Out of their comfort zone

Novelist Emily Perkins. Photo / Kenny Rodger

When Emily Perkins stepped up to receive the Montana Medal for fiction at the Montana Book Awards on Monday night, Tom Stone was robbed.

Tom, the grieving narrator in Perkins' Novel About My Wife, inhabited her head so much while she was writing the book, she didn't feel quite right about sending the manuscript to her publisher with her own name on it.

"It was odd. When I finished the book - and it was many drafts before it was finished - and then with the final draft, I remember sending it to the publisher and feeling very strange about putting my name on it because it felt like it was his story," she says, curled up on a couch in the lounge of the Grey Lynn home she shares with her husband, artist Karl Maughan, and their three children.

"Not to sound all 'woo-ooh'," she laughs, "but with that first-person narration, you get into a really long and intense form of characterisation. Because it was a long time in the writing, it did feel strange sticking my name on it rather than his - which sounds ridiculous but it felt like that for a long time."

Novel About My Wife, set in London, takes the reader on a tense and sometimes very funny journey with screenwriter Tom as he tries to make sense of the events leading up to his Australian-born wife Ann's sudden death, shortly after the birth of their son, Arlo.

Ann's death is signalled immediately as Tom begins his quest, so we are not giving the game away here. But this is Tom's version of Ann's life and death; an alternative, and increasingly puzzling, point of view is occasionally scattered through the book, offering oblique insights, almost like stains, into Ann's past.

The reader - or this one at least - has some work to do to put together the clues. It's worth it - and such a shock when the pieces are connected and the truth falls into place. However, Tom will never know this hidden other story.

"Part of what was driving it was the fact that this guy [Tom] was trying to get at the truth or a version of the truth about his wife and the question for me was, is it too late?" says Perkins.

"I suppose what I believe is that once someone is not around, whether because of death or anything else that takes someone away from your life, is that you have to be responsible for your own version of the relationship. So Tom will never know the truth, it's only ever going to be his version of events. So that's the title - it's his 'novel' about his wife."

Many of Tom and Ann's woes centre around the large, unrenovated house they've bought in Hackney, a place for which they've mortgaged themselves up to the eyeballs, although the suburb, as portrayed in the book, is dangerous and dirty.

When Ann is involved in a derailment on the Underground, and ends up holding another passenger's cellphone, she and Tom drive to wealthy Hampstead to return it. It was "a part of London I pretended was too fuddy-duddy for me but secretly aspired to", thinks Tom in the book. "Our laughter, as we turned into street after street of bigger and bigger houses, was thin with envy."

Perkins and Maughan know what it's like to inhabit seedier parts of London after living there for a decade. "We lived in Tower Hamlets which was possibly even grottier than Hackney," recalls Perkins. They also lived in a famously narrow triangular house in Shoreditch.

"One end of it was like the length of one of my arms to my shoulder," says Perkins, demonstrating. "It was a tiny, tiny Victorian building that had three floors and a basement. The shower was on the landing. But it was cheap and central so we didn't mind."

No such luck for Tom, struggling to find writing work, his reputation damaged after an "incident" on a movie set in Fiji, coinciding with his spur-of-the-moment marriage there to Ann.

A year on, Tom and Ann are way behind with the mortgage, the bills are piling up and pregnant Ann drops a bombshell: she is being followed by "a man". Then bizarre things start to happen to Ann in the house, while Tom - for good reason - finds he is constantly looking over his shoulder.

Perkins enjoyed dropping in the little bombshells of fear.
"There is an enormous amount of pleasure in writing those things even if you don't know what's going to follow. I really love paranoid cinema and fiction - I get a lot of pleasure out of that as a viewer and a reader. That's a lot of the reason the book is set in London, to allow the sense of unease, of what might be around the corner that these characters live with, to be actually quite realistic in that particular city.

"I also suppose I'm having a bit of a play with Tom," she says with a naughty grin. "He's a middle-class man out of his comfort zone in order to pursue a lot of his middle-class aspirations. He has to make certain kinds of compromises like the suburb he lives in and that is what happens in a city like London. There is a kind of comedy inherent in that which I enjoy. So as well as being spooky and threatening, I think it's also kind of funny."

Perkins, who won the Montana Award for Best First Book in 1996 (for Not Her Real Name), began work on Novel About My Wife when she was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship in 2006.

Enrolled in the Masters course in Creative Writing at the University of Auckland since the beginning of this semester, she writes at home and in an office on Richmond Rd she shares with another writer.

When she was writing the Novel novel, her quandary - as with most writers with kids - was juggling such an intense narrative with the everyday needs of three young children.

"My version of it might be different from theirs," she laughs, "but it is hard to totally switch focus. There's this sense that you do carry the fictional world with you all the time, you just do. I try to organise my life so there are places where that can happen and also away from the desk - I walk a lot using that space to really be in that world. But it doesn't mean I'm not paying attention to my kids," she adds wryly.

Perkins describes hearing her name called on the night of the awards as "surreal". "You do have that gap in time when you think, 'Was that my name?' You pray you're not doing a Zoolander and getting up on stage by mistake. I didn't knock my tiara off or anything, it wasn't a beauty queen moment but you know ... you feel the way you feel about the book and it's been out for a while and I've had a lot of response but this is a really nice recognition."

She does have a cheeky hint for publishers who want to help their writers win awards. Buy them a dress.

Last year, Perkins was at the Hay Festival in England with her publisher, the legendary Alexandra Pringle, founder of Virago books and editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury. Pringle got very excited about a little black dress she saw in a vintage shop in Hay-on-Wye, telling Perkins it would be perfect for her.

Perkins loved it, but she couldn't buy it. By the time she got back to New Zealand, it had arrived in the post, courtesy of Pringle. She wore it to the awards on Monday night.

It wouldn't have fitted Tom.