Love runs into all sorts of difficulties,” he says. “All sorts of things do get into your books- your beliefs, obsessions, prejudices….” 12 “One of my central obsessions is the difficulty of connecting, and my novels are partly about that. Gee agrees that family stories and his own life find their way into his novels. Most readers of Gee’s work recognise a location, landscape, person- or some aspect of their own lives. It seems to me that when I write a novel I like to set it in the place I'm living in….” 11 “There's so much in Wellington, it's a wonderful place to set stories in-it's got wonderful levels, you go up steps and down steps and you can drop out of one world and into another. They moved to Wellington in 1989 when Gee won the Victoria University of Wellington’s Writer’s Fellowship for that year. “So we got by, things improved, and Margareta was able to buy real coffee instead of drinking a make-believe sort made from roasted barley.” 10 Pick-your-own fruit and vegetables and home brewed beer helped money go further. “We arrived in Nelson and for several years were church-mouse poor, so buying cheap food was a necessity,” he wrote in the recipe book, Food Central.
8 In 1975, he plunged into life as a fulltime writer when Gee and wife Margareta moved from Auckland to Nelson, living off a small Literary Fund Scholarship. 7 As well as teaching, he has been a hospital porter, librarian and postie. 6Īfter completing an MA in English from the University of Auckland in 1954, Gee taught for two years. From the age of 16, 4 he knew he wanted to tell stories and invent people and worlds like his favourite author, Charles Dickens. 2007Īs a boy, he loved Robin Hood stories- tales of adventure, narrow escape and robbing the rich to give to the poor. Steaming cocoa came around in kerosene tins and the stoves turned red behind their iron rails….In swimming weather we went in classes down to Falls Park and swam in the brown salty water.” 5 “In the winter we ran to school bare-footed, breaking the ice on puddles with our toes. His 30 th book, Access Road (2009) was triggered by a return trip to his childhood home. 3 Henderson Creek, where he enjoyed “…playing in the haystacks, sitting by the creek, exploring old culverts….”, runs through his imaginative life, with many of his books set there. He grew up in Henderson- “no suburb of Auckland then but a country town with boarding house and blacksmith shop and a concrete-box town hall where the pictures (movies) showed on Saturday nights.
And we did not want a writing mother anyway. “But it was too late for her to write well.
One of her stories was included, by Frank Sargeson, in an anthology of New Zealand writing. His father was a carpenter, his mother an aspiring writer. Courtesy NZ Book Councilīorn in Whakatane in 1931, Gee was the middle son of three boys.
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