1/4/2024 0 Comments Tinderbox bookWhen men do it, such as Paul Auster or Milan Kundera it’s called meta-fiction.” There’s a strong connection between autobiography and women’s writing too of course (the personal as political, the idea of art as therapy), which Jeanette Winterson spearheaded best in her line, “I have noticed that when women writers put themselves into their fiction, it’s called autobiography. I grew up watching Oprah with Mum and we both hazarded our guesses at the mysteries of human behaviour. Autobiographical writing does have a lower place in the canon and maybe that’s because it sits somewhere just above (or below?) Oprah Winfrey and Jeremy Kyle and countless TV shows that are fuelled by ‘real life’ drama (although fiction does this too). I first fell in love with the novel and I wanted to be a novelist, so I crush hard on fiction writers. Megan Dunn and Jeff Bezos in Fahrenheit 451 (Image: Megan Dunn) I just read that particular interview at a low ebb. And I think most writers speak to that complexity, including Catton. But broadly there is a tension between fiction (which scales the dizzy heights of the imagination) and non-fiction (which is laid out before us like a set plate and all one has to do is describe it, right?) However, the relationship between the two is far more entangled. The argument is circular and sounds simple when boiled down and paraphrased by me. This is a point of view I’ve heard before. I think Catton said in an early interview she would never write a book about someone writing a book. What are the pitfalls of autobiographical writing? What was it like for you to write about your life this way? In your book you talk about Eleanor Catton saying she would never write a book about herself, and your embarrassment at finding yourself doing so. It’s already one of my favourite New Zealand books. It’s dry and pessimistic, and totally compulsive reading – I had to stop folding down pages when I came to a good line or passage, because her book was starting to look like an origami project undertaken by a moron. It’s also about the collapse of a marriage, copyright struggles and what it’s like to work as a bookseller in a collapsing, corporate bookstore chain. It’s about her attempt to rewrite Ray Bradbury’s classic sci-fi novel Farenheit 451 from the perspective of Bradbury’s female characters, and includes excerpts from her original drafts. She has recently published a brilliantly funny memoir called Tinderbox with UK’s Galley Beggar Press. Her writing was smart but never pretentious and it managed to be conversational, but never in the banal hyper-realistic “how are Sharon and the kids” New Zealand short story competition kind of way. She was also one of the first art writers I read who didn’t sound like they’d been hit squarely in the back of the head with the critical theory stick. She had a dry, ironic sense of humour, an idiosyncratic writing style and an obsession with everything tacky and camp. I knew Megan was a writer, and first read her work a couple years later when someone linked me to a few of her essays at Pantograph Punch about the New Zealand art scene. I stamped book exchange tokens all year in silence and allowed my brain to slowly atrophy. I liked her and therefore barely spoke to her, because I usually wanted other people to leave me alone, especially people I liked and respected. That was where I met Megan, who sat across the hallway from me. I stamped hundreds of book tokens in the 13th floor of a skyscraper, and learned how to re-order paperclips and photocopy toner refills. I first met Megan Dunn the year after I had graduated from a writing programme and had to emerge back into reality and start paying off the huge student loan I had accumulated while trying to turn all my bad feelings into art. Poet Hera Lindsay Bird talks to Megan Dunn, author of a brilliantly funny new memoir about working at a failed bookstore while experiencing a failed marriage and making a failed attempt to write a novel.
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