Long Time Coming
New Zealand Listener|May 19-25 2018

Wellington writer and teacher Kate Duignan explains why her second novel has arrived 17 years after her debut.

Long Time Coming

Ah, that difficult second novel. Marilynne Robinson had almost a quarter-century between House-keeping and Gilead. “I’m dependent on the emergence of a voice,” she has said. “I can’t make them, they have to come to me. There’s no point in my worrying about it.”

Such serenity. I believe she was truly like this, too. Robinson seems to be that kind of person. There have been 17 years between my first and second novels. I would love to say I waited graciously until a voice emerged, and didn’t worry, but that would be a lie.

I started writing The New Ships in July, 2001. I was 27. Breakwater was just out, and I should have been elated, but I’d gone through a breakup, and I wasn’t. I read Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing, about a widowed judge.

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