Auckland Writers Festival: Many gaspworthy moments

Writer Helen MacDonald pictured with David Walliams. Photo / Twitter / @HelenJMacdonald

"Thank you so much. You're the highlight of my festival". That was an audience member to Helen MacDonald, at the audience participation stage of an exceptionally well run and enjoyable session. So much of the festival experience depends on good chemistry between writer and on-stage interviewer, and MacDonald and her chair Noelle McCarthy could hardly have been better matched. They managed to combine easy, witty banter with a very high calibre intellectual discussion about grief, death, our relationship with the natural world, and murderous birds.

"When my dad died, I responded mostly at a very intuitive level, and one of my intuitions was, to cope with Dad's death I am going to train a goshawk. Which is not something I generally recommend people do. They have a bit of a reputation as the psychopaths of the bird world".

In fact, as MacDonald made crystal clear, birds are never murderous: that's a human concept. "We use nature as a mirror of ourselves, we can't help it. But it's really important to see ourselves doing that."

She pointed to TH White's classic book The Goshawk as an example of a great writer projecting his own problems onto a wild creature; her brief account of how White came to write the book was a compassionate and beautiful piece of literary analysis, and also a fantastic bit of storytelling.

Earlier in the day, it seemed briefly as though a less successful match-up of interviewer to writers was going to derail the session featuring Daniel Mendelsohn and Helena Wisniewska Brow, who have both written books exploring family members' deaths in the Holocaust. Ten minutes in, an audience member called out to chair Peter Wells: "Is it possible to allow the people you're interviewing to speak? They're the ones we came to hear!"

It was a necessary intervention. To Wells' credit, he took it on the chin, and stopped telling his panelists' stories for them. As soon as they were given a chance, Mendelsohn and Brow opened up vast landscapes of lost cultures and difficult survival.

"It becomes an ethical duty to restore to these people their specificity," said Mendelsohn of his research into how and where his family members had lived. "Each one of the 6,000 people who might have died in a particular town could have a fat book written about them, if one only knew enough."

It was in the specifics of the stories they told that both writers became moving and absorbing, and also unexpectedly entertaining, given the deeply troubling subject matter. "Stories, stories", one survivor in Sydney once said to Mendelsohn. "There isn't enough paper in the world to tell our stories."

Another highlight from the Saturday sessions involved a writer who was not interviewed by anyone. Polymath science writer Philip Ball gave a lecture on the ways the history of art has depended on colour technology, with the discovery of new pigments and new ways of mixing colours driving changes in how painters treated their subjects.

For instance, art theorists have attempted to explain the predominant use of the brilliant blue colour ultramarine for the robes of the Virgin Mary in medieval art as somehow a symbolic choice. Probably, Ball suggested, it was an economic one. Ultramarine was made from lapis lazuli, which at that tme could only be found in Afghanistan: it was very difficult to procure, and therefore very expensive. "If you wanted to show how much you venerated Mary, you'd give her the most valuable colour you had."

Ball filled his hour with a dazzling array of historical fact and scientific explanation, in a perfect display of a public intellectual making complex ideas accessible. At the end of the session people rushed to the bookstand to buy his book Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Colour. It sold out in minutes.

American author Atul Gawande said the medical establishment needs to focus on finding out what matters most to people.

There were so many moments when people audibly caught their breath. Atul Gawande's session was titled "The End Matters", and here's how it ended: "I left med school not understanding that I would spend a significant portion of my career dealing with problems I couldn't solve. Over time, the opportunity to learn to deal with that reality has come to seem a gift. You have that discovery to look forward to."

Gawande was speaking to a final year high school student with aspirations of studying medicine, the last audience member to get to the highly popular question time microphones before they had to be shut off to keep the session from running long. He was also speaking to the central thesis of his bestselling book, Being Mortal: which is that at the end of life, the medical establishment needs to move away from trying to cure us, and instead focus on finding out what matters most to people, and helping them achieve it.

"There's a technical procedure for finding out what people's priorities are, which many doctors struggle to master. It's called asking them."

Seventy percent of us will die with someone else making core decisions on our behalf, Gawande said. (This was one moment the audience could be heard gasping.) "If we haven't voiced our preferences about what matters for us, those people are in a very difficult position."