My History, I Think

‘I am, I suppose, a hoarder. I have carefully filed away all the pain, all the personal shame, that has failed to take written or printed shape and that forms the past. The past, which could break my heart … ’ The year is 1994. A writer lives in a wide white house on a green riverbank. He is writing a book about the lives of rich people a century or so ago. At the same time, he seems to be writing his own story. Neither autobiography nor yet fiction, this fascinating book traces the workings inside the mind of a leading writer. It is part history, but it is also an intensely personal revelation as to the way a committed writer develops, and even why. The writer moves backwards and forwards between the present and the past, between last century and the century before last. The text twists in and out of the lines of certain stories and novels. We shift from one place to another — from Christchurch to Chicago, from Patagonia to the promenades of Noumea. ‘The interesting part of a story is always concealed,’ says Eldred-Grigg — who then proceeds to give us glimpses of just what his secrets might be.

Stevan Treleaven Eldred-Grigg is an award-winning novelist and historian. He was born in the Grey Valley, New Zealand in 1952 and grew up in the small mining town of Blackball and the suburbs of Christchurch. He graduated from the University of Canterbury in 1975 with an MA in history before obtaining a PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1978. He has lived in Canberra, Berlin, Whangarei, Mexico City, Wellington, Oaxaca, Singapore, Shanghai, Waiuku and Beijing.

List of his published novels: Oracles and Miracles (1987), The Siren Celia (1989), The Shining City (1991), Gardens of Fire (1993), Mum (1995), Blue Blood (1997), Kaput! (2000), Shanghai Boy (2006), Bangs (2013).

List of his published history books: A Southern Gentry (1980), A New History of Canterbury (1982), Pleasures of the Flesh (1984), New Zealand Working People (1990), The Rich (1996), Xin Xilan de Wenxue Lucheng (2004), Diggers, Hatters & Whores (2008), The Great Wrong War (2010), People, People, People (2011), White Ghosts, Yellow Peril (2014), Phoney Wars (2017).