When Fiona Sussman arrived in New Zealand, her husband-to-be whisked her off to walk the Milford Track and afterwards presented her with a big box of Central Otago cherries.
"I thought I’d arrived in heaven."
Sussman, who was born and brought up in apartheid South Africa, was in the middle of her medical studies when she met her Italian doctor husband-to-be, who was about to emigrate to New Zealand.
"I knew nothing about New Zealand but I was in love."
That was 33 years ago and Sussman has not looked back.
"In some ways I have come full circle."
She grew up in a household full of books, as her father was a publisher.
"We had these amazing authors coming through our home and our home was always full of books and manuscripts. I had a love of the written word from early on. My brother and I used to write plays and produce them. For a long time I knew I wanted to do something with words but I didn’t know if it was expressly being a writer. "
But when her father became ill with stomach cancer, the doctor who looked after him was very inspiring.
"He was a remarkable man and very involved in testifying against the government when detainees were tortured in custody. He was someone I really revered. I guess the seed was planted."
So when she finished her bachelor of arts degree she went on to study medicine and completed her studies in New Zealand.
"I really, really loved it. I was passionate about it. To me it was a vocation."
However, when she had children she felt conflicted. She really wanted to be a hands-on mum but also wanted to give her all to medicine.
"At the same time I had a growing urge to have a creative outlet. For so long I’d been reading medical journals and just using one side of my brain."
Sussman decided to take a year out to be home with her children and write a book.
"One year, became two, became 20 and I think some people manage part-time medicine well. For me, it had to be one or the other. For a while I felt quite bereft at having turned my back on medicine and some of that was appeased a little bit by helping my husband set up a charitable surgical service. "
Over the years the writing has gained "traction".
"I love it. I write every day. I get very irritable if I’m not writing."
She started out writing during school hours with the answerphone turned on. "Then I’d let the world intrude."
These days she has kept up that discipline, writing every weekday between 8am and 5pm mixing up her time with mentoring creative writing students and administration work.
"I heard the other day, an author saying because of that your subconscious continues to work on your story. I’ll often reach a hurdle or a difficult spot and I’ll wake up a couple of days later and the problem will be solved in my head. I think by working every day your brain is working on things in the background."
Ideas often come to her just as she is dozing off or if she is out and about.
"I used to love it when we had cheque books as I’d always make quick little notes on chits of cheques. I’m a bit of a Luddite, I still do handwritten notes."
"That is often the emotional impetus for the book. I get various ideas and they get deposited away to compost. Some die a slow death and others declare themselves as a story that will go the distance."
The inspiration for her latest book The Doctor’s Wife is not as clear but she thinks it grew out of the preoccupation she has with the idea of losing one’s mind and one’s sense of self and control over what one does.
"I myself have a very poor memory. I’ve always been struck by idea potentially lose limb or have gallbladder removed but essentially you are the same, but were there to be disease process of brain, the shell of you might be exactly the same but the very essence of you would be lost."
Normally with Sussman’s books to date, the story leads the way and the genre gets put on it after the fact.
"I never write to a particular genre.
"When my second book won a crime writing award at Ngaio Marsh I was completely gobsmacked. I didn’t see it as a traditional crime novel."
As a result of the 2017 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel for The Last Time We Spoke she was invited to a crime writing festival in Stirling called Bloody Scotland.
"It was there I really discovered the incredible breadth of writing that falls under the banner of crime fiction, from your cosy murder mysteries and police procedurals right over to more literary crime novels."
She came home from the festival with the express purpose of writing a more traditional crime novel and so The Doctor’s Wife evolved.
It is the first time in any of her novels that she has drawn on her medical background.
"I’ve previously addressed morally complex medical questions in my short stories but for me it was quite satisfying to thread together these slightly disparate careers I’ve had."
This time though, she called on what she learnt about human nature practising as a doctor and a general practitioner. Her knowledge of how the medical world works, jargon and medical terminology also made it easier to write about.
"I think when people are sick they are often at their most raw and vulnerable and it is a huge privilege to journey alongside them. A lot of artifice is shed and people are honest and authentic when they are unwell, so you learn a huge amount."
Sussman’s writing career began with short stories but she also finds they provide a break when writing novels, allowing things to percolate.
"I really enjoy the variation. In many ways I really honed or learnt my craft doing short stories. I find short stories can be harder. There is no room for flab, as it were, every word has to fight to be on the page and so a lot of the power of a short story is in what is not said but implied and so I guess I found that really useful when writing a novel."
As well as learning the craft, short stories also helped her "unwittingly" build a literary curriculum vitae to show publishers when she approached them about her first novel. She won the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Award for Mad Men, and A Breath, A Bunk, A Land, A Sky was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2020.
"When I started my first novel I had no idea if I was going to be any good at it. You sit for hours alone in your study. Initially there is no feedback as you are not showing your work to anyone. So when I started to write short stories I’d send them out to competitions or radio I got some feedback from a competition judge. That was like gold."
Her latest book is now out in the world and Sussman is thinking there could be a future for the detective duo featured in the book.
"I have it on good authority they would like to solve some more mysteries in New Zealand, so I think this might become the first of a few books in a series, which is quite exciting."
It will be her first series.
"Each book still has to be written as a stand alone story but the characters are developing over time as their story continues over time. So there will be some challenges for that. I have begun and I’m quite excited."
TO SEE:
Fiona Sussman The Doctor’s Wife, December 2 at 6pm, The Merchant of Clyde Cafe and Bar at Olivers of Clyde.
