WARRIOR QUEEN Barbara bares HER SOUL

Best-selling Dunedin author Barbara Else reflects on how she found her voice after her failed first marriage, the power of becoming a grandmother and why her battle with cancer has enhanced her creativity.

- JUDY BAILEY

Barbara Else is beginning to have second thoughts about the publication of her memoir. The bestselling New Zealand novelist, literary editor and playwright has produced a raw, funny and sometimes heartbreaking account of her life. An intensely private person, this public baring of her soul has been “really upsetting” at times.

Laughing at the Dark examines, among many other things, her failed marriage to a leading renal physician, her love affair with a fellow writer, her beloved older sister’s decline and Barbara’s own fight for her life as she battled cancer.

She tells me she’s not looking forward to the inevitable hoopla surrounding publication. It’s painful each time she has to tell the stories. “It’s an alarming thing to do, writing a memoir.”

In her role as a literary editor, she’d seen many memoirs come across her desk, but she insists, “I never thought I’d do one. I didn’t think I had anything to say.” Turns out she was wrong.

She started Laughing at the Dark because she wanted to discover whether there were any signs in her past pointing to the person she would become. There were many.

Barbara is the third of George and Dorothy Pearson’s four children. Her older brother and sister, twins, were eight years older. Her sister Lesley fi ve years younger. George was a banker, while Dorothy was the first woman to graduate from the University of Otago with a Bachelor of Arts and a teaching certificate in the same year.

Dorothy was bright. She passed her love of books and theatre on to Barbara. Theirs was a close family. She remembers lots of picnics and days shared together at various beaches.