Chidgey week: Steve Braunias interviews Catherine Chidgey

Newsroom

07-05-2025

'I think she's completely the best fiction writer in NZ today,' author Stacy Gregg texted me last Tuesday when I took the bus to Hamilton to interview Catherine Chidgey, and her latest novel The Book of Guilt further supports that widely held view. I began reading it on the bus that day and got up to the bit where the Minister for Loneliness is trembling at being touched by a child who is regarded as a foul and vile loveless creature. I finished it a week later and was moved by the tenderness of its final chapter. It is Chidgey's ninth book; I travelled to see her to conduct a craft of fiction interview after recently discovering a Paris Review book of author interviews, Volume 3, and finding it a revelation, the way it stripped back journalism and was purely about craft. Some of the questions I put to Chidgey were verbatim from Volume 3.
She teaches at Waikato University. We met by a golden pond on campus. She led me through a network of brutalist architecture to The Canopy cafe. We spoke for about an hour. Although the interview was intended as an examination of craft, and tried to avoid questions about her life, she talked very candidly about her life and at autobiographical length, on the verge of tears at one point when the subject turned to the death of her parents.
When Dorothy Parker was asked in a Paris Review interview how she started writing, she replied, 'I first settled into writing because I suppose I was one of those awful children who write verses.' I think you might be able to resonate with that?
Yes. I did start writing really young because I was sick a lot as a child and home from school a lot and left to my own devices. I watched a lot of things like I Love Lucy and Bewitched, and I played a lot of Scrabble with my mother, and I wrote to entertain myself. Up until I was 12, I was home a lot from school and and writing often bad poetry or pretty bad short stories. That's where it started.
And also from spending so much time with Mum, who was a lover of books, even though I wouldn't say I grew up in a literary household. We had The Thorn Birds and lots of Maeve Binchy's, and Jeffrey Archer's that Dad would read, and stuff like that. But Mum and Dad were both keen readers, and Mum took us to the Naenae Library every week where we'd get a stack of books. I remember that I used to love books that had something of the fantastical or the magical about them.
You mention Scrabble. One of the highest ranked players in New Zealand is Wellington poet Nick Ascroft. He came over to my place for dinner recently when he was in Auckland to compete at the nationals where he was able to form the words BLOOPED, NAEVOID and TEENSIER. Are you much of a player?
I could never go up against someone like Nick, but I loved thinking about kind of breaking language down to its most basic components and thinking about the parts of words. I remember when I was at primary school and I did a project on the meaning of everyone's surnames in my class. I got a real buzz from thinking about the meanings behind words and the origin of words.
And I think that really started to develop at secondary school when I started studying French and German and thinking about the relationship of those languages to English. It felt kind of like a detective game to figure out the meanings of words and the meanings behind the surface meanings. I think really early on I loved the idea that language was this kind of elaborate code.
Your writing luxuriates in language but it doesn't sort of stop and smell the rose of a particular word.
I know what you mean. Earlier on I did luxuriate more with language than I do now. It was probably more language driven than plot driven.
Possibly to make up for the absence of plot?
Yes. I still get a huge kick out of putting together a beautiful sentence where every beat feels in the right place when I read it aloud, which I do with all my work. I still love doing that. But over the years I think plot has become more important to me, or something that I pay more attention to anyway. So I'm thinking about putting a story together, not just on an individual sentence level where it sounds beautiful sentence by sentence, but where it also feels satisfying in terms of story.
Dorothy Parker was asked where she gets her character's names from and she said the telephone book and the obituary columns. You?
I still have a couple of books of baby names, but these days I tend to just go online and look at lists of baby names and what they mean.
University of Waikato campus.
I read in an interview you gave to Philip Matthews that your writing schedule was two days a week. Can you tell me about your writing process now?
It varies. When I'm in the generative phase of a novel, and I'm getting down the words, that's when I'm hardest on myself, and that's when I write seven days a week. My life is so busy. I teach here fulltime and I have a nearly 10-year-old daughter and I run the Sargeson Prize. So I write a couple of hours in the morning, from six to eight. And then I take Alice to school. Then I come here and do my day job. Then I go home, see Alice and Alan, read to Alice, put her to bed, and then I write for another couple of hours in the evening and sometime inbetween there, I eat and then go to bed. And that's pretty much it for the day. And I tell myself that I need to stick to that writing schedule at least five days a week.
And I set myself a word count. Usually it's around 400 words. That seems about what I can manage. And that's polished words. And there's no possibility of not hitting that number each day, so I have to keep going until I do hit that number.
I can't say to myself I will just make it up tomorrow. I'm not allowed to do that. If I go over 400, it's a bonus, but it's not a bonus that I can exploit the next day. I have to start again from word 1 the next morning.
I get really obsessed with the maths of it and with counting up how many words I've done in total. And I keep a running total on my desk on a piece of paper that sits next to my keyboard with the date and the number of words I wrote on that day and then the running total so that I can see the progress that I'm making. Because I find writing really hard. It really never flows for me. It's incredibly hard work and I'm very easily distracted. But I make an agreement with myself to write 400 words a day, five days a week, and that's 2000 words a week. So I could almost produce a decent draft in say 18 months. That seems doable. That seems OK. But invariably I'll wake up on Saturday morning and think, look, let's just get that little bit further ahead, and I'll do the same thing on Sunday.
So I end up doing that seven days a week and it is exhausting, but I do love seeing that total tick over and meeting my goal before the planned end date.
All this talk of wordcounts means obviously you're writing on screen. Do you write in longhand at all?
Not really, no. I wish I could. It feels more romantic but it just doesn't work for me because I'm changing things all the time. Like as I'm writing a sentence, I'll change that sentence maybe 10 times. So doing that by longhand would be excruciating.
I remember when I was studying at Victoria and Maurice Gee came to talk to our creative writing workshop and he said that he gets an exercise book, and he writes longhand on the right hand side of the page, and then during the editing process, he makes any changes on the left hand side of the page that he's left blank. I thought, wow, that sounds amazing. And then you'd have this incredible record of handwritten books. How amazing to have that. But I can't work like that. But I do have loads and loads of notes to myself that I've scribbled down on scraps of paper and I have like boxes and boxes and boxes of those. I know how many there are because we've just shifted them all to the new house.
How many boxes?
A dozen.
Do you write in notebooks?
I do. And on scraps of paper and on my phone and and whatever document is open on my laptop.
3B1 notebooks, like this?
No, they're gilt-edged books that people have given me that I then feel obliged to use or that Alan has bound for me. He has a background as a bookbinder, so he's bound me some beautiful ones that you then have to use.
Catherine Chidgey on the University of Waikato campus
Have you ever typed a novel?
Yes. My very first novel. I started writing that when I was living in Berlin, although I didn't realise at the time that it was going to be a novel. It was more just sort of bits of writing because I joined the creative writing group over there and everyone seemed to be interested that I was from New Zealand. You know, Germans have this fascination with New Zealand and kind of romanticise it and think it's a subtropical South Sea paradise. And so they were encouraging me to write about living in New Zealand. So that's kind of where In a Fishbone Church started.
And while I was living there, I bought a typewriter. So I was typing those pieces on the typewriter, and I brought it home to New Zealand but when I came back for the creative writing course, that's when I got my first computer that my parents bought. I was still living with them, and set up the spare room as my office. They knew what a big deal it was to have been accepted for that course. They were very proud of me.
A number of people in your class remember that when you were writing this book, your Dad fell ill and died.
Yeah. The reason I came back from Germany was because he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, which is cancer in the chest wall caused by exposure to asbestos. He'd been a builder in his younger days. It took a long time to be diagnosed. And then when it was, I cut short my studies in Germany and came home to be with him.
So I moved back in with Mum and Dad in November 94 and in the following year in July he died.
It wasn't very long after I came back that I'd applied for the creative writing course at Victoria, which used to be called English 252: Original Composition and took 12 people and I knew that over 100 applied. It was such a buzz when I got the letter, an actual letter with my name on it, saying that I've been accepted. And I remember jumping up and down in the living room at home and Dad was there sitting in his armchair and I explained to him what this paper was. And I remember in North and South, there was a profile of Bill [Manhire, the course supervisor] and he was talking about the course in this story which came out really soon after I'd been accepted.
So I was able to show Dad and say this is what it is, this is what it means. So he understood how important it was. And I know he was really proud of me because he wanted to write as well. He was a frustrated writer whose dad had told him you can't be a writer, you need to be a builder.
Did the events of that year infiltrate Fishbone?
They absolutely did. It's a very autobiographical book and became more autobiographical as the year went on. I hadn't intended for Dad's illness to be part of the story, but it worked its way in. And I still look back on that year and think, how did I do that when I was, you know, grieving the imminent loss of my father? How did I also put that on the page? And in some ways, it seems quite cold-blooded to do that. Dad knew I was doing it, Mum knew I was doing it.
It's the Graham Greene dictum about the writer needing a slither of ice.
In the heart. Yeah, it is. I also think it was a way of making something lasting out of a situation that felt so uncontrollable. And I was watching Dad change week to week, even day-to-day as he deteriorated. And writing felt like and feels like something that will outlive him, outlive me, that has a permanence about it that our lives don't. I think that was part of the reason I did it.
The very end of the novel, the last two paragraphs, I read at his funeral and I put a typed copy actually of those paragraphs in his coffin with him.
Which you had typed on your typewriter you brought home from Germany.
Yes. And then when Mum died in 2022, she'd been suffering with dementia for over a decade, so it was very, very kind of slow moving in her case. But during that time, she kept my books close by and especially In a Fishbone Church. And whenever we visited her, she would always have that book sitting next to her bed. And I know that she dipped in and out of it. And I wonder what she made of it because yes, it is autobiographical, but it's also not, you know, it's kind of 50-50. And I wonder if the made-up scenes sort of became for her a reality or part of a family history that didn't ever happen. I know she felt great affection and tenderness towards that book and towards what I'd made from our family.
I was rereading on the bus your short story 'Attention' published in Metro a few years ago. It's a rare example of Catherine Chidgey writing in the New Zealand social realism genre and almost seemed like the work of a different writer.
It's interesting. I think I tend to do that in my short stories, and in my novels I do something else. I think maybe there's just there's more room in a novel to explore the magical. It's more interesting for me to to get to a truth via a slightly oblique route.
In The Book of Guilt, you create a sort of totalitarian library, where the only available reading material is a set of encyclopedias called The Book of Knowledge.
It's real set of 1950s children's encyclopedias that I have sitting on my shelf at home. I find it fascinating that the idea that all the knowledge in the world can be contained within these eight volumes. I wanted them to be based on a real set that I could access to get all that really dated kind of racist colonial language. I settled on The Book of Knowledge because it has a fold-out map in it that has two New Zealands on it.
Are your books triggered by images, like the sight of a vast block of ice inspired One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? I was struck by the image of a high wall with shards of broken glass on top of it in The Book of Guilt and wondered if that was a trigger.
The way I work is that I kind of store away snippets that for whatever reason speak to me the moment that I encounter them. And I know that somehow they belong in my work. I'm just not sure how. So I make note of them either in one of my beautiful notebooks or on a scrap of paper or phone or whatever.
I kind of don't want to interrogate that process too savagely because I feel like there is something magical about it that might just go 'Poof!' if I I try to unpick it. But there are things that present themselves to me and that stay with me for whatever reason. The stone wall in The Book of Guilt was one that I saw in Ireland in 2008 when I had a writing residency in Cork. Alan and I got married in February 2008 and then straightaway we got on a plane to Cork and our honeymoon was six months in this little cottage in the countryside. You stepped out the door and you were inside this beautiful old apple orchard, and around the perimeter was a stone wall with shards of glass set along the top.
A character in The Book of Guilt is told the glass is to keep him and his brothers safe. 'We were very special, our mothers told us, and we needed looking after.' And in your novel The Wish Child, a character says to a child, 'I make things safe.' They could be described as two books about children at risk in strange totalitarian environments. Why children? Is it their vulnerability?
It's not something I realised I was doing until maybe a couple of books ago when I started to join the dots. I think part of it is my experience of infertility and that after that I did start writing, not consciously, books about missing children or dead children or lost children or children that were very desired, you know, very much longed for.
And also within those books, they were children who often formed unconventional families. And I think that was me kind of reflecting between the lines, my experience of what we ended up doing, which was going through IVF here and IVF in Las Vegas, which was a whole trip, which didn't work. None of that worked. And then considering adoption and then being told that we were too old, so that wouldn't work either. And then looking into surrogacy. And that's what eventually gave us Alice.
So I'm still good friends with women who were going through IVF at the same time as we were in the States and still good friends with lots of the families who were either going through sperm donation or surrogacy so, you know, I have been surrounded for years with unconventional families and, and have a family that's been built by unconventional means.
I think my books are just as a process of thinking about that and thinking about the tenderness that can come from unexpected places.
The opposite of safety is peril.
I love dropping little hints that all is not as it should be and that you should be worried about what might happen. I love winding the reader up in that way or making them fear for the characters because that makes them care about the characters and makes them identify with the characters and want to keep them safe.
So, yeah, that's something that I've done with my last few books is to gradually turn up that sense of tension and anxiety.
University of Waikato campus
What writers have you most learned from?
Janet Frame. She was my first hero and still is my hero for her facility with language and her way of, you know, crafting those beautiful glittering sentences and often using words in unexpected ways. That's something that I admire and that I try to do in my own work as well.
But also Margaret Atwood, which might not be a big surprise to say, with everything we've just been talking about.
Do you write carefully or rapidly?
I told my students this morning, 'Get it down on the page. Don't worry about, you know, stopping to check for grammar or crafting the perfect sentence.' I'm such a liar because that is not the way I write. I wish I could work that way because then you have something to edit, right? Then you have this raw material that you can start to shape into something more elegant. But I've tried working like that and it does not work for me. I have to polish and perfect as I go. I can't leave it looking ugly. I can't.
These 400 words that you talked about, is that 400 words at both ends of the day or 400 all up?
The total per day.
Are you allowed to do 100 in the morning and then 300 later?
I would feel quite anxious about that. I would try to get most of it out in the morning. Otherwise I'll be worrying all day that I won't hit my hit my number.
What is the place of inspiration? Does it exist?
I need to be somewhere totally quiet in order to write, so the door needs to be shut. The child needs to be somewhere down the other end of the house. I write best if there's no one in the house at all. I am a very solitary person. I like my own company and I'm an introvert. The place of inspiration is…I don't know. It's being in the world and and being open to those gifts that present themselves to me like the glass topped wall.
Has public criticism and reviews made you consciously change the way you write?
No, but I'm hurt by bad reviews. I'm deeply wounded by bad reviews. I know lots of writers say, well, just don't read them, but I'm too nosey for that. I'm far too curious not to know what's being said about my books. I find it difficult to separate the book that's being critiqued from myself, because the books feel so much a part of who I am. So I read them once, and then I file them away and don't look at them again.
But I don't change my writing based on reviews because then you would never have any sense of who you are as a writer. If you change with every review that you read, you'd never have any kind of compass.
Writing, for you, is a discipline, isn't?
Yes. It has to be like you have to want it badly enough that you make sacrifices. Like having no social life. You know, this is my social life.
It's the Ockham book awards next week. Do prizes make you ill? You know, four people on the shortlist, and they have to troop in together for the announcement, knowing that three of them will be losers.
I think it's a cruel and unusual punishment to announce it in public. I think it was the Commonwealth Prize where there were four of us shortlisted for best book, and they slipped a note under our door at the hotel saying, 'It's not you. The dinner's tonight, please still come, but it's not you.'
Classy.
It was classy. I would absolutely still go to the Ockhams if I knew that I hadn't won and they told me just beforehand. At the Commonwealth Prize, I was really grateful to know that it wasn't me.
I would have been more grateful to know that it was me.
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to covering the book and its author. Monday: Chapter 1 of the new novel. Tuesday: her cohort enrolled in Bill Manhire's writing class in 1995 remember Chidgey as destined for greatness. Tomorrow: a review by Philip Matthews