Up close and personal with Pamela Stephenson

Pamela Stephenson aboard her yacht in Auckland. Picture / Kenny Rodger

We say we might get her to pose for a picture later and Pamela Stephenson bounces about and puts on her "here I am posing" look.

She's done a bit of posing in her time and she's very good at being bouncy. She was once a comedian. Now she is married to that famous comedian, Billy Connolly, and she is a very serious psychologist who has just written a book about running away to sea. It is about her mid-life crisis, or, as she prefers, her "creative illness, say, which is a dark night of the soul".

This makes it sound as though she was unhappy, but she says no, she wasn't.

"I was quite over-burdened but I wasn't unhappy. I really had no complaints. I was thoroughly spoiled, I had a great career, everything I could possibly want materially, great husband, great kids, everything."

Then an odd thing happened that explains, or sort of explains, the book, which is called Treasure Islands: Sailing the South Seas in the Wake of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson.

We meet on her boat, the Takapuna. It is a very nice boat although she says it wasn't this flash during the 10 months it took to complete her running away. She's just had it refitted and is very proud of it, but when I ask how much it cost, she says "Oh, don't".

She is wearing a green satin suit and some hefty baubles and white cotton socks. The suit is because she's just come from talking at a literary lunch.

The socks are because there's a "no shoes" rule on the boat. This makes for a rather incongruous get-up, a fact she is not unaware of because she says to the photographer "Are you taking pictures of my socks?" She says she is bossy, so you can't argue with that.

She is also terribly serious and quite guarded when it comes to talking about herself. She saves the bounce for when any posing should be required.

The woman you sit down with for an interview is intense. She talks in the language of the psychologist so that, for example, when she's talking about Fanny's seasickness and rheumatism, she says "I know what was going on with her. I think she had a psychosomatic illness".

The odd thing that happened, which I am keen to know about, is that one day in a hotel room in Auckland Stephenson had a vision of Fanny. This vision poked at her with an umbrella and declared that Stephenson was "truly awash" with this "existential angst, creative illness, mid-life crisis ... you must take action!"

I say, "Most people who went about saying a ghost had poked them with a brolly would be locked up somewhere."

"That's one of the things I loved about it," she says, "that I couldn't explain it psychologically because psychologically I think I had thought all of those sorts of things are very cut-and-dried.

"I mean, I can explain it psychologically, but I prefer to think of it as a bit of a mystery. Which I think is wonderful. You know, after all my sort of probing into the human brain, that I should still be aware of mysteries and come up with them myself.

"Just the notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing, isn't it? It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience."

This is true, and, I say "Plenty of them got locked up, too". Anyway, I want to know whether it hurt, being jabbed like that. At which she laughs like, well, crazy. She is accomplished at laughing harder at jokes than the joke deserves.

She says she is a "caretaker" by nature, which might well, in the context of her marriage, also involve being a good audience.

Stephenson is so serious I wondered whether she had become accustomed to playing the straight guy. This is quite an insulting question, but I didn't mean it to be. In fact I'd tried - and failed to the point where an apology seemed in order - to get her to talk about her, and not Billy.

"I don't think I'm really generous enough to be the straight guy," she says. "Well, I'm not generous enough to just be the straight guy. I sort of make my own way and make my own statement. Do I mind pushing myself forward? Not at all."

She says she has a lot in common with Fanny: "There were obvious things. We're both short, bossy women with fascinating husbands that we kind of take care of."

Stephenson has also, of course, written two staggeringly successful books about Billy. She says he is a "genius" and she is still, plainly, fascinated by him. He pops up every now and then in her latest book to grumble about how boring coconut trees are and to take the mickey put of his wife's idea of roughing it.

I say a number of times that I don't mean to bang on about Billy as though Stephenson is some sort of appendage to the more famous one. So I won't here.

But during the interview, all lines of inquiry somehow lead straight back to Billy. In retrospect, she led us there.

"There is a probably natural and learned reticence with myself talking about my early life," she says.

This is partly because she could one day go back to seeing clients, "and one of the things that clients don't want is to read too much about their psychologist. And part of the art of psychotherapy is more that it's about the client, it's not about you".

This is quite tricky because it means she has a purpose-built out. And "there may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography or something like that".

This is bossy, as in a liking for being the one in control, so she has herself nicely diagnosed there.

Beyond that, she's difficult to get a fix on. She can sound quite posh, as in Posh Brit. She refers to herself as "one", but you can hear the Aussie sheila that she became after leaving New Zealand at the age of 4, and at times she's pure L.A. She's a funny mix of frankness and that reticence about talking about herself when she's written a book all about her "creative illness".

There's a sex dream in the book, involving a Marquesan man and a fish. This is quite rude, in a therapy-speak way. I ask her about it and she launches into a explanation of how it was partly about "white man's guilt" and how she was "having a lot of feelings about being part of a race that had brought firearms, syphilis, a different culture, religion", and so on. Which is a very long-winded explanation for a sex dream. "Good try," I say.

"Sexual dreams aren't usually about sex," she says, laughing at me. And who am I to argue with a woman who has been prodded by a ghost with an umbrella?