TVNZ’s Jenny-May Clarkson talks about feeling unworthy, loss and love in new book

Jenny-May Clarkson wonders where the confident girl determined to become a Silver Fern went. Photo / Dean Purcell

She’s represented New Zealand in two sports, served as a police officer and worked in television for the past 20 years. Now TVNZ’s Breakfast host Jenny-May Clarkson has written her autobiography Full Circle. She talks to Jane Phare about love, loss and self-doubt.

It’s when Jenny-May Clarkson talks about her beloved father and her twin boys in the same sentence that the tears flow during our interview.

They’ve been welling in her eyes, her voice faltering, ever since she mentioned that lost girl, the defiant 10-year-old who marched past Piopio’s Cloverleaf Dairy – which her parents Waka and Paddy Coffin ran from 5am until 10pm each day – on her way to becoming a Silver Fern.

She did become a Fern, at age 23, playing 26 tests over a six-year career and countless domestic matches, as well as representing Aotearoa New Zealand in touch rugby. But where did that confident girl go?

Clarkson wonders that in her autobiography Full Circle (Penguin Books, $39.99), written with the help of writer Kimberley Davis. What happened in those intervening years that left her full of self-doubt, suffering from imposter syndrome and panic attacks? What wasted years, she says now, her voice cracking with emotion.

The tears are not only about Clarkson’s lost years. They’re about inter-generational trauma, losing the language, growing up Māori but not quite Māori enough.

Jenny-May Coffin (now Clarkson), aged 10.

“I was locked out, stuck between two worlds, never really feeling like I belonged in either,” she writes in Full Circle. “Without my reo, I didn’t feel Māori enough; I was able to walk in the Pākehā world but still didn’t feel at home there either.”

She didn’t learn to speak Māori until her late thirties – full immersion, the hardest thing she’s ever done in her life. Finally, she could talk to her father in te reo. She remembers a precious moment at home in Piopio, the conversation flowing between father and daughter. But Waka Coffin told his daughter, “we need to speak in English so your mother can understand”. (Paddy Coffin had tried to learn the language but gave up after people mocked her accent.) Take people along with you, Waka Coffin told his youngest child, don’t exclude them.

He died soon after, she says, and it is now that the tears come. Clarkson doesn’t seem to worry about smudging her makeup, freshly done for TVNZ’s Breakfast show that morning. She just keeps talking, the emotion raw.

Jenny-May Clarkson's father Waka Coffin urged his daughter to be inclusive.

Clarkson wants to do better by her 9-year-old twin sons, Atawhai and Te Manahau. She insisted they go to Kōhanga Reo and, despite initial pushback from them, kura kaupapa Māori language school for a full-immersion education. Now her heart sings, she says, when she hears them speaking te reo with their friends.

“I know that my dad would be so proud of my sons and the journey that we’re taking.”

Jenny-May Clarkson says her father Waka Coffin would be proud to hear his daughter and grandsons speak te reo Māori. Photo / Dean Purcell

It was a long time coming. Clarkson (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Kahu) was in Raglan years before, reading Māori from an autocue for Māori Television when a kaumātua came up to her and spoke te reo. “Do you understand what she said?” a young boy asked Clarkson afterwards, before translating the words.

She got back in her car and burst into tears. She thought of her combatative relationship with her beloved father, the many pieces of his advice she had batted away in the past.

Jenny-May, he had said, you can’t go on Māori Television and speak te reo without understanding it. It would be years before she took his advice, taking a full immersion course in 2012.

‘The incredible woman from Piopio’

Outwardly, Clarkson is one tough cookie. Friends use words like “steely” and “determined” to describe the woman who morning viewers see smiling on TVNZ’s Breakfast show. In the book’s foreword, broadcaster and TV host Stacey Morrison describes her friend as “an elite athlete who treats vacuuming like an Olympic event”.

Her husband Dean Clarkson describes her as “the incredible woman from Piopio” with the courage to share her “raw and unfiltered” story. Friends say she’s incredibly kind, emotional.

Dean and Jenny-May Clarkson on their wedding day in 2015.

I ask her about the emotion that bubbles up when she remembers her 10-year-old self.

“Yeah I think that I lost that girl somewhere.”

The emotion comes from looking back at a life full of ups and downs, challenges, berating herself for not being excellent at everything. The doubts crept in, she says, the are-you-good-enough questions.

“I reflect on that and it makes me sad that I did that to myself.”

There’s a hint in the book’s dedication: “... to anyone who has ever felt unworthy or is still on the journey to finding themselves ... ”

And now?

“I don’t really care what people think anymore. I want to be able to live my best life and be able to say to my sons, so should they ... ”

At 51, life has given her a pummelling. As a 6-year-old, she witnessed her father scoop up her badly injured 10-year-old brother Charlie (Charla to her) and run to borrow a neighbour’s car to drive him to hospital. Blood was pouring from the boy’s head after a biking accident.

A month later, Clarkson’s mum Paddy came into the boy’s bedroom to find Waka desperately performing CPR on his son. Charla had caught meningitis and was gone.

Jenny-May Clarkson's brother Charles died from meningitis at the age of 10.

Then Clarkson’s older brother Jeff was hurled through the windscreen of a car and suffered a serious brain injury. He was never the same and she remembers, with regret, getting impatient with her brother because he was different from before. Years later, in 2018, she was holding Jeff’s hand when he died of bowel cancer.

“I wish I had told him that I loved him. I wish I had hugged him. I wish he was still here,” she writes. Four months later, her dad died from a heart attack.

She remembers returning to work after the grief of Jeff’s death and the shock of her father’s. She’d choke up just before going on camera, struggling to breathe, struggling to get the words out.

“Kia ora, welcome back to sport.”

She hoped viewers didn’t notice; after all, they noticed everything. And some of them voiced their opinions – on Clarkson’s very pregnant bulge when she was expecting her twins, her use of te reo Māori, her decision to let her hair go grey – “It caused a minor media moment” – and, shock horror, the moko kauae on her chin (a traditional Māori tattoo).

Fast times in Piopio

Full Circle is full of stories that weave through Clarkson’s own life and those around her. The struggles at school, the alcohol, marijuana.

“Fast times in Piopio, eh.”

Even some self-harm, cutting her arms. Feeling lonely and sad, about what she couldn’t say. And there she was as a teenager, wearing a rented wedding dress at her debutante ball in the Piopio hall.

It was a close community. When Clarkson made the Silver Ferns in 1997, Piopio locals raised money to send her parents to the UK to see their girl play in the victorious three-test series.

A young Jenny-May Coffin with her parents Paddy and Waka Coffin during her 1997 UK debut with the Silver Ferns.

Back then, she worked as a police officer, played for national netball leagues and, in 1999, represented New Zealand in touch rugby. Life was good.

Then in 2003, Clarkson received the devastating “I’m-sorry-you-haven’t-made-it” phone call from the Silver Ferns selectors. She couldn’t get off the couch, leave the house, answer messages. The public humiliation. How could she face the world? She watched from afar as her team won the World Netball Championships in Jamaica, their first world title since 1987.

They deserved to win, she says, and she didn’t deserve to be part of it. Again, the self-reprisal. She had done this to herself. She was a good enough player but she hadn’t fed her body. She was, she says, more worried about looking like a “healthy” athlete and keeping her weight down than eating properly.

And then came the “now what?’ question.

“Because if I’m not a Silver Fern then who am I?”

Clarkson was studying part-time to become a teacher but a chance encounter led her to apply for a job with TVNZ as a sports presenter in 2005. She’s worked in the media ever since.

Breakfast host Jenny-May Clarkson says a chance encounter resulted in a career change in 2005. Photo / Dean Purcell

By the time she hit 40, she had represented New Zealand in sport, served for nine years in the police force, had a successful career in the media and a supportive family. But she was still alone.

Her TVNZ colleague Wendy Petrie told Clarkson: “You need to get yourself out there.” So she did, joining friends for a night out at a bar. It was there she met Dean Clarkson; that night they talked until the sun came up.

They got engaged 10 days after meeting (he says it was nine), were married seven months later and had twin boys to join Dean’s two daughters, Leah and Libby-Jane. Both girls have left home now but for a while it was a busy household, two babies and two teenagers, and Dean’s parents living upstairs.

‘Do I still have a job?’

It’s still busy. Every morning Clarkson drives into TVNZ at 5am from her home in Clevedon to host Breakfast and there’s prep work to do in the evening. A year ago, after making the most important decision of her life, she wondered if she would still have a job.

More than a decade after learning te reo Māori, Clarkson felt she was ready to announce to the world her whakapapa, her identity. The decision to get her moko kauae done came upon her slowly, a thought that wouldn’t go away.

Jenny-May Clarkson was a police officer for nine years.

Just months before her 50th birthday, she drove to Ngunguru with Dean, her mother and her older sister Alicia to have the tattoo done by trusted friend Reghan Anderson. Anderson had already tattooed tiny stars from Clarkson’s neck down to her belly button, marks of navigation that connect her to her mother and her sons.

When her moko was finished, Clarkson remembers being overcome with emotion.

“Receiving my kauae has been the most empowering thing in my life. I walk differently, I stand differently, I feel different.“

Her mum thought it was “so beautiful”.

There were doubts for sure. What had she done? How would TV viewers react? Would she lose her job?

Her boys wanted to know if they could still kiss their māmā or if the moko would rub off. Now they don’t notice it and Clarkson, too, forgets it’s there.

Stares from people these days are more ones of curiosity than hostility.

Clarkson says she is the same person but also different.

“I wear my identity, my whakapapa on my face. There is no question about who I am and who I carry with me. All of it is there for you to see, plain as day.”

Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.

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