Robin Robertson, editor: Mortification

Reviewed by PETER WELLS

It is common knowledge among booksellers that authors often sidle into bookshops, seize their own book and rearrange it more prominently on the bookshelf. There's usually no danger of the author being discovered because, after all, no one is more anonymous — unrecognisable — than a New Zealand author. The most miserable amateur sportsman is more of an instant celebrity.

I am prompted to these thoughts by an entirely cheery volume which fell into my hand on the very day of my birthday. I was skulking in an Australian bookshop when what should I spy but a book subtitled "writers' stories of their public shame". I grabbed it as a drowning man lunges at a martini. Shamelessly I stood there, reading page after page, cackling with the terrible recognition that where I have been, many others, more famous than I, have been before.

Take Margaret Atwood, for example. One instantly thinks of a rather sour-faced woman not unimpressed with her own genius. It is entirely refreshing to find her batting her eyelashes coquettishly during a television interview on a no-account channel, talking salaciously about "the men in my life". At the same time, her astute rational consciousness is calling out, disbelievingly, "Men? Plural? Me?"

Mortification is the way of the writer, his or her eternal pilgrimage. The editors in the introduction say there is something inherently funny about high morality and very low earnings.

This is a splendid banquet of sore thumbs, stood-on toes, noses squashed up against plate-glass windows. Even the famous, such as Michael Ondaatje, Roddy Doyle and Edna O'Brien, are no escapers from the inner cringe. A common mortification is the book-signing attended by a small crowd — a very small crowd — usually the publicist, nursing a bunion.

Writing is, of course, an absurd craft in the technological age we live in. Texting has changed language, perhaps forever. So my advice to any readers who know a writer who needs cheering up — and God knows that means most of us — or to someone who enjoys laughing at the plight of the writer — that means most of you — is: make a beeline for the bookstore. Buy this refreshingly wicked tome. And, by the way, if you find any of my books on your way to the counter, feel free to place me in a more prominent position.

* Fourth Estate, $24.99

* Peter Wells is an Auckland writer and film-maker.