Anne O'Brien has done a lot of things - all with a lot of enthusiasm. Photo / Dean Purcell
The Auckland Writers Festival announced this year's line-up of authors last week and it looked pretty fantastic. Haruki Murakami! Literary Giant, Elusive! said the press release. Nick Davies! Heavy-weight British journo who exposed the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World or The Man Who Did For the British Press, said the Daily Mail! Dav Pilkey, the man who created Captain Underpants! Fart jokes! Pretty fantastic all right. Lots of exclamation marks there. They are all mine, but I caught them from the festival's director, Anne O'Brien. You'd expect the festival's director to be pretty excited and she is - but I suspect that with her it would be hard to tell the difference between really excited and merely excited. There isn't much in between emotion with her. She doesn't have an off switch, or not one she's found yet, and not for lack of trying. She goes at a gallop and talks at one too. I had the usual amount of time with her but double the pages of a transcript that had to be played at slow speed - and on slow speed she still appeared to be talking at twice the rate of normal people. "Clearly I'm a talker," she said. "I do like talking." She certainly doesn't have a volume dial. She's loud. She said: "Well, the thing is I'm lively and I'm kind of slightly loud and animated. I wave my hands around. I can get someone excited about something." If she was a book, she would be a book which had done away with commas and full stops and semi-colons and replaced such conventional punctuation with those exclamation marks.
I had been asking whether she had to charm people into coming - often a very long way - to a festival which doesn't pay people (beyond their air fares and accommodation and covering "very basic living costs while they're here") to come a very long way. She said: "I can be good at charming people."
I think she just talks and talks and waves her hands around until they succumb, exhausted, and possibly charmed. Does she have charm? You'd think she must have some to persuade writers to come to her festival (she does call it "my festival".) I did actually find her rather engaging in her loudness and for the fact that she wasn't slightly offended by being asked whether she had a "much loved or much loathed" reputation.
Which is another way of saying that she's either your cup of tea, or she isn't. That would have been a gentler way of putting it, but as she doesn't muck about, neither did I.
"She goes around with a clipboard" is another thing I was told about her, but she said she doesn't actually have a clipboard. She might have a metaphorical clipboard, she conceded. "I'm a bit of a control freak in my life, actually, that's true."
She said she doesn't shout at people but I can see - as can she - that people might think she was shouting at them. She can be blunt, although she tries not to be, but she "will say what I think. I will say: 'That's kind of not on.' I'm quick to respond to things ... My volume control is terrible, as you can tell," she shouted. "I'm just always loud. People say: 'You're shouting.' And even now I'm shouting ... And that's just me. Talk fast, talk loud."
She is a bit of a control freak. She'd have to be, wouldn't she? Writers are not the easiest people in the world to wrangle. She wrangled me, just a bit. I'd suggested a place to meet but she went ahead and organised the club lounge at The Langham (they put up the writers and her - she moves in for the duration of the festival so that she and her metaphorical clipboard can keep tabs on those tricky writers, or so I reckon). There are book cases in the lounge with those sorts of books you find in hotels, the ones nobody reads (Maugham, Goldsworthy, Daphne du Maurier who, as it happens, she loves) as a backdrop for her picture, she had decided. But she arrived with an enormous carton of books by festival authors. She planned to replace the hotel books with these but that would have been too much faffing about for me, so in the end she didn't do it. She said this was the festival publicist's idea and I almost believe this but it is also the sort of control freak scheme - free publicity! - she'd have leapt upon with alacrity.
She does most things with alacrity and she has done a lot of things. Her CV is what she would call eclectic. She has worked in childcare, investment banking, mediation (at the Human Rights Commission where she somehow gravitated from the accounts department to mediator), journalism, grief counselling. Grief counselling? I could, just about, imagine this. If you could imagine a grief counsellor shouting: Cheer up! She said she could talk in a grief counselling, whispery sort of way and she did manage it, for about 10 seconds. She is interested in grief, in any case, because, she said, she was only 17 when her mother died. She has a fraternal twin sister; they are "second from the bottom" of the seven children her parents had in nine years. Her father was a Catholic; her mother wasn't. Her mother was lively and sociable, like her; her father was loud, like her. He was also "brilliant" - he was the Chancellor of Victoria University for 45 years - but he was troubled and an alcoholic and "I don't think he was well liked by anybody". The family were reasonably well off but lived in a house where, when it rained, the furniture had to be moved and pots placed under the leaks and there was tacked-up scrim on the walls. She has no idea why they married and she can't ask, of course (her father died in 1993) and she thinks what her mother really wanted to do was walk the Milford Track. This is partly why, she thinks, "some of the things I've done, like walking in the Himalayas ... I'm possibly having part of my mother's life that she would have done if she hadn't had children". She is 51 and doesn't have children but she says she once thought she might have five, but the right chap didn't come along at the right time. Also, she says she might not have been very good at being a mother "long term"; she is too impatient. There could be some truth in this. She is too impatient, she said, to muck about doing her hair or putting on make-up. She doesn't give a fig about clothes. "Well, I would care if someone looked at me and said: 'God, she looks like a complete mess.'" But other than that: "I'm more into what it is that I've got to talk about."
She likes doing things and talking about things, not mucking about with mascara. She has done some interesting things; some high-powered, others a bit hippyish. She is a bit hippyish and is given to searching and to saying things like: "You know, attachment is what causes grief but we have to accept that everything changes ... " And, "I think it's just who I am in the world". She once went to India and lived on a mountain in a tiny hut and taught English to refugees and wrote a paper on torture for the UN and studied Buddhism with a lama who spoke no English through a translator "who couldn't really speak English very well. So it was kind of hard to follow". But why did she want to study Buddhism in the first place? "Well, as you can tell, my challenge is to be still and quiet and I still haven't entirely achieved it."
She worked as a producer on Nine to Noon for three years from 1999 when Kim Hill was the presenter and they had some sort of infamous falling out. I had been told it was a fairly spectacular sort of stoush but she said: "Oh, no. It wasn't a shouting stoush. There was just a kind of ... 'don't really want to talk to you' and that's very uncomfortable in a really small team ... [And] when people are feeling uncomfortable they kind of withdraw and we probably both withdrew a little." This withdrawal, then, was over her not having done her job "as well as I should have", that she probably hadn't "briefed" Hill properly and "she felt let down ... I think she probably felt a bit exposed". Anyway, she said that she thinks Hill is an amazing brain and broadcaster and that they were friends but are not now in touch, although: "She's welcome to chair anything at my festival any time." She said this twice so presumably she really means it. I'm sure she does. The festival is all. What does she do if she doesn't much like writers but wants them to be at her festival? "You just have to suck that up. Ha, ha." She is resilient and quite tough but not as tough as I'd imagined her to be. She really minds when people take her and her loudness and bluntness the wrong way. She gets her loudness from her father and his friendlessness might be the reason she has, and likes to have, "rafts" of friends.
She said. "I mean, I'm not the best people manager in the world because I have high expectations for myself and for other people. It just means I have to work harder at it. It just means I have to think about that a lot."
All of her jobs, as odd a mix as they appear on paper, have been about the same thing, really, she said. What she is best at is taking "a massive amount of information and finding the shape of it and putting some order in that and that's what the festival does. It's what I'm good at".
She likes the arts, obviously, but likes maths too, and is mad keen on sport too. Her partner, Jonathan Alver, the director and producer, directed the opening ceremony of the Cricket World Cup and she was at the semifinal. "And, yes, I stood up and waved my arms about, as you can imagine!"
I can imagine. I also imagine that she isn't everyone's cup of tea but she's more interesting than a cup of old gumboot.
• The Auckland Writers Festival runs from May 12-May 17.
It’s rare to be accepted at just 16, but Tyler Parkinson's waited his whole life for this.
