Much-loved author Joy Cowley steps into the Canvas Confession Box and owns up to three sins, two of them deadly.
IGNORANCE
You nominated ignorance, which is not one of the official seven deadly sins.
I think ignorance
- a failure to understand others, a failure to be well-informed - causes so many of the world's problems. At one time innocence was thought to be a virtue but another name for that is ignorance and I would call that a sin. I have travelled a lot and I see the way we think if we put certain labels on other people that justifies us in our judgment of them, because they're not like us. That escalates and it causes huge problems in the world.
Are there any examples that are particularly bothering you in 2019?
There are examples that have delighted me, for example the whole loving reaction of New Zealanders after the massacre in Christchurch. That made me so proud of my country, because generally there has been an "us" and "them" understanding of a religious group that wasn't "ours" and to see that disappear, and we were all suddenly brothers and sisters in this one New Zealand family, it was good.
You have a story about ignorance?
Ignorance and gluttony. I stayed with Pat and Roald Dahl when Roald was making a film of my first novel. I had never had much to do with alcohol and they fed me martinis and I drank them like lemonade and they showed me this beautiful blue swimming pool, because it was a heated swimming pool and in those days no one else had heated swimming pools, and I fell into it. And then I vomited into it. It was probably the worst thing that had ever happened. They were actually very nice about it, but I just wanted to curl up and die.
GLUTTONY
Why does gluttony resonate for you?
Well I'm a vegetarian and one time I went down to a cafe in Wellington and sat by myself at a table and ordered a big meat pie - beef with rosemary - and it came with a couple of bits of lettuce and when I got home and was asked what I had for lunch I said I had a salad. I left out the meat pie.