SYNOPSIS (The story in brief)

At the end of Darwin Road (Vintage, 2008)
At the end of Darwin Road is volume one of a two-volume memoir. In this book, I trace my early life in small town New Zealand. Born in Hawera to restless, hard-working parents, I follow our lives together through the Waikato, Kerikeri in the Bay of Islands, the Nova Scotian settlement of Waipu, and Rotorua. When I was working in Rotorua’s public library, the desire to write that I had as a child crystallized into a conviction that I would become a writer. The second half of the memoir follows my life throughout the 1960s and ‘70s as I juggled motherhood and family responsibilities with numerous writing jobs, and lived through turbulent times of change for women. These would eventually lead me to write my first published novel, A Breed of Women, hailed as a breakthrough in contemporary women’s writing. Its success came at some personal costs. The book ends around 1980, shortly after the book’s publication.

In 2006, I was the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellow, resident in Menton. There I found surprising parallels with Kerikeri, where I lived ‘at the end of Darwin Road’, the place which most significantly influenced my early desire to write. The town became a contemporary framework from which to view my early life.