Confessions of a Writer Who Won’t Retire

Extracted from It’s Been Six Weeks Since My Last Confession by Peta Mathias, Peta Mathias Books, RRP $38.00

The only way to achieve a lifelong ability to work is to be born that way. People keep asking me when I’m going to retire and the answer is never, not because I feel principled about it but because my work is my life and my life is my work and if one stops, the other will stop. I’ve been travelling, teaching, cooking and writing all my life, if you count the script I wrote for the Christmas play when I was ten. Some people retire so they can spend the children’s inheritance on travel. Some people retire because they’re forced to. Some people retire so they can say what they’ve been longing to say their whole life when someone asks them what they’re up to — ‘nothing’. They dream of the day when they can say that beautiful powerful word — nothing. I do nothing, actually.

After I published my most recent book, Shed Couture, I said to every bored person who made the mistake of asking me what was coming next, ‘I am never writing another book again. Eighteen books. That was the last one.’ Shed Couture was just so much work with all the research involved. Some writers adore research. I can’t bear it. Shed Couture is about fashion and clothing and alongside the stories of clothes, my life in clothes, my mother in clothes, other people in clothes and what it all means, I had to get a lot of correct information on shoes, the history of colour, why wool is a super fibre and the point of sustainability. I don’t need 100 frocks but I do because they are not just frocks — they are beauty, art, history, emotion, memory, identity and above all, joy. But the detailed research did my head in and my publisher despaired of me. I thought she was going to fire me. Well, she did fire me, as she turned down the next book idea I sent her.

Friends, colleagues and readers continued asking what I was working on for my next book. I would put on my resting bitch face and say nothing. I would say, I’m unmotivated, I’ve lost my mojo, I’ve got writer’s block, I’m busy. But here’s the thing. I missed writing, for it is the occupation I love the most of all my occupations. One needs an intellectual life. One needs to use one’s brain. One of my writer friends says there’s no such thing as writer’s block — she just squeezes her books out her bottom.

I tried to analyse why I didn’t want to write, and then one day I went on holiday to the deepest darkest South Island with four friends. Their behaviour was so lurid, fantastical and eccentric that I started writing the story of the trip while I was still on the plane. It was so complicated for all of us to even go through an airport and actually get on a plane together that it struck me what my problem was — not writing from the heart. I realised that if there was ever going to be another book, there would be no research and it would be written from the heart. While I didn’t precisely squeeze it out my bottom, it was certainly a pleasure to write indiscreet stories about my friends and family and not research anything once.

Another big decision I made was to not use a traditional publisher but to self publish for the very first time. I had lunch with a bunch of writer friends and two of them revealed they were going to self publish their next books. My ears pricked up. The principal person who helped me was Sue Copsey, editor and author. She sent me a lot of information regarding exactly what self publishing involves, the costs, the process, the choices and she was unfailingly helpful, generous and encouraging.

Once I wrote one story, other stories insinuated themselves on to my laptop and there I was — unblocked. One evening recently I was having drinks with writer friends and we were trying to remember what we used to say to the priest when we walked into the Catholic confessional as children. Suddenly we all screamed, Bless me father for I have sinned, it has been six weeks since my last confession! And the title of this book was born. All these stories are confessional in the sense that they are about my life, hopefully with occasional wisdoms and universal truths thrown in.