Melissa Lucashenko

You know, from where I stand outside New Zealand, it certainly does that for me.

It was a groundbreaking book in lots of ways.

It centred an Indigenous woman and her experience.

It's postmodern in the sense that it flips between voices a lot.

It incorporates quite a lot of Maori language.

It is actually the story of a queer family in a sense because Joe is a straight man and he has romantic designs upon Kerouan in the book and would love to create a new family out of the ashes of his old family because his wife and his biological child have died and what he's left with is this white child, Simon, which he doesn't know what to do with Simon.

Simon's very difficult.

and Joe's looking for help and he wants he would like to marry Kerouan and have a new family but Kerouan describes herself as asexual as a human neuter and she's not interested in Joe in that way at all and she's only barely interested in being a family but it's about how um

circumstances and fate and culture press the three of them together and then fling them apart again in quite brutal ways before creating a community of care around the child and doing the nation building myth making that Hume set out to do in a really powerful and beautiful way

Yeah, well, I knew it had to be a funny book.

I'm looking at, you know, pretty hard material, material that kept me awake at night quite a bit in the writing because...

Yeah, I don't know that this book's going to make me too many friends, or at least I didn't expect it to.

The reviews have been good, but they're not the opinions that really worry me.

Aboriginal community opinion mostly and other communities beyond that but when you hold a mirror up to a society you know people aren't always going to applaud you for that and so I'm I'm expecting blowback I haven't got it yet but whether or not that comes whether or not people are ready for this book I don't know

Yeah, well, it comes from the underclass life, which is a very, very funny life in lots of ways.

You know, when people don't have much to lose, humour can become a really useful tool.

And, yeah, the funny things that I hear and say, you know, working with sisters inside and just in my family and in my community, it's...

People crack me up on a regular basis, and I thought, not only is it authentic to have the humour in there, but it's also necessary because otherwise the hard stuff will overwhelm the reader.

So it was a very fine balancing act, this book.

I wanted to talk about really difficult material, but make it funny and entertaining and high energy at the same time.