C goes with D to meet an orthopedic surgeon, who outlines D’s intended procedure. It’s absolutely worth it, he assures them. C and M and D have it all worked out, how C and M will wait while the surgery is performed, the times they will visit. But after they arrive at the hospital they’re told, “Due to Covid there is no visiting at all.” D follows the nurse through the doors. They will not see him for days. His shoulders are bowed, and he is towing a tiny suitcase.

C faces the dermatologist. She suspects he won’t remember this, but when she first met him years ago he asked the worst and funniest question a doctor has ever put to her: “Have you done any recent nursing in the Third World?”

She considered answering, “I’ve just got back from Uganda. It’s Ebola, isn’t it?” But this wasn’t true; her problem was nothing so exotic, and eventually he let her go.

Now they’re meeting a second time. A stereo begins emitting eerie music from his cupboard as he says, “I’m afraid you’re not going to like this.”

He describes the biopsy he wants to perform on her face. C says, with a prim cough, “Can we put it off? I have some public things to do this month.”

He jumps up. “That music’s got a bit loud.”

Is this a new thing, C wonders, piping music into doctors’ rooms? He twiddles with a knob. “No,” he says, “we can’t put it off.” He needs to decide what sort of biopsy. Not the punch, perhaps the graze or the slice. The problem area is diffuse, meaning he’ll have to angle around the existing facial scar. The music rises. He frowns and jumps up again. “Strange. It seems to control itself.” Sudden swoop of violins. He looks so sane, as he’s plotting the unthinkable. He’s going to take a knife to C’s face.

C receives a series of emails from R, who rebukes her for writing about her family. He accuses her of “lying” in order to “assert victimhood.” He attaches an article about whining First World feminists. When C replies, he writes that her response is a “sign of weakness.” Then his tone alters, and he tells her he’s spent his life battling addiction and mental illness.

D’s surgery has been a success and he is a new man. But then, another twist: M visits a specialist and now she needs treatment.

In the café, M wears a casually elegant jacket, stylish trousers. They’ve taken a table for four, and M is obliged to squeeze in next to C. She won’t do it. She won’t go near C, but stays at the corner of the table, awkwardly perched, turning away. This makes C think about art. Bad art would gloss over this, would tell a story of togetherness and warmth. Bad art is what the rebuking R wants: ersatz stories of wonderfulness.

The 18th Annual Frank Sargeson Lecture

From fiction to fact: how writing a memoir changed my brain

The Mirror Books

I grew up in a family in which, from my earliest memory, my father CK Stead was writing fiction, often using fragments of our real lives. I spent decades writing fiction myself. One day, an inexplicable impulse sent me to the bookshelf where I found myself reading a Frank Sargeson story, 'An International Occasion.' The story portrays characters who share a few features with my parents, who knew Frank Sargeson well.

I have clear memories of Frank myself, and still have presents he gave me when I was a child. I began thinking about a life lived in fiction, and the idea started forming: to write a memoir with a specific aim. It would be an attempt to find out who I was. I had no idea what I was like, and what was my real self. I’d always been able to imagine my way into other people’s experiences, in order to write fiction, but I seemed to inhabit a self that was in some sense a false front, and I wondered whether this was linked to a life lived in the midst of fiction. From then on, my writing and research at that time became part of a forensic examination, and an attempt to integrate and construct a real self.

Some years ago, I had thought about applying for a particular writer’s fellowship. The application needed to be based on a significant project, either a book requiring a lot of research or, I thought, potentially two books. I wrote a proposal for two books.

The first was to be a novel exploring ideas of identity in the age of Trump. It was to be about the exercise of power in microcosm, and on a macro level. I wanted to write about the idea of a family as a regime, in which power might be enforced in some of the same ways it’s enforced by a state.

I was fascinated by Trump, by the way he lied and gaslighted, by the misogyny he represented and the backlash against it that probably gave rise to the #Metoo movement. I wanted to write about narcissism, conformity versus rebellion, gaslighting, fake news.

I was interested in the fact that Trump was helped into office by Russia, and what that meant, and continues to mean, for democracy, because if you follow the fortunes of Trump and the Republican party in the US, you will know what Trump hasn’t gone away, and the threat to democracy in the US is even greater. And, I wanted to write a pacey, plot-driven story that would take place in New Zealand, France, and Buenos Aires. So that was the first book, a novel.

The other half of the project, the second book, was to be non-fiction. It was to be a memoir exploring the way power was expressed and arranged in my literary family – the one I grew up in. It was to be a memoir in which I explored the ways we’d fictionalised ourselves. It seemed to me that fiction had become a more acceptable way for us to express ourselves than open communication. I’d started to feel that we operated within a nicely curated storyline we conformed to, and if we strayed outside it, there tended to be strife. Both my father and I could use recognisable material in our writing, and could really sail close to the wind in that regard, so long as it was safely framed as fiction.

So that was the second book – a memoir.

“I made certain,” the Uber driver said, “that my wife-to-be shared my goals: financial, social, spiritual.” Outside, beyond the line of palms, the sky had a fierce, pale sheen, the light was all blaze and glare, and the temperature had reached 38 degrees. It was a heatwave, fitting for a day of high drama. We were driving at high speed towards Beverly Hills.

“My car,” the driver continued, “is a Tesla. I call it Kit. When my wife and I shop, it parks itself. After shopping in the mall, we summon it. I geo-locate my wife’s position when she drives, to keep her safe. By the way,” he added, “I’ve been to New Zealand myself. I was there with a mentor who was in the business of high-end property. He checked out some oil wells. Oh, and a mine.”

He went on, in his glazed monotone. Minutes before, I had dreamily understood: this was his American dream. Wealth, success, a self-driving car, a perfect wife. It didn’t matter if none of it was true. What you needed was faith, the patter, the specifications; you could summon your shining future, talk it into being real.

Los Angeles: city of stories. The same day, an artist in a cowboy hat told me this: “My laptop crashed and I lost some new work. No one could fix it, until I was referred by a super-specialist. I drove out into the desert; there was an empty mall. At the far end of the mall were two guys at a counter; you could tell they were highly educated. Turns out they were military. They fixed my computer. Out the back of the mall was a military base, where they were testing the prototype of a new stealth bomber. I took film of it; here it is.” And he showed me a video on his phone of a military plane over a desert. I sat there enjoying the surreal, dream-like quality of the story. It certainly didn’t matter if it was real. There was a small, quiet woman in the artist’s party. She hesitated getting into the elevator and I assumed she was claustrophobic, until I was told she’d spent two years in an American Navy submarine.

We swooped onto the freeway, speeding through the post-truth afternoon. Just as our driver was describing his trip to New Zealand - “I don’t know what city I was in. I was situated in a prestigious property, in a country locale. For four months, we discussed multi-million-dollar deals” - the computer announced we had arrived.

I opened the door of the Beverly Hills Courthouse and made a polite inquiry. Two armed guys ushered us in, pushed us towards the metal detector, scanned our bags. On the top floor a masked woman approached. “Family, please attend outside.”

We waited in the lobby until the doors burst open and the wedding party arrived; bohemian, glamorous, stylish and lawless, they swept us into the elevator and we all poured onto the top floor, and there was our handsome son Conrad and his beautiful partner Ashley, about to be married at the Beverly Hills Courthouse.

After the presentation of attestations and tests, after the strange silence of security, there are rows of closed shops and cafes, the departure area dim and empty. Getting out for the first time in two years is an eerie experience. Only three planes are leaving.

All through the night, as we bounce and lurch through the turbulence, I imagine our plane as a tiny, lonely dot, no fellow travellers ahead to warn of bad weather. There’s a renewed sense of distance, of how extremely remote we are.

The Los Angeles immigration queue is a miracle. We are through in an unprecedented half an hour. And then we’re on the freeway, and here is America with its crumbling infrastructure, its potholes and wildness, its opulence and cruelty.

On the side of the freeway a shirtless man is struggling to his feet. There is no pedestrian access. He has either fallen down a high concrete wall or been pushed out of a car. He is unsteady and staggering. As I spot him our driver is negotiating a furious, weaving, high-speed lane change; we veer away and when I look behind, the man’s arm is raised. We who are about to die salute America, the land of the freeway.

Los Angeles is effectively an archipelago, a city divided against itself by two things: money and the freeway system. The way from island of safety to island of money is by car. Walking can be done with caution within islands, but not between.

On the first morning, as we google map our way on foot, the phone directs us beneath an overpass. We hurry through a street lined on both sides by the tents of the homeless. It’s a long and unnerving walk. Coming out the other side we pass an enormous, gated palace, the sinister headquarters of the super-rich and opaque Church of Scientology. Homelessness and distress come right up against extraordinary wealth. The trick while navigating is to avoid the borders.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon recently referred to some types of people as “bottom feeding.” Perhaps some of the “wealth narrative” of American evangelism has rubbed off on him: affluence as a sign of virtue. On TV, American evangelists tell their flock, “If you enrich me, folks, God will be pleased.” (It sounds like a fantastic ethos to me, and not a scam at all.)

Here in Los Angeles there is no safety net, no easily affordable health care for anyone, and nothing for the outdoor bottom feeders except their tents and shopping trolleys, their crazy singing, and the mad fire in their eyes. You can’t actually get rid of them, so you have to steer around them. Los Angeles will remind you, there is a good reason why societies with proper taxation and the least inequality are the most cohesive and the happiest.

I’m thinking of five Auckland women, three in one family and two of their friends, one in her eighties, one seventy, the others in their fifties. Three have more than one tertiary degree, four have husbands. One was raped under the age of sixteen. Between them they have had twelve healthy children, four miscarriages and seven abortions.

The miscarriages of wanted pregnancies were devastating; the abortions were not. The abortions were a clear choice, and once they’d been performed the emotion was relief, although the woman in her eighties was forced to have a backstreet abortion that nearly killed her. The abortions were not an “agonising” decision, and there were no regrets.

These are five ordinary New Zealand women, and this is a perfectly normal reproductive history over a lifetime. The idea that anyone would interfere in their choice of healthcare is abhorrent to a majority of New Zealanders, and our current laws reflect that.

But can we be sure the position won’t change? The decision of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade has rocked America, almost immediately denying abortions to women in half of that country. The only option is to travel out of state, which effectively makes the decision a war on America’s poor. Many women who need to travel don’t have cars, credit cards, adequate ID or money. Some could have been raped by family members, and many will be young girls.

When National MP Simon O’Connor broadcast his pleasure at the decision, his post decorated with triumphant love hearts, he caused a problem for his party, and National MPs rushed to reassure women. That storm may have passed, but we were left contemplating the disturbingly large number of MPs, on both sides, who voted against the decriminalisation of abortion. In particular, there was a worrying past statement by National’s health spokesperson Dr. Shane Reti, whose anti-abortion voting record seems more radical given he’s a medical doctor. Dr. Reti didn’t rule out changes, took no position and added, “but we are mindful in watching what happens with Roe v Wade.” This seemed to suggest the decision would have an influence.

Republican and Democrat senators are now complaining that Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch lied in their confirmation hearings about their intentions for Roe v Wade. Perhaps if you believe you’ve got God on your side, you might be as willing as those US Justices were to lie to achieve what you want.

The problem for our pro-life MPs is that we are about to witness the barbarity, injury and death associated with the state enforcement of their “morals.” If they’d been American politicians, this is the mass human rights violation they would have voted for.

Just after President Vladimir Putin’s speech acknowledging International Women’s Day, his army bombed a maternity and children’s hospital in Mariupol. Ukrainian women and children stumbled out of the rubble while the Russian army went on shamelessly insisting it wasn’t targeting civilian infrastructure.

As the world reacts to the disgusting slaughter of President Putin’s war, there’s a refrain you keep hearing: amazement that this could be happening now, to a European country in the 21st century. This was almost the first thing that struck me too: it is so utterly retrograde. Not only in its savagery, but in its complete detachment from the modern world.

We are told President Putin doesn’t regard Ukraine as a real country. He wants to recreate the Russian Empire, and is ready to bomb anyone who gets in the way. He doesn’t have a problem with threatening world security, potentially causing nuclear fall-out, using banned weapons and committing war crimes. Even if any Russians were willing to indulge him in this violent killing spree, how could they think there’s time for it now? It’s insanely anachronistic. It’s the madness of Retrograd.

You can’t get the power-crazed old leader of a petro-state to pause and think about climate change, any more than you can influence an Auckland mayoral candidate who wants to dump the regional fuel tax that helps fund public transport projects. Try telling some people there’s a new reality. Some people will go on doing their retrograde thing, until all they’re left with is scorched earth. It makes you wonder if it’s pointless to dream of adaptation, and a different kind of world.

Recently I had two encounters that made me think of Retrograd. An old friend had a serious mental health and addiction crisis. When we went across town to visit, we found a situation so dire I felt sure help could be summoned. (Those who have experience with such crises will laugh at my naivety.) On the phone to a community addiction service, I explored the options. Could someone come to the house? No. And unless the patient had trouble breathing, an ambulance would take hours. A crisis team could attend, but only if there was a threat to self or others. There was no help; there was nothing. We buckled down and did the only thing we could: we talked and talked for hours.

Not long after that, a woman tripped over outside my gate. She’d hit her head and got a serious gash to her leg. She and I waited fifty minutes until the ambulance came. The paramedics couldn’t have been kinder. One had come up from Taranaki to help with the Omicron surge. They discussed options, where to take her in a hospital system understaffed, crowded and struggling under the strain.

Searching for the Self

In a narrow street of tiny houses, in a district near the Yanaka Cemetery where the last Shogun is buried, a row of shoes was laid out along the pavement. Policemen stationed beside their bikes wielded glow sticks to move along the passersby, but so politely and cordially that it was possible to pretend not to understand and to drift closer and closer until the crime scene was clearly visible: a tiny, cube-like building, a claustrophobic staircase, a child's pink bicycle parked at the bottom, and within, the room in which lights were set up and investigators were working, dressed in special overalls, their feet encased in plastic bags. It seemed typical and not: atypical because a crime had occurred, and crime is so little in evidence in Tokyo, and yet typical in its Japanese neatness, its crisp efficiency. The line of shoes was absolutely straight, the emergency outfits were chic and toy-like, dinky-coloured boiler suits with epaulettes and buckles, helmets with straps done up under the chin.

Inside the tiny room, one act of untidiness had occurred, a piece of chaos involving blood splatter and something lying on the floor. One meltdown or blowout in a city of rigid order and control. You hoped it hadn't involved the owner of the small pink bike.

Tokyo, unreal city, under the iron light of an autumn noon. One day it rained, and a cold wind tore across the vast grounds of the Imperial Palace. Crows sat on the black palace walls, and the black water in the imperial moat had a brooding, sullen sheen. In the shelter of the grounds, the dark green foliage hung dripping over black bridges, and framed the ancient gates. The Palace is grand, imposing, so steeped in the atmospherics of power (beauty and menace) that it makes Buckingham Palace look like a block of flats. Later the sky cleared and turned luminous and the palace grounds became wildly pretty; for days the city glowed with a still, golden sheen, an autumnal radiance that turned the early dusk into a light show, long shadows cast by skyscrapers, low sun glancing off acres of mirror glass.

An app on my phone totted up walking distances: it got up to twenty kilometres a day. It's a vast city where people live crammed into tiny spaces, a ceremonious city, where a uniformed functionary (boiler suit, helmet, glowstick) bows low and guides you past road works. Such is the mania for formality that the fixing of one paving stone will entail a scene: cordons, signs, fencing, as if you would be lost if not guided around the tiniest obstacle, and you can't help wondering how New Zealand must seem to visiting Japanese tourists: a wildly unregulated free-for-all presumably, full of people who are friendly but ill-dressed, physically degenerate, staggeringly rude.

It was a year when I tried to find a method to quell my internal chaos, where I searched for something elusive that might have been called balance. It was a year when I realised I have only two modes, hyperactivity and exhaustion. With me, it seems, there is no middle way. I entertained a new idea: slowing myself down. I toyed with concepts like mindfulness and relaxation. I didn't get very far of course. Maybe in this, as in all things, I was in two minds.

Me and Germaine Greer

Let's begin with the tea towel. I was at primary school, one of three children of a stay-at-home mother. Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch had become a bestseller, and women's liberation was very much in the air. Back then, in our house and in the houses of my friends, one of many instances of domestic tyranny was the ironing pile. These days it seems to me a form of madness. Why iron a handkerchief or a pillow case at all? My own rule is iron nothing unless it's your own shirt. Ironing drove my mother crazy but it hadn't occurred to her to give it up. Dully, she flattened a hanky, a cloth napkin. She picked up a tea towel. And then she snapped. She stamped her foot, mangled the tea towel and shouted, "I hate being a housewife." Soon after, she'd embarked on the necessary training and got herself a career. The Female Eunuch had entered the collective consciousness and made the throwing down of the tea towel imperative and right. My mother did it gladly, and not a moment too soon.

“The personal is political", began Carol Hanisch's feminist memorandum of 1969. In the early days of the women's movement, Hanisch recalled, men "belittled us no end for trying to bring our so-called personal problems into the public arena – especially all those body issues like sex, appearance and abortion." A year later, Germaine Greer courageously laid bare those body issues in The Female Eunuch, a treatise on the lot of women that was idiosyncratic, hectoring, witty, angry and, for the times, quite inflammatory. Women read it and were exhilarated, threw down their ironing, hurled it across the room at their husbands. It's a book antique enough to contain this startling sentence, "That most virile of creatures, the [unrepeatable words describing an African man], has very little body hair at all", and unscientific enough to give us this gem: "Men's habit of wrapping their nether quarters in long garments has resulted in a wastage of the tissues which can be seen in the chicken legs which they expose on any British resort beach." The book is fascinating now because it fixes, with great clarity, an era and a voice. The fact that it's dated shows how far we've come. It seems an expression of Germaine Greer's deepest self, imaginative and personal as well as passionately political. It is famously the book that "changed lives."

In the course of making the personal political, feminism has tended to express itself in terms of memoir as much as polemic. Caitlin Moran, in her 2011 take on feminism, How to Be a Woman, shared details so intimate (on masturbation for example) that Germaine Greer wondered in a review whether Moran might live to regret casting off all vestiges of her privacy. Greer also complained (mildly) that Moran had spent pages talking about subjects Greer had covered herself many times, with no sense they'd been written about before. The elder feminist could take some wry, selfless satisfaction in little sister's complacent ingratitude: big sister is unappreciated, but her work has been done. (And Greer herself has been accused of disregarding her predecessors.)

The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

So much has been written about Sylvia Plath that reading her letters involves a continual reference beyond them, to all that's known about her life. As I grappled with this enormous, hardcover book, a volume so heavy that it needs some kind of stand (or derrick – of which more later) to hold it up, I found myself continually cross-referencing with my own copy of Plath's journals, in which a different version of her exists, the private Plath, whose voice sometimes rises to terrible rage, or sinks to a pitch of venom so intense it's almost frightening.

The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume 1: 1940-1956 is dauntingly vast, an exhaustive 1400-page archive containing every piece of correspondence Plath produced from the age of eight up until 1956. Most of the letters are addressed to her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, to whom Plath wrote most often, confiding in minute detail her daily experiences, her emotions, her illnesses and her diet. The letters are open, affectionate, warm, chatty, and full of every possible disclosure.

Reading with Plath's journals in mind, there's a strong sense of separation between layers of Sylvia.

We know from the outset that the happy, impulsive, affectionate young Sylvia of the letters, who writes, "Honestly, mum, I could just cry with happiness – I love this place so...", and signs off "XXX your happy girl, Sivvy," is also the author of the journals, and the writer who could produce her famous poem "Daddy", the most baleful and intense piece of black rage anyone could write about a parent. (A recording of Plath reading "Daddy" can be found online and is worth listening to for anyone who hasn't already: three minutes of hair-raising malevolence.)

Plath's attitude to her mother was complex, to put it mildly, and awareness of the complexity colours the reading of these hundreds of mundane, cheery mother-daughter communications. It's hard not to look for a fraying of the sunniness, some clue to tension. But there are no such clues, at least not at first, perhaps because Plath really did have different selves, discrete versions of herself.

When the brightness does fray and there's a plunge into darkness, the anger is directed inward, and Plath damages only herself. Her loving tone, her desperate, focused eagerness, remains undimmed.

The young Sylvia reports conscientiously from school camp. "Dear Mum..." "Dearest Mummy..." "Dearest, Most Revered, Twice-Honoured Mater, Last night was a red-letter night because I got two postcards and two nice big fat letters from you..."

Charlotte Grimshaw reports on the latest weird and turbulent week in Donald Trump's presidency: "The most powerful country in the world is at the mercy of someone so unfit for office that he shouldn't be running a gas station."

It was the end of summer on the east coast of America, and it was only getting hotter. By the Charles River in Boston it was nearly 40 degrees, the light was so bright it hurt, the river glittered and the sky was a high, washed-out blue. White dust blew up in little tornados on the river path.Here in the east, where the American colonial story began, Bostonians formed a revolt against British taxation. The Boston Tea Party, an anti-tax, anti-big government movement, would later reinvigorate itself, drag the Republican Party to the right, increase the partisan gulf in American politics, and finally give rise to the phenomenon of Donald Trump. It all began here; potentially (given the nature of Trump and the bigness of his nuclear button) it could end very badly indeed.I walked by the Charles River, all the way to Harvard University. This was the centre of American elitism where, I'd been assured, the reaction to Trump was one of horror. In a café, a woman frowned over a book on organic chemistry. Two men were discussing a legal precedent. I had my own reading, purchased at the Coop bookshop in Harvard Square (already 30% off): Omarosa Manigault-Newman's torrid account of her time in the Trump White House.Unhinged, by Omarosa: it's more coherent and readable than you'd expect. It's a story in which the abiding preoccupation is not politics but the American Dream of "making it", from humble beginnings to the centre of power. After growing up poor and successfully auditioning for The Apprentice, Omarosa went on, improbably, to win a senior position in the Trump Administration. The flaw in the dream, she came to realise, was that she'd made it into a madhouse.Reading Unhinged in Harvard, there was an unexpected element: comedy. Omarosa describes Vice President Mike Pence, the "Stepford Veep", spending an hour-and-a-half gazing adoringly at the back of Trump's head. She recounts Trump's reason for the firing of an aide: he disapproved of the way she'd installed his tanning bed in the West Wing; also she hated him deeply and wasn't able to hide it.Unhinged details creepy flirting between Trump and his daughter Ivanka that makes those around them squirm and wish they'd "knock it off." Trump pauses a high-level meeting so they can admire Ivanka's ass in a new tight skirt. In the Oval Office, Trump would talk to his old friend Omarosa in increasingly incoherent rants. During their Apprentice years, she recalls, he was sharp as a tack; now he's cognitively impaired, unable to read long words, or to concentrate. She estimates his reading age at 12 years old.

The first thing to say about The End, the sixth and final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's series, My Struggle, is that it's 1153 pages long. It's enormous and it's an conundrum, representing a struggle for the conscientious reviewer: first the task of concentrating on subject matter ranging from the minutiae of child-minding and housework to the Bible, to Joyce's Ulysses, to the poetry of Paul Celan, to Hitler's Mein Kampf, then the hours spent sorting through notes, heaving the giant volume about, trying to create an orderly response to each discrete topic while also, on another level, wondering what exactly it is that Knausgaard has achieved here, what the correct taxonomy should be, whether the book can be accurately described, whether there is a method to it, in the sense that he's been in control of the project all along, or whether he is simply (although not simply) a writer who has compulsively set about listing his thoughts, experiences, memories, relationships, in an undertaking that's original for its very disorderliness, its intrinsic lack of architecture and forward planning, a creation that's spilled out of him, forming itself into a thing that can be described in a bewildering number of ways: a chronicle of a writer's life, a dissertation on reality and art, an intellectual deconstruction of the civilisation around him, a love letter to his family, a study of male shame, an intimate description of living with his wife's bipolar disorder, a disturbingly relevant warning (first written in 2011, although only translated into English now) about the threat of nationalism and populism in Europe, a reminder that everyone in 2018 should be reading about the Weimar Republic, the rise of fascism in Europe in the thirties, the seduction of the German people by Hitler, the intricate ways that the Nazis used language to dehumanise the Jews, to create a society where they could be killed with no one questioning, because the new language didn't have space for them, they had been linguistically and conceptually erased.