It probably still exists somewhere in Gmail, she says now, but “I couldn’t open it with a gun to my head”. And it wasn’t just that “untitled Christmas novel” wasn’t coming together as she’d hoped, it was that “it was dreadful, it was awful, and I knew it, and I didn’t stop”. It did not, not even when there were 85,000 words of it.
If she sat there for a year, she figured, something “at least as good” as her previous work would emerge. The New Zealander, now 43, had built up a career in journalism in the UK and Australia, where she lives, writing for outlets such as the Times, Vogue and the New Yorker, and felt comfortable with discipline and deadlines. After all, she knew she could do it: there on her shelves were her memoir of having children in her 20s, Say It Again in a Nice Voice, and her 2017 novel You Be Mother.
W hen Meg Mason took herself off to her shed to write her third book, a certain pragmatic confidence accompanied her.
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