Author's Message

It seems odd to be writing for RT BOOK REVIEWS when my book, The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs, can seem so concerned with all that is unromantic in our everyday lives. Mary Gilmour is so enraged by the domestic chaos that she finds herself living in that she compiles a star chart to mark her husband’s good and bad behaviour. As a consequence, the book is as much concerned with the stench of an untidy kitchen as with the scent of a lover.

The other day my four-year-old daughter Celia asked, out of the blue, "what does romantic mean?" She already has a highly evolved sense of what she thinks it is, based entirely on Disney Princesses. She refused to watch one DVD because it didn’t have a "proper ending", in other words "Barbie marrying a handsome prince". She and her little sister can’t see a towel without putting it on their heads in lieu of a veil.

But to me, real romance has always been about the little things rather than the grand gestures and extravagances. I wanted to write a story which gave me the opportunity to explore how to keep the love alive beyond the heady first days and when realities like raising children, maintaining a home and keeping your job interfere. My brother, who is a film-maker, read it and described it as a "romcom x 2" because you get the "they hate each other then love each other" bit twice — once in my heroine’s reminiscences about how she and Joel first met and fell in love, and then again in the course of the novel as she tries to re-ignite these feelings in the midst of her fury.

Finding the love amid the grime is a challenge for both my heroine and her creator. Mary is not always easy to like. When I look for adjectives to describe her I come up with some very British-English words like stroppy, bolshie and whingey, perhaps because she has a personality that is most often associated with us grumpy Brits. Her husband Joel has to be attractive enough for us to care about him, but not such a love god that Mary’s anger towards him seems deranged. I wanted to convey all the untidiness and chaos of their lives without getting bogged down in tedious detail. I had a strong set-up, the writing of the list, but then wasn’t sure how to get from this high-concept beginning to the ending in a natural way.

While there were issues to be resolved within the story, my personal circumstances made the writing of it even harder. I began the book about seven or eight months after the birth of my second child. A few months later, I found myself precipitously pregnant again. I know lots of women achieve great things when pregnant, but I become even more distracted and obsessed with irrelevance on the Internet. Plus I had to earn a certain amount of money through journalism to qualify for the UK Government’s not ungenerous self-employed person’s maternity allowance (at the time about $160 dollars a week for six months). This meant that the novel got pushed aside.

It was hard going back to the book after another maternity leave, especially since I now had three children under the age of five. Whereas with my first child there were always moments of naps and his father taking over, with three there was no respite. Luckily my agent had sent out the first three chapters of the book and this sparked enough interest from a couple of publishers for me to persevere with Mary and my’s story.

I worried, too, when writing it that nobody would want to read a story that, though exaggerated, was rooted in an unromantic reality. Many of us want to escape through books, while my novel offers more of an opportunity for identification. The book’s reception, both in the media and in the feedback I’ve had from readers, has shown that although there’s a place for fantasy and a flight from reality, we also like to read books that show our own lives in a comic and ultimately romantic way. Most of us have experienced falling in love and trying to maintain this in amid the chaos, few of us know what it’s like to be a princess or noblewoman. I hope that readers feel the heat of Mary’s righteous anger, but at the same time the also get to warm themselves in the glow of the love that ultimately prevails.

- Christina Hopkinson