Paula Morris on winter's rich crop of local debut novels.
Despite this year's lockdown crisis – bookshops closed, launches and festivals cancelled, cartons of books stranded in overseas ports and warehouses – a slew of local women writers have managed to make confident debuts. These recent arrivals – two new memoirs and four novels – vary in style and tone but all explore secret lives, life-changing events and traumatic consequences.
This doesn't mean any of these new books are earnest. Honest, funny memoir Not That I'd Kiss a Girl by Lil O'Brien (Allen & Unwin) is billed as a "coming out and coming of age" story that's both personal and charts the cultural shift in New Zealand over the past 20 years. The memoir's focus on the confusion of coming out "timestamps the story," says reviewer Ruby Porter, "as much as the 'hologram orange' ball dresses, the all-caps all-contractions text speak and Nelly's 'Ride wit Me'. And, as you would hope, the early 2000s gay content is all there: message boards with online lovers, Tumblr feeds of kissing girls, The L Word."
O'Brien excels, she suggests, in capturing "the intensity of young love, imperceptible shifts in power, what remains of memories which have been lost to shock." Making sense of shock also lies at the heart of Caroline Barron's Ripiro Beach: A Memoir of Life After Near Death (Bateman) – part recovery account from PTSD, part detective story into murky family pasts, including prison spells and dishonourable discharges.
Kate Duignan, reviewing the book for the Academy of New Zealand Literature, praises Barron's "lucid, visceral prose" in a memoir that doesn't shy from brutal truths. "The aftermath of a terrible birth, and the damage of her grandparents' lives read as parallel investigations into the link between being a person who undergoes trauma, and being a person capable of violent rage. The overriding question of the memoir becomes a matter of survival for Barron: "Why am I like I am?"