have lived in London, Budapest, South Africa, and journeyed through India.
“I got married 10 months after meeting him,” she tells. “It was for a visa, but it worked out. He got the visa and I got nothing out of that but a couple of kids!”
However, it was when the couple were in London, in 2005, both working on the hit British crime drama TheBill, that Catherine felt inspired to write her first book. She spent the next few years putting together a manuscript. But despite her efforts, she admits it needed some professional help.
“An amazing writing agency called Curtis Brown in London always had these evening classes, but I could never make them,” tells Catherine, mum to Jonnie, now 12, and Wolf, nine. “I had a little baby and was working – I used to get very upset that I couldn’t get to them.”
But when they introduced an online course a few years later, Catherine, then back in Aotearoa, applied. “I finished that in 2013 and a week later, I was offered to be represented,” she says.
Oh,Bridget!
HowNottoFallinLove, Actually was released in 2017 and it was an instant hit with British readers, who fell in love with the central character Emma as she navigated a new life as a soon-to-be mum who’s just dumped her baby daddy.
With Catherine drawing on her experiences from life in TV, travelling and homeschooling her two sons, her book has many comparisons to hit flick BridgetJones’s Baby – something she still
cringes about to this day.
“I watched the film and just kept thinking, ‘Oh, no!’” she confesses. “The book was written way before the film but I wondered if people would think I copied it.”
It did little to derail her career. Her second book, Make orBreak, was released this year. And she’s currently writing her third, another love story based in London.
“I always knew that when I wrote a book, it would be a bit international,” she says. “My dad is English, so I was brought up around that British sense of humour.
“And really, I just love England. I loved living in London. But I suppose it is kind of funny that I’m writing these books in my pyjamas in Queenstown.”
While there’s so many British quirks to Catherine, she admits there’s one true Kiwi quality that can be seen in each of her books. When writing about love, she wants to keep it real.
“I can’t stand picking up a book and just feeling that false romanticism of it all,” she explains. “That you have to have flowers, be taken to Paris and be treated like a lady.
“I don’t find that romantic, so it was important to have real love in my books. And I suppose that’s a real Kiwi outlook. We can’t be bothered with the fluff, really.”