Short story award winner's blissful solitude

Charlotte Grimshaw

The story which has just won the Katherine Mansfield award for short fiction is about a woman who lives alone, except for a baby who screams and seldom sleeps.

It was written by Charlotte Grimshaw, who lives in a house in Remuera with three rowdy children, a lawyer husband and a cat called Batty.

You have to take her word for this, because when you visit her during the day, you would be more inclined to think that she lives, very quietly, in a house in Remuera where she spends her days writing in blissful solitude.

Both of these descriptions of her life are true. She loves her rowdy family. She loves being on her own but "I wouldn't like to live alone, so I like having a family. No, I'd die of loneliness if I lived alone."

She is suited to being a writer. It is hard to imagine her in a flap. She gets up, gets the kids off to school, she writes and surely does not - ever harder to imagine - procrastinate. She drinks instant coffee.

She likes "order and hard work". Even when she was being rebellious at school she "always did my work. I always did well academically." She left Epsom Girls because she hated being told what to wear and that there were no boys, and went to Selwyn College. She went to university and did law. She got a job at Simpson Grierson doing shipping law, which sounds like the most god awful boring stuff.

It seems odd, or odd to me, that she went for law in the first place because she always knew she would write. But she says, "Oh, I thought it was something I could do. It was all about language and it was interesting."

She'd write in her office or go to the library and read but "I always did my work".

Also, she thought it might be good to be a lawyer because "I wanted to do my own thing. Well, no one else in the family was a lawyer so I thought, 'Oh well, I'll go and be a lawyer'." In the end "I just felt more literary than legal, you know".

This is in the genes, she thinks. Her father, C.K. Stead, won the Katherine Mansfield award 45 years ago. Which is nice, isn't it?

"Oh, it's nice, yeah. But that's not quite the point for me. I'm not sort of focused on him when I'm doing my thing, really."

I say I hope she doesn't think I'm implying that she is, because that could be irritating, couldn't it?

"Oh, no, but I think people naturally ask, that people are naturally interested and they sort of wonder about my attitude to him and so on and it's perfectly natural. It doesn't irritate me at all, it's just that people assume that it will be more significant to me than it is. For example, they will say: 'Will you be annoyed if we talk about your father.' They expect me to be uptight."

She has never been daunted by how good her father is. "No, that's what I was trying to explain, that people sort of ask whether I was, or felt this or felt that. I've never felt daunted and I don't know why."

Probably because she has always had "a kind of confidence about what I'm doing. I know that I really am not playing." And "also familiarity. I've grown up with him. I spent years and years of my life living in the same house".

She probably learned some things about writing: hard work and order and the necessity of spending hours on your own.

She has just been to Ayers Rock where her husband, the leaky building lawyer Paul Grimshaw, was at a conference. "I absolutely loved just walking around in this weird landscape all by myself. You know, all the other sort of spouses were mingling at the pool and I just wanted to be off on my own."

It is possible the other sort of spouses thought she was a bit strange. Is she? "Oh, probably, you know. I try not to be. I don't know. You never know what other people think of you. If they think you're weird they don't tell you, do they?"

The day I saw her, she was to fly to Wellington to be presented with her award and $10,000. She is very happy about it - the money is good but "obviously it's not all about the money. It's just recognition of a certain level of skill in writing short stories and it's nice to win because, you know, they have the winner's list. It's nice to be on that list because it's a good list."

She wasn't planning on getting frocked up. "Aah, no. I'll probably just put on something clean."

She is long-limbed and slender; she looks strong. You can see that she'd look odd with lots of makeup and her hair all done up. She is a looks-good-in-jeans kind of guy. She has an intriguing face, with the upside-down mouth of, I thought, her father; she says people say she looks like her mother. She has the normal aversion to thinking about which family member she most resembles. Well, she could have had ugly parents. "I know, but it's not something that you kind of pursue."

She was considered to be a great beauty around Auckland in the 80s. She seemed to me to be pretty cool. This is an awful thing to accuse somebody of, and of course, anyone who thought they were cool would immediately be ruled out.

"I mean, it's good if I looked cool! But I don't know what cool means."

Perhaps it means a sort of aloofness - which writers often have; a standing slightly apart and observing.

She has been in London recently, staying with her sister Margaret, and she didn't write because "I found it hard to concentrate because I was so busy taking a hell of a lot of data, but I made a lot of notes. Just ideas. I don't lug around a notebook and whip it out, but if I do see something interesting I write it down just because I might forget."

She might write down "an exchange between people or something that I've heard. My sister has some really interesting friends and there were various fascinating details about the friends."

Which might end up in her fiction? "Well, maybe just subtleties or an oddity. Except that it won't be them it'll be. Which is what you do, isn't it? You're observing. In a way you're doing the opposite. You meet someone and you're meant to write about how they really are, whereas I'm free to invent. That's right, isn't it? So we're kind of doing the opposite."

That is about right, but I rather think she has the upper hand. It is not so much that she is hard to interview, at least not wilfully so, it is just that writers are terrible at talking about themselves. When you spend all day giving your characters entire lives so that you can write about them, you might not be so interested in talking about your own so that somebody else can write about it.

There is also her manner: she is straight-forward to the point she can come across as abrupt. I think this an extension of the way she approaches her writing: orderly, she doesn't muck about in conversation. Or in the writing of reviews, say.

"If you're straight-forward and honest you'll win out in the end. Well, you'll come out all right, it'll be realised later even if people get furious with you ... as long as you're absolutely straight. I just have faith that that's the best way to be."

When her first novel, Provocation, came out a journalist wrote: "Well-known as an opponent of political correctness, C.K. Stead has never been afraid to make provocative remarks. Grimshaw seems to have inherited this trait."

"I suppose so, if I was ever in the position to ... make a provocative remark. I don't know what that's referring to.

"But, just theoretically, I would make a remark that was perceived as being provocative if it was true."

The voice of fictional characters being taken for the author's is "aah, well that's always a problem for the writer, isn't it?" I wonder whether we can learn anything about her from her writing.

"Oh you probably can, but I couldn't tell you what you would learn. I'm too inside it, you know. So I suppose you could think that you would know something about me but I don't know what it would be."

She says, right at the end, "It's hard to talk about yourself, isn't it?"

This is a likeable thing to say. Was it awful, I ask, and she says, "Oh, no, it's just."

It's just that there is a quiet room at the back of a house in Remuera where blissful solitude beckons.