Catherine Robertson -Just Don’t Call It ‘Chick Lit’

Catherine Robertson writes funny books about intelligent strong women, and it’s got her into trouble with people who think humorous women’s fiction should never veer from the pink and fluffy. Hi there I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Catherine talks about escaping labels, her new book Gabriel’s Bay which gives men a bigger voice, and bridging the gaps between ‘literary’ and genre fiction. Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: How many complete MS she wrote before she published one Why the ‘chick lit’ category makes her mad Being a cheer leader for creativity The incredible value of critique groups Why she loves stroppy women What she’d do differently second time around Where to find Catherine Robertson:  Website: https://www.catherinejrobertson.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nzcatherinerobertson Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjrauthor What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. Jenny: But now, here’s Catherine. .  Hello there Catherine and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us. Catherine: Thank you Jenny, it’s really nice of you to invite me. Jenny: It’s really nice to have a fellow countryman or countrywoman, because most of these interviews have been done with people overseas. So we wanted to have a little bit of balance with it!    Beginning at the beginning – was there a “Once Upon A Time” moment when you decided you wanted to write fiction?  And if there was a catalyst, what was it? Catherine Robertson, author Catherine: I think I had always thought about writing fiction much in the same way as I’d thought about winning lotto. I hadn’t actually found anything about it, like buy a ticket or indeed do any creative writing. I had children quite young, and I was self employed when I was 26. There never seemed to be enough time to do anything, like writing. But when I moved overseas, the family moved overseas in 2000 and I found myself out of a job because we’d gone to work for a Dotcom and just at the time the market tanked. My husband still had a job, but I didn’t. The children were at school, and I suddenly had one of those ‘now or never’ moments; I looked up creative writing courses and found one at a local community college. So I started that, and that is when it started. That did give me the confidence to keep going. Jenny: Fantastic. So that was in California? Catherine: It was, that’s right. It was in Marin County, just out of San Francisco. Jenny: So your first book- how long did it take you from doing that course through to producing The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid, which was the first one we saw published? Catherine: That’s exactly right. Probably too long. I never want to put people off, but between that time and getting The Sweet Second Life published, I probably would have written eight full length novel manuscripts and had them all rejected; some of them more rewrites of previous ones that I’d done. I probably didn’t start writing really seriously until- we moved around a bit, came back from England and again I didn’t have the time to keep writing and reestablish business, all that useful stuff like earning money. I started writing probably about early 2005, so it was five years of solid effort before I got The Sweet Second Life sold to a publisher. The Sweet Second Life of Darrel Kincaid Jenny: That is amazing. I mean there’s so many people that I talk to- there is an apprenticeship time where you find yourself developing in confidence and you obviously went through that in quite a real way. Catherine: Well I think, I mean I really like the Stephen King book on writing and he thinks that bad writers are unteachable because they don’t know that they’re bad, so they can’t be taught. But you can teach competent writers to be good. He also thinks that genius writers are born, not made as well. So most of us are in that good to competent range. I think that all my life, my job was writing so public relations, advertising, magazine writing; I knew how to write a sentence. That doesn’t mean you know how to write a novel, and that’s what I had to learn how to do. I had to learn about structure, character arc, voice, dialogue and I was so very much an apprentice in the process I went through, teaching myself through feedback and rejection. And the best kind of rejection is the one where they give you decent comments about what they found didn’t work. So those were absolutely gold, and I just decided that I would continue and learn what I could from that feedback and put it into practice. So I think I turned myself from a basically competent writer but not a particularly competent novelist, into a competent novelist, and that’s where I got published. Jenny: Your first book The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid was part of a so-called “chick lit” trilogy – and we’ll talk more about that definition as we go along…  but those first three books all told women’s stories –  and had strong female characters  – as Wikipedia defines it – “heroine-centered narratives that focus on the trials and tribulations of their individual protagonists”.  I guess starting out this was natural territory for you to explore?   Did you consider other genres or was it a ‘no-brainer’ for you? Catherine: Well the thing is is that I’d always wanted to write a funny book. My sort of inspiration when I was growing up was funny writers; Sue Townsend, Stella Gibbons and Nancy Mitford, and Bill Bryson, Clive James. I loved them. So I wanted to write a funny book. This is how sort of ignorant I was- I just really realised that if you wrote a funny book about relationships, you were instantly in that “Chick Lit” category. I kind of knew that I was doing it, because I knew that Marian Keyes wrote that sort of thing; Bridget Jones obviously. I shouldn’t call it Bridget Jones- Helen Fielding wrote Bridget Jones and I always refer to them. I’m sure she gets Bridget Jones! So I kind of knew that, but I didn’t really understand the expectations of that genre and I didn’t understand that being marketed in that genre means that you are very much boxed up in this pink, fluffy category. The Misplaced Affections of Charlotte Fforbes You know, with everyone else that’s writing similar kinds of books. So you don’t get taken so seriously, and you’re also expected to write a certain tone of book for the reader. So when I started writing say the third one, The Misplaced Affections of Charlotte Fforbes which was the third .. I wrote slightly darker, I had darker bits in it. And people didn’t like that, because they want an unrelentingly cheerful, happy, funny book. So that’s when I decided I had to break out of that genre, because I wasn’t ever going to write anything that wasn’t quite unrelentingly cheerful. Jenny: Yes, and you also came into a bit of flack I think because you’re women were maybe too strong and their language was a little too salty. It also didn’t quite fit the “Chick Lit” stroke- is that correct? Catherine: Yes, that’s exactly right. And again, this is me just stumbling into areas that I didn’t know existed. Then I thought that women who were kind of strong and outspoken, just sort of making it happen for themselves were really great! I thought that was a fantastic role model, but I got a lot of flack because they weren’t vulnerable. And I think that Chick Lit genre is expected to be vulnerable; to have something wrong with them. I kind of really railed against that- I can have heroines and have things wrong with them, faults and flaws as I did in The Hiding Places which is the next book I wrote. But very much I didn’t want that to be my particular characters…. and feel like I was forced to make them not so strong and to put something wrong with them was just complete anathema to me; I just really didn’t like it. Jenny: Yes. When you think particularly about the Bridget Jones’ movies, she is a little bit of a pathetic case in a way, isn’t she! Catherine: Yes, she is! And appealingly so. They are great, funny books and every bit of you picks out the Marian Keyes characters. I love Marian Keyes and her writing is hilarious, she has brilliant humourist. But all her female characters have something wrong with them. I was really kind of angry with her, because she has the Walsh sisters and the Walsh family; there’s a lot of books about them. The younger sister Helen had always been one of these strong, forthright characters throughout the book. When she finally wrote a book about Helen, she gave her depression. I was really angry at her for doing that! All of a sudden, she had to have something wrong with her. I just thought, ‘No! Don’t do that.!’ Jenny: Yes, Jennifer Weiner in the States has said that it started out being fun, breezy, relatable and very authentic and now it’s sort of turned somewhere along the line as far as critics are concerned anyway into just disposable, beach-blanket fluff, with no depth or insight or meaning. Catherine: Yes, It’s incredibly misogynistic I think.  I think it’s just incredibly patronising. I think it is a way of minimising women’s work and there’s a really great article; I think it was in The Guardian about how it was called the male glance. (The male glance – How we fail to take women’s stories seriously.) Sort of playing on that male gaze thing, but it was saying “this is worse, this is the male glance when they look at it and just dismiss it with a glance”. Joanna Trollope – why “Aga saga?” And the thing is, that glance is not just men who are doing it. I think there are a lot of women who do dismiss romance writing and chick lit as not worthy of their attention, because they have had there marginalisation of their work happen through a lot of this male dismissal. When people say “Chick Lit” to most readers, they think fluffy stuff. So they don’t even really know what it’s about, they don’t even know the genre- but they are already dismissing it. I think that is something we have been trained to do, and we should untrain ourselves. Because a lot of fantastic writing and worthy writing- I mean you get somebody like Karl Oven Knausgård who writes endlessly about the minutia of his daily life. In some cases quite tediously, yet he’s counted as a genius. You get women writing about domestic detail, and they are dismissed . Like ‘Aga saga’ author  Joanna Trollope because it’s middle class in Britain. Some of these other ones, you know Jennifer Weiner is dismissed as being … suburban Mummy stuff.  It’s so infuriating. Jenny: Yes- I’m wondering if part of the problem is that we’re quite used to having strong women in New Zealand; we probably lead the world in it considering we look at our past political history and even current political history with a Prime Minister who’s just had a baby. Do you think that maybe we take some things for granted that maybe aren’t quite accepted in other places as well? Catherine: I think that New Zealand writers- because New Zealand is small, we are used to looking outward and so we’re very aware of the world, whereas people often  in bigger countries, they don’t really tend to be aware of their country so they don’t look outward as much. We absorb a lot more; we’re a lot broader in our outlook and I think that does translate to our fiction. We do think sort of outside the box, I suppose and we do assume we’ve got a freedom to write what we want, and we do. And so I think that sometimes that works, and sometimes that doesn’t fit what readers are expecting from a particular genre. So yes, I think that New Zealanders are a bit more open minded in our writing and a bit more flexible- less likely to write like everybody else does which is great, but sometimes we just want what everybody else is writing. The Not So Perfect Life of Mo Lawrence Jenny: And Book Two – The Not So Perfect Life of Mo Lawrence – riffs very humorously on the final lines of Book One “Michelle has the perfect life.” And  she very smugly says “ I know, isn’t it wonderful. ..” We discover it isn’t so wonderful after all.  Do you think part of the success of these books is because women find it reassuring that “having it all” is darned hard . .. and they’re not alone in that? Catherine: I think that’s what all the Chick Lit (if you want to call it that) genre does. I think it is about looking at the complex views of women’s lives and the juggling acts that we have to do, and the difficulty in actually being the driver of our own lives and careers because we’re often torn between a bunch of different actual duties and expected, societally imposed duties. It is a real struggle. We’re not really that free; we’re certainly not as free as men to shape the way our lives go. That’s why I think this genre is so important; it does give us this perspective into how women’s lives can be tricky and how people can navigate it. You can have fun reading about it at the same time. Jenny: Do you get feedback from readers that really underline what you’ve just presented? Catherine: I can’t think of anything that comes to mind, but I do have people who sort of appreciate the fact that for instance Mo Michelle’s  youngest baby Rosie is totally fierce. She’s kind of a little small demon spawn, completely in control of everybody. And she’s great! People say,”I love Rosie, I love Rosie so much!” It’s the female baby that aims to be fully in control and manipulative, but the adult female characters are not which I find very interesting. So I’ve had quite a lot of feedback about that sort of thing. Jenny: Your most recent book Gabriel’s Bay you’ve moved away from women’s fiction and it’s also the first book set in New Zealand  You said in reaction those comments we’ve been talking about you wanted to try something with broader appeal which still played to your strengths of characterisation, dialogue and humour. Tell us a little bit about the new book. Charlotte:  Well I wanted to find a way to still write funny books but needed to find a way  not be trapped or boxed into that chick lit genre.  so I did some research trying to think of formats that would allow me to do that and I looked at Maeve Binchy and Deborah Moggach who wrote the Marigold Hotel.  They have the same setting and a set of different characters with their own stories and then those stories interlink to make one novel, I thought this is what I can use,so that what I based the Gabriels’ Bay structure on.One of the things I flack for in the chick lit books was dwelling too much  on the male characters in my chick lit books  and I wanted to give them  life and agency and complexity . I think sometimes people just want heroes, but I didn’t want just heroes, I wanted fully rounded men who were struggling with what it meant to be a man. and so I wanted to create a bunch of characters where I could explore all the different aspects of being old, being young, being female being male, but I also wanted it to be funny. Destiny Bay by Donn Byrne Jenny: I think harking back to Book One; you had an acknowledgement there, quoting a friend who recommended a book that you said you absolutely adored and read several times; Destiny Bay by Donn Byrne, which was a sort of family sagaset in Ireland. I must admit, I’ve never heard of it before. It’s based on an Irish nobleman who marries a gypsy in 1889. Donn Byrne is an absolute story teller, and I kind of got the feeling when I saw that and compared it with Gabriel’s Bay; I bet there’s a little seed for a long time that Catherine’s been going back to and nurturing! It seems like the things she really enjoys! Would I be right in that? Catherine: Oh, absolutely. Destiny Bay is a wonderful book; he was extraordinarily popular in his day which was sort of around the 20’s and 30’s, and he died sort of relatively young in the 40’s in a motorcycle accident. So Destiny Bay is a collection of stories that moves through the years about this land owning Protestant, but it is absolutely delightful and wonderful. I just absolutely love it. So Gabriel’s Bay. I think I’ve always wanted to pay homage. Like in The Sweet Second Life, the trilogy has gypsy characters who I’ve taken some of the names from Destiny Bay and used them riffed on some of those things that he talked about….  . I called Gabriel’s Bay- this is a long winded sort of way to come to a title, but I sort of wanted to call it Destiny Bay! But that’s just too twee.   But that’s just too obvious and existent. From Donn Byrne, I got the name of Gabriel Byrne, and called it Gabriel’s Bay. Moving to a more general focus, away from specific books to your wider career Jenny: Is there one thing you’ve done in your writing career more than any other that’s been the secret to your success? Catherine: I would say keeping going. I mean the thing is, in retrospect if I knew that I was going to have to write eight full length manuscripts, while juggling work, children and everything else in my life before I got published, I probably wouldn’t have done it. But I didn’t know. So every novel, every time I submitted something else and you think that could be the one, you get the rejection. And if you get the rejection, you’ve only got two choices; you can stop, quit and give up or you can keep going. So I just kept going, and tried to take what I could from the feedback and continue to learn and teach myself. So persistence I think is one thing. I’m also very organised with my time, so I commit. Although I am a great procrastinator, I’m really, really talented at procrastinating but I do put a lot of time aside and I use that time wisely for writing. I also write when I don’t feel like it, which is pretty much all the time. Writing is really hard work, and I don’t wait for the muse and I don’t wait to feel like it; I just knuckle down and do it. So I think that’s probably it; just keeping on going. Jenny: So there’s no likelihood that one of those eight manuscripts might be worth self publishing. I mean just because the industry didn’t quite see a market for it, it still might be a jolly good read! Catherine: Well the thing is, they have all turned out; all those failures have been resurfaced into the books that were successful. I have not wasted any ideas- they’re all ideas I like in those books. Trust me, I have picked the eyes out of those books and put them into other books. So I keep notes, I keep phrases, I keep characters and they all turn up. I will make them live again! So it wasn’t wasted, Catherine’s first love – humour Jenny: You’ve also been a master at bridging the gulf between the different writing leagues – for eg., romance and literary fiction – You are vice president of Romance Writers of NZ – and a very funny MC at the annual conferences – and also Chair of the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors, which is the ‘serous guys’ in New Zealand and you are a member of the Academy of New Zealand Literature. Catherine: I have just actually stepped down as the Chair of The Society of Authors. I did that for four years, but I’m also on the Book Awards Trust (which I probably haven’t updated my website- very unlikely!) and I administer the New Zealand Book Awards. I am also now on the board of Litfall, which is the literary festival that runs in November in Wellington. And we do get a lot of experimental things and new works; it’s really great fun. And so I do a lot chairing at literary festivals. I think that the groups for different sort of genres do have this perception that there’s this sort of literary clique, and it’s very difficult to penetrate that world. I haven’t found it difficult at all, because all I do is become interested in things and talk to people. I mean all writers have got the same struggle, all writers have their doubts about their own works. They have doubts about whether they can make a living, about whether they can get recognition, about whether they’re going to get the next work published. Whether the publishing industry is dying and it will never be revived, that arts money isn’t going to be available. We all have those same worries. Fundamentally, it’s the self doubts that sort of connect us all. I think that no matter what you’re writing, there’s enough connections and you have more in common than you don’t. So talking to writers in all genres and all forms of writing; non- fiction, poetry, chick lit, romance, everything; it’s a really great way to gain a perspective on what you’re doing. It’s also a great way to learn about how other people approach things. Writing is a very solitary pursuit, and so getting in touch and getting some context with how you feel about it and what’s going on for you with other people is a bit fantastic. It’s absolute gold. We’re all in the same boat, and I think the more we can bond together, I think the sort of creative energy expands and I think if we want creative work to be a force in New Zealand, we have to connect and be greater than the sum of our task. We have to put that energy out there into the world and be a force to be reckoned with. Jenny: Sounds really inspirational my dear! Turning to Catherine as reader Jenny: The series is called “The Joys of Binge Reading” because I see it as providing inspiration for people who like to read series . . . .So – turning to your taste in fiction who do you “binge read”? Emma Kennedy – one of her favourites Catherine: I do have authors that I binge read. One of them is the late great Terry Pratchett- I’ve been through all his work, and then I re read them. Another one would be Sue Townsend, who wrote The Diary of Adrian Mole. I read her books fairly regularly, and I re read Jane Austen regularly! I also go back to Nancy Mitford and I love  Love In a Cold Climate.  But I also go back to the non- fiction genres. I go and re read Bill Bryson, and Clive James. There’s some brilliant British woman- there’s one named Emma Kennedy who wrote these absolutely brilliant travel books, I think one’s called The Tent the Bucket and me and another one is called I Left My Tent in San Francisco and I think I cried so hard laughing I actually physically hurt myself and I had to stop for a while… And do you have a current series or author – or more than one – you’d like to recommend to listeners? Circling back to the beginning at the end  (I see this as a bit of a narrative) Jenny: At this stage in your career, if you were doing it all again, what would you change – if anything? Catherine: I think I would join a writing group or I would do another course, because the course I did there were a lot of people in the group and you only got a little bit of time focused on you and your work.  I know you had a chance to listen to the feedback others got and you learn from that, and that’s great . . . But the reason I did the MA at the Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University a few years ago was because it would an intense workshop situation, I’d be working with other writers in an intense situation and I had never had that before.  I found that extraordinarily useful. and now I have a writing group. We just met last night. We take turns to submit writing and it’s incredibly valuable.  I have critiqued Gabriel’s Bay through the group. and the sequel which is called What You Wish for which is coming out next year, and they are better books because I put them through my writing group.  So having people that whose opinion you value and is of worth to you, people who can critique it from a writing point of view, I would do that early on. Jenny : You’ve mentioned you have already written a sequel to Gabriel Bay. That’s coming out next year? Catherine:Yes I’m not entirely sure yet.  Gabriel’s Bay came out in January this year so I’d expect the sequel to probably be out January February next year. Jenny: So what is next for Catherine as writer?  New projects under development? Catherine:  Welll I have done absolutely nothing this year in terms of writing which is a bit sad.  I did some rsearch on a bio/memoir based  on my family’s time in a cult type of organisation.  Not me, I didn’t grow up in it, my parents resigned before I was born, but there are some interesting things, I’ve interviewed some people o I am wanting to pull that all together and shape it up into something, I’m not sure what. . .and then there;s  Gabriel’s Bay I always envisaged as at least three books and so I have that milling around in my head. Jenny: So the memoir – non fiction? Catherine: Yes, focusing on my mother, she was brought up in this organisation, so it’s how it affected her and my childhood . . .. We’ve had some incredibly good memoir in New Zealand – Adam Dudding’s My Father’s Island and Diana Wichtel’s  Driving To Treblinka were both incredibly good, so it’s a hard bar to enter that field, so we will see how we go.. Jenny: Where can readers find you on line? Catherine: You can find me on Facebook, and I’m on Twitter and of course on my website.  I am best on Facebook and Twitter is the second tier to that. I do enjoy it – I find social media is a good way to tell people what I am doing and also to celebrate other authors  We have to be each other’s cheer leader, so s if my friends are launching or have success I want to put that up there as well… Jenny:  And you do quite a few readings, going out and meeting people? Catherine: I really like chairing sessions at writers sessions with other writers  I am still learning, it is terrifying but it is really good fun and it gets you in front of people  and I like going on stage and talking about my own books  And I do launches and I love to say yes I’ve got lots of things coming up  the Hawkes Bay Arts Festival coming up in November and Hamilton Book Month and the Word Fest in Christchurch!! And of course Romance Writers of NZ in Auckland!!  Lots happening. Jenny: Thanks yo so much for your time Catherine. For someone who is just starting out it’s inspirational to consider how much work went into it before you go published… Catherine: Oh yes so don’t give up people . . .! Thanks To Our Technical Support: The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with. Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at [email protected]