NZ Author Jodie Shelley On Finding Humour In Hard Family Situations

Monday, 28 October 2024, 1:11 pm
Article: RNZ

Coming out to family can be really difficult, but what happens when it results in someone being disowned?

Jodie Shelley explores this in her latest book, A Thousand Paper Cups.

It is Shelley's second book - her first, The Tui Has Landed was a finalist in the 2023 Wishing Shelf Awards.

The new novel, she told RNZ's Nine to Noon, is a New Zealand story about homophobia and family harm, but with a lighter touch.

"At the heart of the story is this one conundrum that the brothers need to face, which is, when they find that one brother is excluded from an inheritance because of his sexuality. What do they do? Do they challenge the will and hope that fairness prevails? Or do they respect the wishes of the departed?" she says.

Will is the eldest brother of the Lewis family, a man in the corporate world, but not living his life, she says.

"He is in ad agencies, in a pretty senior role. He ends up working for an unpleasant kind of guy that doesn't really respect him or value his input.

"And so, on a whim, he just decides to, head off into the into the distance, and set up his own grass mowing company."

This echoes in some ways her own life, she says.

"I had a career change in the last few years too. I was in a busy corporate role, and I've become self-employed now, and I'm also doing this writing.

"So, it feels like I've maybe followed Will, or perhaps Will followed me."

Teacher Emma, the fiancée of Liam, one of the Lewis brothers, is a favourite character of Shelley's.

When she stumbled across a statistic that one in three New Zealand women were subjected to intimate partner violence in their lifetime, she decided to explore this in the novel through Emma's eyes.

"I thought about Emma being this emerging teacher, and her classroom of kids being representative of our community, and it stands to reason that in amongst those children, there would be a child or a family that were facing that in reality."

She started the novel when she was still deep in the corporate world, she says.

"Each night I would sit down and just carve out a little bit of time just to do this writing."

Now self-employed, she has more time to write, and she lives by the mantra 'little and often'.

"Every night I will do a minimum of 500 words. And really, I'm tricking myself when I when I say that I'm going to do 500 words, because by the time you sit down and you've got your computer out and you're all set to go, and you're refreshing what you did the night before, it's so easy just to do more than 500 - 500 is the absolute minimum."

She is a self-published author, a form of publishing of which she once took a dim view.

"I was going to write a novel and end up with a garage full of books that I can't sell, and then I wouldn't be able to park my car in the garage, and that would be a woeful reminder of my expensive folly."

The advent of ebooks had changed the picture, she says.

"Technically, you could write a novel and never get it printed. You could just create an e book of it and put it up on Amazon or wherever you want to sell your books.

"And with print on demand, I can go to my printer and say, 'I'd like another 10 books, please', and away they go and they send them out to me."

This form of publishing is called being an indie author, she says.

"I'm a lady of a certain age, and I relate to having a cooler name, indie author really does it for me."

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