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Reviewed by Linda Herrick In 2015, I interviewed Auckland writer Charlotte Grimshaw – a sharp-eyed chronicler of self-damaging characters – about her novel,
Starlight Peninsula. A clumsy attempt to ask about growing up with her writer father C.K. (Karl) Stead drew a bland response. Her childhood in the Hobson Bay villa, where her parents – Karl and his wife Kay, now in their late 80s – still live, sounded pleasant. She and her father, she added, “get on very well and we do our own thing and it works just fine.”
Marti Friedlander
Charlotte Grimshaw, photographed by Marti Friedlander in 1993, published as the cover of The Mirror Book (Vintage), courtesy of the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust.
Marti Friedlander
“I’d spent literally decades not confiding in anyone about the things I’ve described in the book,” says Charlotte Grimshaw. (Photograph, 1993, published as the cover of The Mirror Book (Vintage), courtesy of the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust.)
About ten years ago Charlotte Grimshaw hit a wall. The award-winning writer, mother of three, wife of a high-profile lawyer and daughter of literary legend CK Stead discovered her husband was having an affair, which sparked a crisis in her marriage and later in herself. With the help of a psychologist, she began to question her childhood, her damaging teen years, her adult aversion to women, and the complex dynamics of her family.