A very rude magpie may still be dogging her thoughts, but one of our most successful authors has managed another novel worth squawking about.
Catherine Chidgey (photographed above by Jane Ussher) is a very good writer. Everybody knows that. What is less well known about her is that she is also a talent wrangler and spruiker for, of all unlikely things, magpie-related merch.
Her 2022 book The Axeman’s Carnival, which is narrated by a talking magpie, Tama, won the fiction prize at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. It came with a most welcome cheque for $64,000. Chidgey claims to have never seen a penny of it. Tama had his own hotel room. He got hold of the credit card and ordered $64,000 worth of fried cockroaches from room service.
That was unfortunate. “Yeah, he got to the credit card. It was carnage in that room.” As any star-maker knows, if you create a celebrity, you create a monster.
He has his own X and Instagram accounts (@TamaMagpie). He is rude, avaricious and bossy as buggery. “I’m a T-shirt! I’m a coffee mug! I’m a motherfucking throw pillow!” Get your magpie merch today – just in time for the swooping season,” he ordered last August.
He complains a lot. The Bird of the Year competition? “STILL no fucking magpie on the list of candidates.” He claims to be a feminist. “Happy International Women’s Day to all the smokin’ hot babes. Call me.” He is a very rude bird.
Tama is outside her bedroom window while we’re talking. Can she put him on the phone? “He’s asking me, ‘What’s she gonna pay for my contribution to the interview?’”
He’s a bad, bad bird. He does actually exist. “He’s very real to me in quite a spooky way. He’s taken up residence; he’s nesting in my brain.”
I have a suspicion that Chidgey might, just might, be Tama. She is adept at slipping in and out of her books. Tama is mischievous. She is mischievous. She says she has a habit of blurting out inappropriate things at inappropriate times. That sounds suspiciously Tama-like.
I had a flight of fancy about what the inside of her head might look like. What I arrived at, I tell her, and this is entirely ridiculous, is that it is full of things Tama has pinched: shiny things, tarnished things, unidentified things, precious things, bits of discarded things that most people would regard as junk, and some nasty things. “Am I close?”
She laughs : “I reckon that’s on the money, actually. I think I have a very messy brain. I’d like to think I had these cool, calm rooms with carefully curated pieces of gleaming antique furniture. I love antiques and love antique furniture but my brain is nothing like that. I think I have quite an unquiet mind. It’s often buzzing and jangled, and it feels like there’s someone in there scribbling hard on a piece of paper with a hard-tipped pen. So I have to work hard to quieten it down to be able to write.”
Well, yes. You can see it is hard to have a quiet mind when a sweary, loud and bossy bird has moved inside your head and refuses to move out.
Three boys in a house
“I’m sorry for terrifying you,” she says. No she isn’t. She has a talent for terrifying. In all of her books there is a brilliantly choreographed creeping sense that there might be something nasty waiting for you just around the corner. Her new book is The Book of Guilt. I am obviously not going to give away what might be waiting for you just around the corner. It is set in part, in “a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest” where three identical triplets, Vincent, William and Lawrence, live.
Chidgey wanted to explore “the way that even siblings who are genetically identical can be entirely different and can come into the world with their own hardwired personalities or form those personalities because of their experiences”. It is the nature/nurture question– one that has fascinated her “since I was a teenage psychology student last century”. She has come to the conclusion “that most researchers come to, which is that it’s always a combination”.
The house the triplets live in is spooky; it creaks with ghosts of gone children. It has “blue velvet curtains full of dust, and fire surrounds painted like marble to fool the eye, and a panelled entrance hall hung with dark old mirrors.” It is a crumbling old house inhabited now by only six residents, the boys and their three mothers. There is Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night. They are not the boys’ real mothers; they are their guardians, and perhaps their guards. But they love the boys in their own particular and peculiar way.
@johnmurrays Morning, afternoon, night. The mothers are always watching . . . 👀 We're thrilled to share with you all the immersive trailer for the dark unflinching novel of 2025 Prepare to open The Book of Guilt Coming 22.05.25. Available to pre-order now. #JohnMurrayPress #TheBookofGuilt #Pet #booktok #CatherineChidgey
♬ original sound - John Murray Press
The boys are not permitted to leave the grounds, which are “enclosed by a high flint wall with broken glass at the top to keep us safe”. The boys are special, they are told, “and needed looking after”. The boys suffer from illnesses and are given medicines prescribed by the shadowy Dr Roach. There used to be many more boys here.
The house is the last remaining of the homes for children like the triplets, purchased by the government in 1944, under something called the Scheme. The Scheme and the homes are not spoken of by outsiders, because, the boys are told, “They didn’t like to feel guilty.”
Inside the house, first thing every morning, the boys are woken by Mother Morning and must recite their dreams, which are written down in The Book of Dreams. If they transgress, their sins are written down in The Book of Guilt. These are books within a book and are approached with equal parts fevered anticipation – like a dream – and trepidation – like a nightmare.
You desperately want to know what is just around that next corner but you are really not sure you want to know. But there might also be something that will make you laugh out loud. Chidgey is a word magician. An illusionist. She makes things disappear and then reappear. She’s clever but in the best possible way.
She is never, unlike some clever people, show-offy or superior. Also, and this is another thing everybody knows about her, she has really great hair. She is a dead ringer for the pre-Raphaelite artist Rossetti’s painting Lady Lilith. People tend to be obsessed with her hair. She wrote a book, The Transformation, in which a wigmaker to the rich and fabulous becomes obsessed with the hair of a young widow. She has a sly and finely honed sense of humour. She winks at you from the page so you know you’re in on the joke, too.
Superstitions & obsessions
She comes from a completely normal loving family. She grew up in Lower Hutt with one sister and her very nice mum and dad. It is a shame her parents are no longer alive because wouldn’t you love to hear what they think about having raised a child who has a magpie living inside her head? I know I would.
She was raised a Catholic. She no longer has a concept of a god. “No. But it’s weird that I say that I don’t because I’m also quite a superstitious person.”
She is superstitious about the writing process. She burns a candle on her desk. “Otherwise, I felt like the writing wouldn’t work. Silly things like that.” She has to have a clear desk with only a coaster and her laptop on it. Her laptop is not connected to the internet. She can’t have any distractions.
For 13 years, she couldn’t write. She and husband Alan Bekhuis, a mechanical engineer and daguerreotypist, wanted more than anything to have a child. Those 13 awful, long years were subsumed with IVF attempts and the debilitating side effects of the drugs used in the treatments.
Alice was born in 2015. She was carried by a surrogate, who is now part of their family. The couple donated sperm to another woman desperate to have a child. That child is also now part of their family. She says, of Alice, “She is the joy of my life.”
She is superstitious about not being able to write again. She feels “a bit frantic about needing to keep hold of the vision for a book”.
What she does believe in is cats. Specifically, white cats with mismatched eyes. She says these cats seem to seek her out.
She is obsessed with obsession, really. She collects antique bags and has about 100 of them. “They interest me as a writer because they’re objects that have been handled by their former owners and often carried really close to their body or been quite an intimate part of the life of someone who’s long gone.”
She is hardwired to be an introvert. “Definitely. I crave quiet and solitude and that goes hand in hand with my writing.”
The day we speak, she, Bekhuis and 9-year-old Alice have just moved house from Ngāruawāhia to Cambridge. It took quite some time to find a suitable house because she had a list of things she couldn’t put up with. Noise, for one thing.
“I’m particularly sensitive to road noise, so at many of the houses that seemed quiet, I would sneak back there at different times of day and lurk in the driveway, listening for traffic noise, and ruled out a lot of places because of that – much to the exasperation of Alan.”
They both wanted a bigger property so she couldn’t hear “the neighbours sneeze”. But because she is a “sensitive vegetarian, I can’t be looking at farm animals and then one day seeing the truck come and take the farm animals away”.
The Book of Dreams. Does she believe in the significance of dreams? “Yes,” she says, “I do believe, or I want to believe, that the dead visit us in dreams. So, my parents will – not often, but a few times a year – visit me in dreams. It feels like kind of a blessing. Knowing that they’ve just stopped by to see how I’m doing.”
Oh, she’s doing all right. There was a bidding war for The Book of Guilt. There is, she says, sounding amazed by this, a big-bucks publicity machine behind its promotion. At the end of a trailer for the book is a quote from an early review: “This will be the book of the year 2025.”
What does she reckon about that? “I’ll take that. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
When there is a big-bucks promotion of a book, the book’s author has to do all that publicity stuff.
She was a “socially awkward girl” and still is that socially awkward girl. She is hardwired, remember, to be an introvert. That’s nature. She was ill with something that went undiagnosed for years and doctors thought she was faking, or that her mother was an over-anxious parent. She was finally diagnosed with a hiatus hernia “and all I needed to do was put my bed on a slope!” She was off school a lot and began writing little stories to fill in the time and entertain herself as much as anything. Illness meant isolation. She found it hard to make friends. That’s nurture.
She has trained herself to do that publicity stuff. She has learnt to disguise that socially awkward girl in public. “But deep down, I am.”
In her novel Pet, there is a character, Justine, “an awkward, nerdy, slightly ungainly redhead who doesn’t quite understand how to make friends easily”. She might still be Justine. She tells her creative writing students at the University of Waikato, where she teaches full-time, “You know, writing often draws introverts but you need to do a complete about-face and be a public person if you want to pursue a career in this game.”
And you have to put up with people like me being obsessed with your hair. But she, of all people, understands obsession.
The Book of Guilt (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is released on May 8.