Alone on Broke Bank Mountain

American writer Annie Proulx's The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994. Photo / Gus Powell

In March 2005, Annie Proulx writes in Bird Cloud: A Memoir, she is driving through a "cow-speckled landscape" in Wyoming, "the occasional line of tumbled green alfalfa the only colour in a drab world". She drives past grey, dusty ditches; banks that are "sloping crumbles of powdery soil ... sagebrush nearly black and beaten low by the ceaseless wind".

She thinks: "Why would anybody live here? I live here."

Here is Bird Cloud - her 59ha which includes a river and a 121m high "golden cliff" which makes her think of Uluru: "Both seem to be fitted with interior lights that create a glow after dark."

She lives here, part-time, in a place that, for the winter months, she can't live in. The only road is not snow ploughed. If she over-wintered, she would be a captive in the house she built, which was to be her final home, and which is the subject (sort of; in part) of her book Bird Cloud.

She put Bird Cloud on the market for US$3.7 million ($5.03 million). There was no interest except from what she calls, scathingly, "an entity", a representative of a big ranching outfit. "They were looking for pasture land, and a place to put cows. Which is what we don't want."

There are many battles with cows in the book. There are problems with fencing; a coolness with a neighbour Proulx was letting grazing land to (nobody is about to say she can't be contrary) after a cow fell off a cliff (she had to pay for said cow).

There are scenes of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author chasing after and shouting at cows. Wyoming is what is called an open range state; this means that if your land is not fenced, the cows have access rights.

Obviously the "entity" hadn't read her book, otherwise it would know how she feels about cows. "I certainly have a great deal of regard for the cow - when it's on a plate."

If there had been other potential buyers, perhaps they had read the book. It is hardly a glossy advertisement for the joys of Wyoming living. So she has taken the place off the market, and will try to figure out some way to live there through the winters. This is a daunting prospect - there is her age (75), lack of local health care, that road, the cripplingly expensive heating bills, the struggle to get decent groceries.

There is money. "There are a lot of expenses associated with living in Wyoming," she says, talking it up some more.

She writes that the place sent her "close to broke". How close? "Aah. Don't start me on that! You'll give me nightmares. I'm not about to go down to the street corner with my tin cup but everything went into the place."

The Guardian suggested another name for Bird Cloud might be Broke Bank House. "Oh!" Which is bleakly amusing, perhaps? "Perhaps. Ha, ha."

Why anyone would live here is one question. Why anyone who was contemplating living here would not double check that the road was ploughed in the winter, is another. The real estate agent told her the road was ploughed and she believed this. "Well, you know, that is their responsibility. I could have, I suppose, have consulted a lawyer and sued for false information ... But believe me, if ever, ever, ever I was to be in a similar position and that question came up, I would double check, sure."

She is, by her own admission, bossy, impatient, short-tempered and single-minded. "Well, yes. It's only fair to list one's negative qualities." You wonder whether she thinks they are negative qualities. "I would like to have, you know, a sweet demeanour and be agreeable all the time and be extremely patient - patience is a virtue." She just didn't come out that way. "No."

She is also a restless person and this is possibly an inherited trait.

She has married, and divorced, three times. A symptom of inherited restlessness? "No. Just a slow learner! I'm one of those people who are better suited to living by themselves. It took me a long time to realise that. You know, I come from a generation where the thing you did was you got married, you had kids, lived happily ever after." She believed this. "Oh, yes."

Nobody who didn't believe in happy ever after, or even at last, would have embarked on the building of her house at Bird Cloud. She has moved many times during her adult life. As a child she moved, or was moved, by her also restless father: "Sometimes every year." Her father, she surmises, was always on the move, running from his "working class poverty ... and the racism that infected the dominant culture of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant New Englanders [her mother's family] who saw immigrants, especially French Canadians from the north, as racially inferior". Her father was in search of: "Bigger and better jobs and more money."

What was she in search of? A dream home is the simple answer, but as people who build dream houses often discover, the building of them can be nightmares.

She fell in love, with a difficult place to build a house. Irrationally? "Oh, of course. Absolutely. I'm a sucker for fabulous landscapes and interesting places."

But this is not simply a book about the perils of building a house. There is the subtitle: A memoir. So readers can be forgiven for thinking it might reveal something about its author who is among other things - bossy, impatient, short-tempered, single-minded, say. She is also supposed to be reclusive, at least when it comes to doing interviews which she has shied from since the film of her short story Brokeback Mountain came out in 2005. She said she wished she had never written the story. She says now that "it got too much attention, I think. And I got too much attention."

She doesn't much enjoy attention. "No. It's not my cup of tea." She says she is excruciatingly shy. "Yeah, I just don't find myself a particularly interesting person. So to be asked about my personal life ... What's the point?"

She is much more interested in telling me that her sister has just sent her photographs of a bobcat she saw in her garden, in Connecticut. The most exotic creature New Zealanders might see in our gardens is a bird.

She likes to talk about birds and is interested in the idea that native birds are coming back to the suburbs now New Zealanders plant so many native trees. Australians have been telling her they have "a much richer bird life ... and that New Zealand was lacking in birds". Theirs are more colourful, certainly, but noisier. Like them. She has heard, of course, about our great rivalry. "Ha, ha. Yes, and that extends to praise of the bird life. I'm taking notes!"

On a Sunday afternoon she's in Perth, in her room at the Hilton hotel, being asked some things about her personal life. It is hard to imagine her in a flash hotel room, having read about those hectares of remote land inhabited, occasionally, by one smallish, 70ish author, her thousands of books, the odd mountain lion, a few cowboys, rare nesting pairs of bald eagles.

A posh hotel doesn't seem her natural habitat. But she says she spends so much of her time travelling - to sell her book, on the literary festival circuit, escaping Bird Cloud winters - that she is often, actually, in posh hotels.

She is not so reclusive; she likes doing the literary festivals. "Oh, some of them. I enjoy very much the chance to meet other writers that I have not met before. I was particularly pleased this time to meet Tim Flannery, who is one of my favourite writers."

Flannery is a palaeontologist and environmentalist, so they might well have got on. But she is supposed to be tricky to get on with. She can certainly be peppery. How to put this? Did they like each other? "Well, I liked him! He is very personable and jolly and I felt I'd known him for years, from his books."

This is what you feel you know about Annie Proulx from her books: she likes big, remote, wild open spaces. She is interested in rural American history and the odd characters who inhabit rural spaces.

She has written about pig farming, ranching, windmill repairmen ...

She is currently (for the last 20 years!) thinking about logging, which will include New Zealand's kauri forests. She hopes to "get up north and have a face-to-face encounter with some kauri trees" while she's here, and to see "the waterways which were used to get them out".

So we know something about her interests. "You know, I like the outdoors very much. I'm interested in forests and the succession of trees and climate change, all kinds of change ..."

She is not interested in the idea that her book is a memoir. This subtitle is a disappointment (or an irritation) to her - and to many reviewers. "Well, let's not make a mistake about this. It's a memoir of place and I wish the publishers had put that on the cover. It's not a personal memoir where I go into my cruel parents ..."

She gave a little laugh, as dry as those dusty ditches she describes in the introduction to Bird Cloud. "It's a book about a place. And I enter into just enough to give some idea of background; where I come from."

She writes about the history of the land, and its ecology and of its bird life. But also of the trials (many), tribulations (very many) of house building. A house can tell you some things about its owner, and hers is so idiosyncratic - elk horn drawer handles, a Japanese hot tub and tatami mats (in Wyoming!) - it might, in the end, be quite revealing of her.

"Well, I don't know exactly what you mean by idiosyncratic." There are her kitchen cabinets: "... in red, violet, aquamarine, burnt orange, cobalt, lime, brick, John Deere green and skipjack blue ..."

"Do you think that's idiosyncratic?" It might be. "Yeah, well, it's definitely not beige."

Beige is small talk, which she doesn't do. She doesn't like to talk about "the trivial stuff". Now she can fill in the awkward silences in social situations by talking about her building woes. "Yes, but I would consider that to be rather boring."

It is fruitless to point out that she's written a book (or part of a book) about her building woes.

Should you ever meet her, try her on birds, a topic on which she is, yes, sweetly agreeable and endlessly patient.

Annie Proulx

Edna Annie Proulx, born August 22, 1935, in Norwich, Connecticut. She writes most of her work under the name Annie Proulx.

After graduating with a Master of Arts, she worked as a journalist and started publishing science fiction short stories in the mid-60s. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994 and was made into a film starring Kevin Spacey.

Her short story Brokeback Mountain, which appeared in Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), was adapted into the award-winning film directed by Ang Lee, starring Heath Ledger. She said of the fame which grew from being associated with the film: "It's not good for one's view of human nature, that's for sure ... you're there as a human object, one that has won a prize."

She has been married and divorced three times, and and has four children.

Meet Annie Proulx: Annie Proulx is at the Raye Freedman Arts Centre, Epsom Girls Grammar, at 8pm on March 16; tickets from The Women's Bookshop.