A Life In Chapters

Many people dream of a book publishing deal. Tammy Robinson is one who has seen that dream come true, but the road to success has been fraught with her own personal nightmares. Emma Clifton met the Kiwi writer to hear her remarkable story.

When Tammy Robinson was young, she knew she was going to be a writer. It took a series of unfortunate events to get her there. Long before the Waikato mum of three was a successful writer with an international book deal, she was a voracious reader, writing in an exercise book during her lunch break while working at a Rotorua shoe shop. But it was a turbulent time in her 20s and 30s that gave her the impetus and the life experience to set out on the right path.

Sitting in an upmarket Auckland hotel, the 41-year-old Differently Normal author is the first to admit she feels out of place. Tammy and her husband Karl have recently relocated from Rotorua to a farm in Otorohanga, in the King Country, and she’s only just started driving, so getting around Auckland’s convoluted inner-city streets is especially terrifying. To top it all off, her car battery died when the hotel’s valet tried to shift it. If that doesn’t immediately endear you towards the Kiwi author, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s a reason Tammy had already built an online community who were fans of her writing before there was ever a physical version of her books, and that is because she is a delight. A delight who still can’t quite believe she’s made it this far.

Following on from a childhood ambition to be an astronaut, but with a sadly irreconcilable hatred of maths and physics, Tammy instead decided to pick a warmer career path and started working on international cruise ships. After a couple of years at sea, she came back to New Zealand to spend time with her dying grandmother. The tropical life was still calling, though, and her next move was to the Whitsundays to work at Club Med. How long, might you ask, can one live on a pristine island before all that paradise starts to become claustrophobic? “Three years,” Tammy says drily. “After that I got cabin fever, and it was time to move on.”