"This is so weird," Barbara Else says as she walks in the door, looking as elegant as ever, thick silver hair casually tousled, a slight edge with her leopard skin pants and pink socks and red shoes. "What is?" I ask. "Being interviewed by your best friend," she says. One of your best, I think, because Barbara has a rich collection of friends, although it took her a long time to learn how to make them, she says in her memoir, Laughing at the Dark. A matter of finding the right tribe, she explains, as she describes literary lunches in Wellington. Friends much missed when Barbara and husband Chris Else moved to Dunedin. But we have started up a book club and lunches here, so there is compensation.
I usher Barbara into our front room. After an examination of our changing age-related shapes, we settle down to discussing Barbara’s successful career as a writer of novels, both for adults, and children, plays and as an editor of collections of non-fiction and short stories for children. Is it slightly annoying that she writes damn good poems as well? She doesn’t mention the poems in her memoir, but she has a natural ear for poetry. Last year, she told me she was rewriting the clunky sentences in her memoir and that is a sign of a good writer, recognising clunkiness and rewriting. Barbara has always been a writer, attuned to story and character. At 3 she invented an imaginary friend, Susan. When her father accidentally broke a window and blamed Susan in jest, 4-year-old Barbara was outraged. Susan was hers alone, but now she had to be sent on her way. Telling Chris one day, "I was a horrible child," Chris reframed it for her, saying she took back control. Gave the story her own ending.
"Chris believes in me more than I believe in myself," she says, and means it. "Whenever I say ‘I can’t do that can I’, he’ll say, ‘why not?’. It’s remarkable. He makes me do more than I think I can." They do not compete, either in Wordle or in writing. It helps if a man is secure and sure of himself, I say.
Fair to say, this wasn’t the case with her first marriage to academic physician husband Jim. In a counselling session, Jim said he was offended by much of her writing. The only option Barbara could see to make him happy, was to give up writing and become a good wife, cleaning and making muffins. After years of being ignored and belittled, when she left him, he said it was a shame. He’d just got funding to pay her to do his filing. Barbara is quick to point out that our generation, men and women alike, were trained towards supporting the patriarchy. Men were victims of it too.
One benefit of writing a memoir is that it can open unexamined memories for everyone in the family. Barbara and her younger sister wondered why all three sisters had broken marriages and concluded that their father, though strict and disapproving of divorce, was a kind man who respected women. They didn’t know how to cope with anyone less than kind.
She was 21 when she had her first child, who became Dunedin writer Emma Neale. Feminism was in the air, but not yet in most marriages. Jim was surprised when he read a play of Barbara’s. "How do you know so much when all you do is stay at home," he asked her. Barbara writes, "I’m shocked. It’s a tiny comment — it’s a huge comment." Obviously, he hadn’t noticed that Barbara was a listener, an observer with a keen sense of the ridiculous.
"Were you encouraged to write at school and by your parents," I ask. She mentions the offhand praise she received when she won an essay prize at Epsom Girls Grammar. As a young married woman, her father expressed doubt that being published in literary magazine Pilgrims, would do Barbara any good. "I think it was because there was a photo in it of a young woman poet standing with a motorbike." Probably Jan Kemp, we speculate, because this was a time when women writers were few and far between. So, an achievement to have a story published but a worry to parents, most likely afraid of bohemians.
"I didn’t have any intention of writing a memoir," Barbara says. "But I started to write down tiny little memories, because I wondered why I became so silent when I went to school. When I was 8, a teacher suggested to my parents that they send me to drama lessons." It worked to a certain extent, but Barbara admits to still being shy with strangers. "I freeze up," she says. Not unusual amongst writers who tend towards introspection, we agree.
It’s a luxury I always think for writers to possess the skills and time to examine their past lives. But still, Barbara was unsure, running her first draft past family and writers, including myself, to make sure she wasn’t being self-indulgent. This worry, even for a professional, is possibly a throwback to the way most of us were brought up, not to blow your own trumpet, not to take up too much airtime, let alone reading time. Especially so for girls. But still, she was aware that some might perceive she had a privileged life in some ways. "But when everything else is stripped away, when there are no money, cultural, or racial differences, when you are still unhappy, the misogyny becomes clearer," she says.
Not self-indulgent, we early manuscript readers said. Her story had relevance and meaning to many, particularly baby boomers, but also our daughters, who might not believe a husband would ban the feminist magazine, Broadsheet from the house.
In New Zealand, even when you publish a bestseller, as Barbara has done with The Warrior Queen and Go Girl, you still must earn a living. Barbara and Chris Else run Total Fiction Services, a well-respected literary agency and manuscript assessment service. With no intention of retiring, Barbara writes in the morning and does assessing work in the afternoon.
I remember an occasion 20 odd years ago when my partner Philip Temple and I stayed with them in Wellington for a few days. I didn’t know her well. "I must warn you," she said, "I don’t talk in the mornings, not even to Chris." Crikey, I thought, she’s serious about her writing. I remind her of this comment, and she laughs and says the next morning we crept out of the house, without saying goodbye, like field mice, not wanting to get caught. "I felt bad," she said. At the time I felt daunted, but now she explains that on that same visit she had a call from her older sister telling Barbara she had breast cancer. So, she’s excused.
We talk more about our common experience of living with a writer husband. Chris and Barbara swear they still stick to their long-established routine, having separate coffee pots, getting their own breakfasts and lunches, and not talking until 5.30 in the evenings when they have a drink and discuss the day’s work. Just like any couple going out to work, but their separate offices are not all that far apart. They have introduced Wordle into their routines, but completing them separately and not discussing their results.
"Poor Philip," I say. "I am sure he would like such silence, but I am rather too keen on talking." Barbara laughs. "That’s because you write poetry and are inspired by what’s going on around you," she says, "while I need time to process and think about things, rather than expressing myself immediately. It probably goes back to being shy."
Barbara’s writing of an adult novel in 2019 became, understandably, derailed by her serious cancer diagnosis. Along with other friends I visited, bringing morsels of food, sweetcorn fitters one day when she couldn’t leave the house. I wanted to fatten her up, but she wasn’t up to eating.
"Some days I could write snippets of memories on my laptop while lying down," she says. "So that’s what I did."
At one stage she was given three to six months to live. She was so dazed and ill that she couldn’t be all that unhappy about the prospect, but she certainly didn’t want to leave her loved ones. "I did think if I died before Chris, I wouldn’t have to learn how to do my taxes as he always does them." We laugh, and again, I think the ability to laugh in the face of adversity is a gift. Chemo didn’t work, but she got on a drug trial and survived.
The cancer story is lightly woven around the snippets of memory. To her surprise, and despite gruelling side effects, the memoir got finished. She is a dedicated writer after all, making use of all her imagination and experiences in one form or another.
I become a little derailed myself by the theory that lots of events in Barbara’s life have accidental beginnings, accidentally buying a house, accidentally writing children’s books, accidentally becoming a feminist. I mistakenly believed the working title of her memoir was An Accidental Feminist. "No. Not accidental," she says. "Undercover, because I didn’t dare talk about feminism." Undercover seems entirely appropriate for the way the characters in Barbara’s adult novel take subversive actions against their misogynist educated husbands.
"You have chosen not to name some who were badly behaved. Is it because you are still a good girl, at heart?" I ask. Unwilling to shame writers who took up more than their allotted time at readings, made unwelcome advances or were crass and cruel at a writing course. "No," Barbara says, "I didn’t want them to take up too much space. They are not worth naming." Ouch.
"Why didn’t you continue with play writing?" I ask. "You could have become a female Roger Hall, albeit with a sharper edge."
"I stopped when I got together with Chris," she says. "Mainly because with plays, you have to go out at night, and I didn’t want to. I like being at home with Chris." A true love story then. They’ve been together for 34 years since Barbara drove across Wellington one fateful day. As friend Linda Burgess pointed out, Chris is the hero of her memoir.
The first sentence in the book is one word only, laughter. It’s a motto of sorts, a way of approaching the world. Barbara attributes it to her father’s sense of mischief and her mother’s saying, "look on the funny side in the face of disaster". The cover photo shows Barbara, in 1967 as a young student at the University of Otago channelling Emma Peel from The Avengers. Many wanted to be Emma Peel then, tall and sexy and holding a weapon. Barbara is looking over her shoulder, a fierce gaze, as if challenging anyone who might get in her way. Not quite how it turned out for Barbara. I’ve never seen her with a physical weapon, just observed how she has managed to employ laughter as both a weapon in skewering misogynists and pompous time wasters, and balm in laughing at yourself and at life’s absurdities. It’s a way of keeping things under control and not allowing yourself to descend into self-pity.
For two hours we have been talking and laughing a lot and weeping a little. I think again about accidental events. How in 2016 I was sitting in the back seat as Chris and Barbara drove around Dunedin when Barbara was the Children’s Writer in Residence at the University of Otago. Researching the housing market in Dunedin, they said, though they intended to return to Wellington. A house in a street was mentioned. I said, "that’s a nice street". Later, they put an offer on the house, though it needed attention. They still live there and say they have no intention of moving. "But every now and then, I need to break out," Barbara had said earlier. I hope she was talking about writing a new book. Adventure enough!
