Columnist Megan Nicol Reed has written her first novel, One of Those Mothers. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Columnist Megan Nicol Reed has written her first novel, One of Those Mothers. Photo / Jason Oxenham
For many years as a newspaper columnist, Megan Nicol Reed wrote about the middle class, cleverly skewering their ardent positioning, their endless striving — for bigger homes, faster cars, more intense health regimes, cooler clothing and more successful children. More, bigger, sleeker, faster, now.
She was very good at it— she was a trained observer, after all, and she lived in that cosy world herself — but she didn’t initially consider it fodder for her first book, a seven-year project that felt, at times, interminable.
Nicol Reed, now 48, had long been satisfied with penning features and opinion pieces, and was, for many years, a Canvas columnist. But as the Aucklander approached her 40th birthday she found herself determined to build a world of her own, populate it with compromised characters and see what happened. She thought her first novel would be about a cult, which some wits might argue it is — the cult of the ambitious middle-class mother.
“I have never been attracted to nice stories, I wanted to write something quite grimy with a layer of seediness,” she explains over the phone, en route to a South Island tramping holiday. “There’s something about the middle class, there’s this hypocrisy that really gets to me. I suspect in really wealthy people and really poor people you don’t get it as much, because there’s less pretense. In the middle class there’s more keeping up. I am utterly fascinated and yet repelled by it. That’s the darkness for me.”
Her engrossing (and yes, dark) debut novel, One of Those Mothers, centres on six friends living in a gentrifying central city suburb whose lives are tightly braided together. They holiday on a remote island, where over the course of a few days their bonds are tested. There is a stomach-churning child pornography element and story threads involving alcohol and drug abuse, disordered eating and marriage strains. The book delves into the “parallel life that runs alongside the mundanity of people’s domestic life”, as Nicol Reed says.
It has drawn the inevitable comparisons to Australian bestselling writers Liane Moriarty and Christos Tsiolkas, so it’s not surprising that it’s also launching in the Australian market. Like Moriarty and Tsiolkas, Nicol Reed takes evident satisfaction in peeling back the veneer of polite society.
“I hear people banging on about the importance of good parenting and then doing stuff in the vicinity of their children that if they read about people doing in a state house — holding a party where people are doing drugs, for example — they are so judgmental [about], and yet it’s the same thing. It’s just they have the money to wrap a nice shiny bow around it.”
Now working on her second book, Megan Nicol Reed is returning to the middle-class territory with which she is so familiar and concerned. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Nicol Reed gave up her column to finally get her book finished. She had begun One of Those Mothers while working full-time for the Sunday Star-Times and did not have the headspace after a day spent writing and an evening looking after children to head off to her desk and write some more.
Freelancing from home allowed her to spend a year “hard-out writing” and figure out where she was headed. “Then I felt like I was flailing and sent it to an editor who sent me off on a different path and I redid things and then I became obsessed with moving house and I spent all the time I could have been writing looking at houses,” she laughs. “I lost a year of my life to that.”
Early menopause and its attendant anxiety stole another two years from her. Keeping the plot and characters straight in her head was much harder than she had imagined when she picked the book up again.
“When you’re dealing with 80,000 words, especially if you spend as long [on a book] as I did, you get halfway through a chapter and you have this brilliant idea that someone’s going to do this or say this and you realise you have just completely contradicted yourself. Sometimes I would forget characters’ names.”
She did a couple of workshops at the Auckland Writers Festival and was part of a writers group, but her working style was very much her own.
“In retrospect, I realise I wrote it in a really bad way,” she says. “From what I understand now, hardly any writers write the way I wrote that book, which is that I started with the first word and I would write 10 more and then I might go back and decide whether I liked those 10 words and I might move two and add one and then I would write another 20 words and then go back and decide if I liked those 30 words … and I did that the whole way through. Now I understand you just have to write the whole thing and get a draft down but that was the way I’d always written as a journalist. I’m a real perfectionist so this idea of writing even when you know it’s crap I find a little concerning, I guess.”
Her painstaking process was a heartbreaker but it did mean that she avoided major revisions when she reached the editing stage and, in journalist’s terms, her copy was clean. Now comes perhaps the most anxious part of all — waiting to see what people think of it. “I want to be able to just enjoy it but I would be lying, I feel really terrified.”
Now working on her second book, Nicol Reed is returning to the middle-class territory with which she is so familiar and concerned. She has unfinished business there. “I still really, really desperately want to write a book about a cult,” she says, “but I feel there’s still some really good material that’s too fertile to walk away from.”
One of Those Mothers, by Megan Nicol Reed (Allen & Unwin, $37),is out on March 23.
