Poet Hera Lindsay Bird talks to Megan Dunn, author of a brilliantly funny new memoir about working at a failed bookstore while experiencing a failed marriage and making a failed attempt to write a novel.
I first met Megan Dunn the year after I had graduated from a writing programme and had to emerge back into reality and start paying off the huge student loan I had accumulated while trying to turn all my bad feelings into art.
It was a very boring time in my life. I stamped hundreds of book tokens in the 13th floor of a skyscraper, and learned how to re-order paperclips and photocopy toner refills.
That was where I met Megan, who sat across the hallway from me. I liked her and therefore barely spoke to her, because I usually wanted other people to leave me alone, especially people I liked and respected. I stamped book exchange tokens all year in silence and allowed my brain to slowly atrophy. I knew Megan was a writer, and first read her work a couple years later when someone linked me to a few of her essays at Pantograph Punch about the New Zealand art scene.
I loved them instantly. She had a dry, ironic sense of humour, an idiosyncratic writing style and an obsession with everything tacky and camp. In your book you talk about Eleanor Catton saying she would never write a book about herself, and your embarrassment at finding yourself doing so. What are the pitfalls of autobiographical writing? What was it like for you to write about your life this way? I think Catton said in an early interview she would never write a book about someone writing a book.
