Trendy But Casual

A Curator Speaks

The Guardian’s latest gambit for readers is called “Generation Y Takeover” (or “generation Y takeover” because lower-case is much more on-message). This means they’ve brought in various Gen-Y “digital trainees” to contribute pieces like “Why I’m taking my Spotify list public” and “Which 90s film character are you?” (subhead: “which 90s film character do you most relate to?”) and “The songs that soundtrack Generation Y.”

So far I’ve learned that soundtrack is a verb, that talking about who we “relate to” is acceptable in a once-respectable newspaper, and that one of the key questions of the day is: “Am I the only one who feels as though I have to make a definitive choice between: a) sharing my unfiltered listening habits with my Facebook friends and “followers” on Spotify, and b) forever pretending that only my carefully curated public listens exist?”

Someone at the Guardian should warn the digital trainee in question that articles beginning “Am I the only one who feels as though … ?” read like a parody in Private Eye.

Of course, I’m so Gen-X that I remember when we talked about “choosing” rather than “curating,” and writing rather than “documenting.” Remember those times? (Recently I read an article in which parents talked about letting their children “curate” the posters/objects for said children’s own bedrooms.)

If I were to curate/document a selection of “Am I the only one who feels as though …?” concerns in my life, these would include:

1. Am I the only one who feels as though the words of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” should be amended to: “It’s once, twice, thrice you are out at the old ball game?”

2. Am I the only one who feels as though the supporters of U.S. sports teams known for their red uniforms (e.g. St Louis Cardinals) should adopt the British fan-chant “Come on ye reds”?

3. Am I the only one who feels as though the last word to the Champions League theme song sounds like “huzzah” (rather than “champions”)?

4. Am I the only one who feels as though a selfie should be taken by the person in question, i.e. a self-portrait, and not just a cute picture of yourself taken by friend/professional photographer that you decide to post on Twitter?

I see that this particular cluster of concerns are mainly sports-related. Am I the only one who feels as though this … etc?

And now I must go and get on with my olden-days job, i.e. writing a book.

Olympic Spirit

I have just one week left of radiotherapy, after five weeks of being burned and zapped and prodded, and carrying around my green plastic shopping basket of clothes, and being asked to repeat my birth date and address, and being told to take a deep breath and relax into the table, every single day of the week. The only differences, day to day, occur when my treatment room, LA3, is running late, and they send me down to LA9, which is a bigger room and has a TV in its waiting area.

Every Tuesday, after my regular appointment, I have a meeting with a radiographer who asks me if I have any questions. I always say no, because everything is unfolding just as they predicted and described, in all its miserable banality. When something seems required other than nodding, I say that I feel tired all the time, and need to have naps every day. This, I’m told, is normal.

Of course, I do have questions. Why don’t any of the male patients have to wear the stripy gowns? Why are some patients in reception told they should “start drinking now”? Why do the radiographers always have such cold hands? Why is the TV outside LA9 always tuned to the Jeremy Kyle Show and not the Winter Olympics, like the one in reception? Why do people agree to go on the Jeremy Kyle Show, when they know he’ll make them look like fools? Are they lured by an all-expenses-paid trip to London? Would I go on the Jeremy Kyle Show if they offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to London – or Tokyo, say?

I don’t ask the radiographer any of these questions, though some days I’m tempted to ask the bus driver if it annoys him when someone dings the bell to request a stop, even though the bell has already been dinged.

At home, when I’m not groggy or trying to work on my book, TMiddy and I watch the Winter Olympics. Sometimes curling is on three channels at once, as though nothing else is happening that day. TM is disgruntled about the WO generally; they were better in the olden days, apparently, when Jean-Claude Killy was the star attraction. TM had a lab rat during his senior year of high school: he named it Jean-Claude Killy and created a Skinner box with a slope and a series of slalom gates.

TMiddy adopted a more positive attitude towards the Winter Olympics today when Finland knocked Russia out of the ice hockey. Overall, I’d say that I have more benign feelings towards the host nation, or maybe TM just lacks the Olympic spirit.

For example:

PM: How good to win in front of your home crowd!

TM: Even better to win in front of your Cold War enemy.

My Three Dots

This is a picture taken around 1893. It’s my great-great-grandmother, Rahui Te Kiri, with Ngapeka, the daughter of her first marriage, to Te Roa. My great-grandfather, Kiri Tenetahi Brown (Paraone) was a child of her second marriage, to Tenetahi.

In 1893 Rahui was probably in her 60s. She died in 1930, outliving Tenetahi and two of her sons, including my great-grandfather. I was looking at her will the other day and saw my grandmother’s name listed there, Hene Te Kiri Paraone. Grandma was in her late 20s when Rahui died, and already married to my grandfather. I wish I’d asked them more questions.

Rahui’s will is signed with her mark, a shaky X. It’s hard to see in the photograph above, but Rahui had a signature of a different kind, the moko (tattoo) on her face. The grooves in her skin were made with various plain and serrated chisels, either made of bone or metal.

My great-grandmother, Grace Tihoi Amos, didn’t have a moko; neither did my grandmother or any of her sisters. For them, its visual language no longer held the same currency. My grandmother, Jane (Hene), and her sisters Bella (Pera), Tottie (Rihi Paea), Roto (Rotorua) and Grace (Kerehi) attended school in Pakiri and learned how to write their names in English.

The only tattoo I saw I up close when I was a child belonged to my grandfather, Alf. He had a bird on his forearm: a sea bird, I think, blue and not very detailed. When I was small I liked to look at it and trace my fingers across it, but he was shy about it; maybe he didn’t want to give me any ideas.

I’m not keen on contemporary moko that turns what was a language, a precise series of signals about status and kinship and particular skills, into decorative gibberish. But then, I never thought I’d get a tattoo at all.

This month I got three tattoos – blue dots, made with a needle rather than a chisel. (“You’ll feel a  sharp scratch,” the radiographer said, because this is now the medical euphemism for something piercing and painful.) These dots are there to guide the green lines beaming down onto what one of my friends calls the sun bed. It’s like Braille for a machine, I guess, a language of a different kind.

My three dots seem so pathetic compared with the marks on Rahui’s chin, something that implied great pride and great pain. She had a moko; I have an ellipsis. Every morning I go to Weston Park Hospital for the machine to read the dots, and to zap between the lines. (I’m using top medical terminology here; after all, I AM a doctor.) Unlike a moko, my dots can be hidden away; they’re a secret that thousands of us carry around, written on the body, along with a strange rectangle of tan. Though this must go on all over the world, it feels like a peculiarly British thing to me at the moment – the polite tattoo, discreet and easily hidden, whispering its coded language every morning on a hard table, in a cold room.

When the radiotherapy ends at the end of February, I get to keep the three dots. Hopefully, unlike Cheryl Cole, I won’t become addicted to the “sharp scratch” and decide to add a few dozen roses. I hope I’ll never come to think of tattoo as decoration. I hope that the three dots will be my only souvenir.

 

 

 

Sequels, of sorts

Occasionally I don't want to let characters go. Some of the characters in Hibiscus Coast, my second novel, reappeared in the short story "Red Christmas," and sometimes I think about writing a sequel to the whole novel. Readers of my YA books (readers of all YA books, perhaps) are obsessed with sequels, emailing or writing to demand one, and often suggesting plot lines. I've written one sequel so far - Unbroken, which takes up the story of Ruined a year on - and I'd quite like to do a sequel to Dark Souls set in Barcelona or Seville.

This blog is named for my third novel, Trendy But Casual. I really like this book a lot. Is it wrong for an author to admit that? I often think about its heroine, Jane Shore, and her dysfunctional family and friends.

I miss them all, and I like writing parody and satire more than anything else, really. So, for a while I've been plotting a comeback for Jane that's a different sort of sequel. A blog, which she'll update several times a week: she'll be much more assiduous than I am here! It's about her true calling in life, PR, and the people she meets, events she attends, and extreme opinions she holds on all things pop-cultural. Real celebrities are mentioned, but it's all fiction, of course - like all those magazine covers that claim Jennifer Aniston is pregnant and Brangelina are getting married this weekend. (And that Daily Mail article last week that said women should get their hair cut short when they turn 46.)

The blog and all its post headings are references to Human League songs and lyric lines. Please visit! And if you're ever wondering WWACD? (What Would a Celebrity Do?), please send Jane a question. She's going to start including Reader Letters next week.

The blog is everybodyneedstwoorthreefriends.com

For those of you unable to sleep at night for worry about my health: I still have the boot, one crutch, lots of ugly stitches, and a broken, swollen foot. Today I had to go back in for a chat with Dr Dan, handsome and gruff as ever. I thought that Dr Dan was surly and antisocial, but now I just think he's taking the blunt Yorkshireman thing a little too far.

Today he actually said my name, rather than just standing in the doorway, glowering at me, as he did last time. "Mrs Morris!" he called.

My mother used to talk about how odd it was, hearing herself called "Mrs Morris." She said she thought people were referring to my grandmother. Part of me is glad to be carrying on the Mrs Morris tradition, but most of me would prefer to be called Ms Morris, or Dr Morris, or Paula, or some friendly variation on the latter.

So I began telling Dr Dan that I'm not Mrs Morris, actually.

"I call all women Mrs!" he barked. They get offended, he claims, if he calls them Ms or Miss. Really? REALLY?

Don't argue with Dr Dan, especially when he's got your broken foot in his hand, and holds the power of painkillers.

I think he warmed to me by the end of our appointment, despite my lack of a correct womanly title, and even gave me a pat on the shoulder before I hobbled off. That's the South Yorkshire equivalent of two kisses.

At the hospital they call me Mrs Morris as well, though I've asked them to change it on my records. The Royal Bank of Scotland unilaterally decided to issue me a debit card in the name of "Miss Paula Morris." Waitrose sent me a card printed with "Ms Morris" - no first name, no initials.

Sky sends Tom letters addressed to "Ms Paula and Tom Morris-Moody" that begin "Dear Tom Morris-Moody." But at least we seem to have left the mysterious Morris P. Moody behind in the US.

 

My Left Foot

I'm out of action at the moment. This is what my left foot looked like on Sunday night:

A surgeon hacked away at it on Monday, and now it looks like this:

 

Apparently underneath all the bandaging and stitches, my foot is straighter. In a couple of months, according to my friend, Deborah Keyser, I will be a foot model.

In the meatime, I have to lie still for a few days and creak around on crutches. I'm not allowed to take a shower or bath for two weeks (!), but I am forced to take a lot of pain killers, and - an added bonus -  to watch multiple episodes of Say Yes to the Dress: Bridesmaids on TLC without feeling as though I am committing a crime against my brain cells.

However, after some channel roaming today, watching people on TV buy a house, try on dresses, consider moving abroad, wrestle with their inferior parenting skills, resist and then succumb to a makeover, and/or cook something that allegedly only takes 15 minutes to make, I'm not exactly Proust lying in a cork-lined room. TMiddy rebelled at one point. "You and I are perfectly suited in every way," he said, "except when it comes to television."

But this isn't normal television: it's sickbed television. In the past, this meant Terms of Endearment or Adventures in Babysitting. (Later it was Under the Tuscan Sun or The Devil Wore Prada.) But it's hard to find movies like these for free on British TV.

I recorded Letters to Juliet last week to save for yesterday, when I knew I'd be lying around in a codeine-enhanced haze, but I only managed fifteen minutes of that before hitting delete on the remote. It was too crummy even for sickbed television! Either silly, soppy movies that insult women's intelligence are getting worse or I'm getting more discerning - and I think we all know that the latter isn't true. I don't even think I could have watched it on a plane, and that's saying something: I watched Sex and the City I on a plane, and (even worse) Eat Pray Love. Once I watched Apocalypto on someone else's screen two rows up, i.e. without sound, and felt as though I wasn't missing anything.

We have a ton of DVDs here at home to watch, but my attention span isn't up to a Fassbinder or Roberto Rossellini festival quite yet. It's not even up to the last four episodes of Arne Dahl. I watched some of The White Queen this afternoon, looking up the biographies of characters on my phone at the same time to pretend the whole exercise was educational.

Maybe tomorrow I'll feel like reading again, and getting on with some work. I have a poem up online today - something I never thought I'd say. But this week I also agreed to have my left foot broken, pins inserted, a bone shaved off, etc, so who knows what I'll do next?

It's Not About You

I need to write some sort of extended article or essay on the various uses of second-person narrative in fiction. (Yes, I really need to!) Maybe after I finish writing this novel - novels pay better than rants on point of view. But yesterday I was moved to write to the Comments editor of the Guardian about a piece on second-person in that day's paper. Though it pains me, here's the link to it.

The writer of the piece (Iowans: remember how Marilynne Robinson used the word "piece" when she didn't want to concede something was a story?) is mainly talking about blogs, but gives various examples from fiction and seems to suggest that the 'internet' is culprit for the use of second-person in stories and novels. Much as I love to blame the internet for its many crimes - like me knowing anything at all about the Kardashian family, or students being able to contact me at weekends and to address me as "hey" - I don't really think we can add use of the second-person to its list. Can't we just go back to the good old days when everyone blamed Lorrie Moore?

Anyway, here's what I wrote to the editor, for filing in the Guardian's bin:

Dear Comment Editor,

Morven Crumlish in today's paper (Saturday 6 July 2013) is making a very basic error: misreading second-person fiction. The "you" in a second-person story by, say, Junot Diaz is not supposed to be you-the-reader. It's a narrator who's talking about him- or herself, but in a way that suggests alienation from the events described, or emotional/ironic distance.

When Diaz was asked why he'd chosen second-person for his story 'Miss Lola' - published in the New Yorker last year - he explained: 'I really needed distance from this story. Every time I wrote in the first person it was just too close. Tried third person, but that flopped as well. Second person ended up being the only way to get through. I guess I wanted my narrator to be “in” the story, but also to be able to comment on his younger self a little.'

A famous example from the (pre-internet!) 80s is Jay McInerney's BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY. The opening lines are: 'You are not the kind of guy who would be  at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.'

We readers aren't supposed to think that WE are the person at a nightclub in NYC, taking vast amounts of cocaine and about to lose our job, etc. The second-person narrator is observing his own out-of-control life, unable to cope with the trauma he keeps hidden from readers for most of the book, the death of his mother.

Sure, Lorrie Moore - also famous for using the second-person before the internet 'inspired this shift in writing style' - employed it in a different way in her 1985 collection SELF-HELP: she told the Paris Review that she used 'the mock imperative of the second person' in part 'to satirize formally the idea of advice and a culture of advice.' But again, I don't think someone reading 'How to Be an Other Woman' (for example) will think it's about anyone but that character, Charlene, and her particular situation. Again, here's the opening: 'Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim’s Fifty-seventh Street window, press your face close to the glass, watch the fake velvet Hummels inside revolving around the wing tips; some white shoes, like your father wears, are propped up with garlands on a small mound of chemical snow.'

When we read stories like this, we do not have, as Morven Crumlish contends, the 'understanding that you are in the same clique as the writer.' We don't have to relate to things we're reading, or identify with characters in a story or novel. As she points out, we should not only read 'content that speaks so directly and without conflict to your own experience.' But I doubt that Junot Diaz is expecting us to live the life of a Dominican-American young man, or that his (very wide) readership is part of his 'clique.' I doubt that Lorrie Moore cares whether the reader is a woman or has even been to New York. Most fiction writers want as many readers as possible, not just readers who happen to share an age, gender or geography with a particular character. Like much good fiction, these stories bristle with vivid and particular detail, bringing into focus worlds that may be very alien - in time, place, experience - to a reader.

I can't address the 'confessional journalism' to which Morven turns in her piece, but please reassure her about the second-person narrative in fiction: it's not all about us!

Best wishes,

Paula Morris
Fiction Writer-in-Residence,
University of Sheffield

Oh yes - I invoked the job title! This always works in Britain. When I taught in Scotland, I sent a job-titled email to the Edinburgh Lit Festival, asking to chair some sessions - based on my experience at chairing writers (like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Monica Ali, Tash Aw, Peter Ho Davies, Tea Abreht, Kate Grenville, etc) in other festivals - I received ... hmm, no reply at all.

 

Packing, and Playing with Dolls

 

We’re packing up in preparation for the move from Glasgow to Sheffield, interspersed with showing prospective tenants around the flat and obsessive readings of the IKEA catalogue. Also, on Friday evening, we went to see the film ARGO, which I enjoyed very much. (And the setting inspired me to read a particular short story on Saturday - #54 in the list.)

The story-reading goes on, of course, despite all the distractions.

Story #49: ‘Pornography’ by Ian McEwan (1978)

Story #50: ‘Starring Gary Cooper’ by William Gay (2013)

Story #51: ‘Angel Baby Blues’ by Wanda Coleman (1987)

Story #52: ‘Only the Dead Know Brooklyn’ by Thomas Wolfe (1935)

Story #53: ‘The Pedestrian’ by Ray Bradbury (1953)

Story #54: ‘Tehran Calling’ by Nam Le (2008)

Story #55: “Grand Froid’ by Paul Emond (2011)

Today we were sorting through tubs and boxes, and packing things to take down to Sheffield this week when I go down for work. Of course, while TMiddy laboured and cleaned and packed, I was concerned with the most important things.

There was a short interruption so I could do some remedial hair-brushing (of  dolls’ hair, not my own), and a bout of dressing-up.

 

These dresses were made for my dolls by my great-aunt, Auntie Violet, sometime in 1980, when I was fourteen. The white dress was made with scraps from my sister’s wedding dress; the pink dress was made with leftover pieces from my own bridesmaid dress.

Those dresses that Auntie made, and the clothes my grandmother made seven or so years earlier for my then-new Barbie, are among my most treasured things. I was so delighted to get these, and conscious – even then – of how much time and care had gone into them. What I didn’t realize, I think, was the love that went into them as well.

If you’re wondering why I was still playing with dolls when I was fourteen, you should know that I continued for some years after that. I should never have given them up.

In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

Much of this week was consumed by illness, which continues to nibble at my time and occasionally to gnaw huge chunks of it: I can’t get up in the morning, and want to spend all my afternoons sleeping. This week my ears were painful, aching the way they did when my brother and I were children and spent too much time in the water.

But among all the sleeping and dreaming there was also time for a snowy train trip down to Sheffield and back – to teach – and time to read some stories.

39: ‘Defender of the Faith’ by Philip Roth (1959)

40: ‘Ashes’ by Cristina Henriquez (2006)

41: ‘A Fire at Sea’ by Turgenev (1883)

42: ‘Super Goat Man’ by Jonathan Lethem (2004)

43: ‘The Imposter’ by Nathaneal West (c. 1931)

44: ‘The Sins of the Wolf’ by Lasha Bugadze (2010)

45: ‘Bella-Vista’ by Colette (1937)

46: ‘Helix’ by Banana Yoshimoto (1993)

47: ‘Golden Land’ by William Faulkner (1935)

48: ‘The Real Thing’ by Diana Athill (1958)

Reading a story a day is a good discipline for me, I think, as well as introducing me to new writers and making me delve deeper into the work of writers I think I know. It means I have to read some obscure things by writers with whom I’m quite familiar; it also means I’m addressing some horrible gaps in my reading. I mean, I should have read ‘Bella-Vista,’ one of Colette’s most famous stories, by now.  (How late it was, how late.)

All this sleeping has brought with it some strange dreams featuring famous people. In one, a surly Steve Coogan threatened me with legal action if I continued writing my own Alan Partridge scripts to entertain my friends; he even sent Rob Brydon over to warn me off. In another, I suspected Everton manager David Moyes of planning to murder me. These dreams of malign public figures may relate to something I’ve been plotting for a while, a blog ‘written’ by Jane Shore, the protagonist of Trendy But Casual. Jane is still a publicist, but these days she has a number of very famous clients. Maybe I’m worried about the trouble Jane’s indiscreet revelations may cause. Like the time Kierkegaard said bad things about Hegel and Goethe, and they sent Rob Brydon over to warn him off.

'In the Land of Dreamy Dreams' is  the title of the first story collection by Ellen Gilchrist, by the way, which I encourage you to seek out.

Habits, hobbies, resolutions

Recently TM told me that my hobbies were not actual hobbies. A harsh verdict, I feel. My hobbies are watching TV while lying down (in bed or on sofa); doing jigsaws; and being driven around in cars. What’s wrong with these?

I don’t count reading and writing as hobbies. They’re work. Enjoyable and rewarding work, but still. And they’re more than work, of course, more than hobbies. They’re a necessary part of every day.

My other interests, by the way, include cooking; browsing the marketplace/eating Swedish meatballs at IKEA; looking up Merrill paper dolls and coloring books on Ebay; and turning this year’s Christmas cards into next year’s gift tags. But I don’t know that any of these count as hobbies, really. Especially the IKEA one, as I get to go there so rarely. (We don’t have a car, and anyway, you have to keep the magic alive.)

One of my new year’s resolutions has more to do with work than hobbies. It’s to read a short story every day. A published short story: student work doesn’t count. (Students will understand.) No particular rules to this resolution, though I’m trying to read as much as possible that’s new to me, and I hope to range around in time and country of origin throughout the year.

Not much ranging has been possible so far. Because I’ve been traveling – in the US, hence American spelling here – most of the stories this past week have been found on the New Yorker web site. I’ve been doing research on Jean Rhys at the University of Tulsa library, thanks to a Carnegie Grant. It’s been an enormously productive week, with the added benefit of proximity to Route 66 and fantastic Tex-Mex food. Here is a picture of Tulsa.

Today is the fourteenth day of January, so I’ve read fourteen short stories.

Stories so far:

1.  ‘In the Penal Colony’ by Kafka (1914; published 1919).

2. ‘Love in the Slump’ by Evelyn Waugh (1932).

3. ‘The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor’ by Deborah Eisenberg (1994).

4. ‘Heaven-Hell’ by Jhumpa Lahiri (2008).

5. ‘The Immortal’ by Jorge Luis Borges (1949).

6. ‘The Lost Order’ by Rivka Galchen (2013).

7. ‘Night Out 1925’ by Jean Rhys (published in 1976 but written much earlier).

8, ‘Creative Writing’ by Edgar Keret (2012).

9: ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ by George Saunders (2012).

10: ‘Elsie by Starlight’ by John Updike (2004).

11: ‘Paper Losses’ by Lorrie Moore (2006).

12: ‘Starlight’ by Ann Beattie (2011).

13: ‘Bull’ by Mo Yan (2012).

14: ‘Experience’ by Tessa Hadley (2013).

I will not be impudent enough to give reviews of any story or – horror of horrors – assign a star rating. If I were in charge of things in the world, as I so clearly should be, I would force everyone to go cold turkey on star ratings for a while. Just a few months, maybe, so people could take a break from pronouncing their opinions and verdicts and prejudices, and deciding whether they liked something or not, and lying awake at night pondering whether they need to deduct half a star because there aren’t enough special features on a DVD …

But I guess I can share some favorite quotes without violating the review rule. So far: ‘Nothing can happen in England’ (Waugh) and ‘Actually have never been to Europe myself. Dad felt portion sizes there too small’ (Saunders).

Please join me in my story-reading hobby-resolution-thing, even if it’s just for a week or a month. I’ll keep updating my list here. You can send me story suggestions as well, but I may not pay any attention. There are enough short stories in anthologies and collections on our book shelves to keep me busy for several years, and TM keeps Suggesting Things, needless to say.

By the way, during a recent Skype session with a class in Illinois, the librarian told me that my hobbies are quite similar to those of her students – especially being driven around in cars. But she pointed out that this is because they are eighth-graders, and too young to drive themselves.

 

While You Were Sleeping

Or, perhaps, while I was not blogging here, I was blogging elsewhere.

Since I last posted, I've had some interesting and difficult times, and some of the more interesting (and least difficult) involved trips to Germany. Rangatira has been published in German, and I've been over there four times this northern summer - Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne. This week TMiddy and I head off to Frankfurt for the Book Fair and then, after a quick return to Glasgow so I can teach some classes, we fly to Switzerland for the Zofingen Festival. Unbelievably, because of the busy-ness of my schedule, I had to say no to readings in Zurich and Vienna. I've never been to Vienna, and desperately want to go - not just to eat Sachertorte, though obviously that's the chief draw - but the timing just didn't work out.

So it's off to Frankfurt now, and to a complicated schedule and (no doubt) to an overwhelming experience at the Book Fair. The theme of the NZ Guest of Honour programme at Frankfurt this year is While You Were Sleeping - coincidentally the title of my favourite Sandra Bullock movie - but I doubt we'll be getting much sleep there, especially if all all sixty New Zealand authors are staying at the same hotel. Will Fergus Barrowman lure us into evil-doing involving late nights at the hotel bar? Will I forget to change the time on my phone so I'm an hour late to every interview, as I was in Berlin? Most important of all, will there be time to go shopping at Kaufhof?

I've promised TMiddy that I'm going to write a Frankfurt diary for this blog, after the official opening of the New Zealand Pavilion, when I write my final blog post for the FBF site. That's where I've been posting for the past few months. The first was about how New Zealand is not Venezuela; the next was about the New Zealand Post Book Awards. Later in August I wrote about Maori novelists, and in September about taking part in the Long Night of Maori Stories at the Berlin Festival. My most recent post was about my reading in Cologne with Sarah Quigley.

Despite my recent travails - anxiety, depression - I'm looking forward to Frankfurt very much. As well as various readings and discussions, I'll be taking part - for or the first and possibly only time in my life - in the same interview series as a Nobel winner, Herta Mueller. Not at the same time, you understand, but still: we'll sit on the same blue sofa ...