Since Emily Perkins' 1996 debut Not Her Real Name and Other Stories was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Award and claimed the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, she has established herself as one of New Zealand’s most important contemporary writers. Her latest work The Forrests is an epic that follows the eponymous dysfunctional family across the globe.
In your early years, you left school for acting, only to be followed by years of waitressing. How has acting, waitressing and writing inspired you respectively?
Acting and waitressing were wonderfully social - I learned a lot about people from both, and also learned a lot in my acting training that I now bring to my writing and teaching.
Writing is deliciously solitary, the horizons and what you want to be able to achieve with it are always extending. I've always loved reading - I sort of grew up in books - and my love of writing feels like a natural extension of that. I only began to think of it as something I could do with my life, though, after taking a creative writing paper at university with a brilliant teacher.
What messages are you trying to convey in The Forrests?
I was interested in so many things, and I hope some of them have come off the page for the reader. I was wanting to go deep into the bliss of physical sensation, and the ways in which writing can evoke sense memory in a reader. The story was driven by my interest in the strangeness of families, love, loss, the effects of time on our lives - just how we live in the moment when anything at all might happen from one second to the next.
What things do you think matter most in a woman's life?
What a great and provocative question! Freedom. The freedom to define herself - just about impossible in the extremely gendered world we live in. After that, it depends on the woman.
What are your most satisfactory works so far?
I think your relationship with your work changes over time, and you always have the surprise of what appears in the work - or is missing - that you didn't expect. So there's no one answer but there are things about The Forrests that make me happy.
Could you tell us something about what you are working on at the moment?
I've got a couple of script projects on the go - one is a screen adaptation of another novel (not one of mine) and another is a stage play. Very different challenges. Sometimes I wonder what on earth I am doing!
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