KEY POINTS:
Joe won't tell me his real name or where he works, and we've only just met but I feel I know this man from the Waikato.
What's more, I have a strange liking for him, given what I know.
I've read his book, twice, and now I sit
face to face with him conducting what turns out to be a stream of consciousness interview.
Joe talks just as he writes, without paragraphs, chapters or full stops.
The publisher put those in and took out a bit of swearing but otherwise Joe's book is as he wrote it _ a warts and all account of what has been at times an ugly life. Joe tells it all without excuses.
The man who has written a book but doesn't read books is a bit nervous of the publicity that goes with being an author. But he's such a good talker that I joke he'll have no trouble being interviewed on the radio by a woman he's heard can go for the jugular, "that Hill chick down there at the radio in Wellington".
That's Kim Hill and the interview is scheduled for today. Celia Lashlie will be there too. The former prison officer, and now author and speaker, has written the foreword to Joe's book and she's someone who knows about men who abuse and what shapes them.
Lashlie says in the foreword that Joe has shown courage in writing his story and in allowing others to read it and that we need to show a similar courage in supporting him on the next phase of his journey.
Joe sits before me now, a big Maori man with tattoos, drinking orange juice. A man who once laid into his wife with a spade. He's lucky he didn't kill her.
He's probably a stereotype. A couple of years ago, you might have been frightened of him, and I'm not about to say he's a teddy bear.
Though his wife might. She's stuck by him through thick and thin, bruises and all. She loves him and it's possible that Joe finally realises this.
He certainly knows he loves her. Here's what happened that day in June, 2006, from the book: "At that moment, Jennifer was in the middle of the clothesline with a towel in front of her and a sleeping bag hanging on the outside of the clothesline, blocking my view of her ...
"Right down beside me was a spade, so I picked it up and swung it at her through the washing at stomach height. I didn't think I got her, so I did it again and Jennifer fell to the ground. I don't know what I was thinking."
It sounds horrific and it is. But as you read Joe's book, it's hard not to become involved with his life, batting for a happy ending as he takes you through his struggle, the misery of his childhood, the shock realisation he was more like his father than he thought and his decision to change.
He threw himself into counselling, went on courses and narrowly avoided jail, spending nine months on home detention at his nana's.
By the end of the book Joe is telling how he doesn't talk so much nowadays, that he does more listening, especially when he's with Jennifer.
"She has said she notices a big change in my behaviour and loves me more and more every day, so that's good."
The book is passionate and raw and frequently harrowing. But that has been Joe's life. Joe's father, who once smashed Joe's head into the bathroom mirror one day for taking too long, is bizarrely murdered and Joe's brother hangs himself. Joe will sleep around, take copious drugs and intimidate and frighten people.
Along with those details, we're privy to Joe's thoughts as he grapples with them. There are many moments where he talks about wanting to kill himself, and of feeling dead inside.
Joe hasn't written his book to change the world. He wrote it because he had the time when on home detention _ and to purge his soul. It is also his apology to Jennifer.
He's still learning and he struggles with shame and guilt, he tells me.
"Half of the time I feel like I'm half a man now, you know, as far as what I thought staunch was before. I feel like a shell of a man, I feel humiliated. It doesn't matter what people say because if they maybe can piece together what kind of psyche I have, a whole life of not having any confidence or feeling like a piece of shit, you know ... it's still hard for me to be able to deal with."
His counsellor told him that only 2 per cent of men who hurt others change _ and he believes he is one of them. Joe knows other men who still hurt their families.
He thinks he is one of the 2 per cent because of his kids, and because he now realises he forgot most of his childhood because it was so painful.
"I forgot what it's like to be that little kid crying with mum and dad fighting, and I forgot what it was like fighting and arguing with Jennifer with my kids next door.
"I've got three boys that are strong boys now, that they could have three women and **** up their lives and their kids. I have a little girl that could get drawn to an angry, violent man and spend a life of abuse. It's way bigger than me."
These days, at 34, he can admit there are good things about him but he knows he is still learning.
"I don't want to give myself no leeway. I don't believe in the quick fix, I think it's going to be a work in progress until I die."
He feels a bit of a hypocrite because, while spilling his life in the book, he doesn't want to be identified and he hopes people won't recognise him because he doesn't want to cause any more hurt to his family.
Because while the book has saved him, it's clear his family has too.
If he didn't still have his wife and children, he reckons he would go down to the radio interview and he and Hill would probably have an argument "cause I'd go balls out and argue till they pushed off and then go to my motel and get trashed and then beat up someone in town, to me that would be like fun, you know.
"But it's not like that no more. I'm kind of happy now."
Joe says things that are confronting and sometimes shocking, but that's Joe, and despite his violent past there's something kind of nice about him. I hope he makes it.
Fighting For My Life: The Confessions of a Violent Offender (Exisle Publishing, $34.99) in bookshops now.
