For many years as a newspaper columnist, Megan Nicol Reed wrote about the middle class, cleverly skewering their ardent positioning, their endless striving — for bigger homes, faster cars, more intense health regimes, cooler clothing and more successful children. More, bigger, sleeker, faster, now.
She was very good at it — she was a trained observer, after all, and she lived in that cosy world herself — but she didn’t initially consider it fodder for her first book, a seven-year project that felt, at times, interminable.
Nicol Reed, now 48, had long been satisfied with penning features and opinion pieces, and was, for many years, a Canvas columnist. But as the Aucklander approached her 40th birthday she found herself determined to build a world of her own, populate it with compromised characters and see what happened. She thought her first novel would be about a cult, which some wits might argue it is — the cult of the ambitious middle-class mother.
“I have never been attracted to nice stories, I wanted to write something quite grimy with a layer of seediness,” she explains over the phone, en route to a South Island tramping holiday. “There’s something about the middle class, there’s this hypocrisy that really gets to me. I suspect in really wealthy people and really poor people you don’t get it as much, because there’s less pretense. In the middle class there’s more keeping up. I am utterly fascinated and yet repelled by it. That’s the darkness for me.”
Her engrossing (and yes, dark) debut novel, One of Those Mothers, centres on six friends living in a gentrifying central city suburb whose lives are tightly braided together. They holiday on a remote island, where over the course of a few days their bonds are tested. There is a stomach-churning child pornography element and story threads involving alcohol and drug abuse, disordered eating and marriage strains. The book delves into the “parallel life that runs alongside the mundanity of people’s domestic life”, as Nicol Reed says.