"The only good thing about writer friends dying," Sue McCauley told me after writer Rosie Scott died, "is that they leave bits of themselves behind on your bookshelves." It's true. When I miss my lost beloved writer friends, I sometimes pick up one of their books so that I can again hear their voices. Rosie Scott and Peter Wells are my first two choices. The last three are by other writers whose books I would like to accompany me on that last journey – but those authors are very much alive and in the world!
1.Rosie Scott's The Red Heart is a collection of essays, some of which began life as commissions for talks, others are pieces developed from her treasured journal that she kept from the age of 9. Some are musings on writers, some on writing itself, or life in Australia for a New Zealander becoming Australian, or on love, motherhood and friendship. In her essay Friends, she writes "For most of us, adulthood brings the full-bodied joys of genuine friendship, relationships tempered with consideration and tolerance, the comfortable state of trust, love and mutual inspiration between two people, without which life would be a boring, hazardous and barren wasteland." Vale Rosie.
2.Peter Wells's Dear Oliver: Uncovering a Pakeha History brings Peter back to me strongly. This exquisitely written book is a history of Peter's maternal family, as well as of his own early life. In Dear Oliver he comes alive as a flappy eared, poky-nosed Pt Chev kid. Peter grew to be the family record-keeper and eventually a consummate, luminescent storyteller. That curious small boy and teenager listened intently to family stories and hints of stories, threads from stories and alarming pronouncements on certain ancestors; there was poor John Summers who got "eaten by the Maoris" and great-grandmother Betsy who, as a child, had to walk 25 miles home from Wellington through rough country with a sack of flour on her back – and many other snippets and mots from his mother and grandmother. I think these narratives sparked off not only the earliest embers not only of Dear Oliver but much of Peter's invaluable life's work as an historian, filmmaker and novelist.
3.Anne Kennedy's The Iceshelf is one of the funniest books I have ever read. It is a play on the idea of Acknowledgements, those sometimes wince-inducing pages that are put at the front or end of a book in which the author thanks friends, family, agents, publishers and the vicissitudes of life for creative assistance. The Iceshelf is firmly set in Wellington and fondly skewers with wicked humour not only that city but arts funding bodies, literary competitions, writing classes and literary endeavour itself. In places with pathos enough to break your heart, in others to make you hysterical with laughter, The Iceshelf is brave, risky and life-affirming and I suppose that when you're dead you need a laugh.
4. If you haven't yet read Decline and Fall on Savage Street then you're not a real Kiwi and you don't care about Christchurch so get busy. Fiona Farrell's rich, multi-layered work is the fictional biography of an Avon Loop house from its conception on an early 20th century planning desk to collapse in post-21st century earthquake. We meet the families, spinsters, the war generation, commune members, the desolation that gives way to upwardly mobile inner city dwellers, and they are all totally believable. Farrell's fury is palpable but so is her deep humanity and love for Christchurch and all of New Zealand. Also, there's a talking eel. In my grave, I would re-read those bits because, mostly, nothing happens, which would reflect my reality.
