.jpg) At the moment I am reading …
Newspapers. I always read newspapers, especially when I am writing and feel quite cut off from everything. I need to slosh around in daily news and get a feel for what people are talking about. It keeps me part of the living. Apart from newspapers, I am reading Diane Awerbuck’s Gardening at night. It’s funny and honest.
Which writers do you admire, and why?
I go through stages of having huge crushes on authors and I devour them until someone else catches my eye. But I always go back to Jane Austen and she never disappoints. I love her irony and her sense of empathy.
What, or who, inspired you to write this book?
My parents moved into a retirement village in Port Elizabeth and a few months later my father died. In the years that followed his death, my mother and I would talk about the goings on at her retirement village – and of course we would talk about my father. We would knit, and talk and sometimes cry, and then I would write a chapter. And so over the years, Pops and The Nearly Dead grew into a book.
My earliest memory …
Is dressing up to go to an ice skating show. I was in my best white dress and as I sat down on the kitchen floor to polish my black shoes, rubbing the brush into the polish, I spattered black polish all over the dress.
What would you say is the most challenging part of writing?
I write the first draft of a book in the shortest time possible. And so I drive myself really hard, tend to neglect everything else and go a bit mental. At the end of it, I am really wiped out and my family and friends are pretty cross with me. I would like to be able to strike a balance, but as yet I haven’t been able to do so.
What was the most enjoyable aspect of writing this book?
A lot of Pops and The Nearly Dead comes from true stories about my mother’s retirement village in Port Elizabeth – as well as some of the rather disturbing things that happened to my father before he died. But I took a lot of these events and turned them on their head and asked “What If?” and “Why not?” I enjoyed being able to take real people and events and give them different histories and endings. In a sense, I loved the fact that I had the power to rewrite history and make it all better.
My favourite guilty pleasure …
Is going to a movie on my own in the middle of the day when my children are at school and their father is at work. I eat popcorn and smarties and come home and pretend that I have had a productive day in front of the computer. And no one is any the wiser.
Is writing your full-time employment? If not, what is your ‘day job’?
I used to be a journalist and a project manager for a media company but I gave that up eight years ago to write books. So every day I send the children’s father out to work to bring home the bacon while I loll about at home pretending to be an author. I’m also currently doing a screenwriting course at Wits, so maybe I’ll produce a decent film script that someone will want. I think I’m really lucky that I am able to do what I love best without having to earn a living. I’m hoping one day I’ll earn some decent cash from my writing and the children’s father can come home and rest.
Which super-human power would you most like to have?
I would like to be able to cook delicious meals for my family. For this I need super-human powers. I have two vegetarian daughters who don’t like fish or pasta, a son who is a carnivore and their father who won’t eat carbs after midday. Come five o’clock I am in a state about what to cook and I end up in tears when they won’t eat the rubbish I put on their plates. And they all tell me to try harder for heaven sakes – I have the whole day to cook, it’s not like I have a job or anything useful to do.
What was your favourite book as a child?
I didn’t have one favourite. But my biggies were: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did series. |
