WHAT LIES BEYOND
Karl Stead, poet, critic, fiction writer and memoirist, keeps saying he has been told he could cark it at any moment – a matter of his wonky heart – then he doesn’t cark it at any moment. He is 88. I think he will go on not carking it until he is 99, whereupon he will cark it – just to annoy anyone who had been making plans for his 100th birthday party.
In which case, he will have time to write another autobiography. He has just published what he says is his third volume of memoir, What You Made of It, which covers the years from 1987 to 2020.
I reckon it is really his fourth memoir, because of the elements of autobiography in Book Self, which was published in 2008. He says Book Self is a series of essays, which it is, but I am still counting it. So, we disagree on this and on other matters.
That is part of the fun of interviewing Stead, which I have done on quite a few occasions. He is, or can be, formidably argumentative, and also frustratingly impenetrable. He does not appreciate hacks attempting to rummage around in his psyche, which remains as mysterious as Mars to me.
He is soppy about animals. He shot a few possums at the family bach at Karekare, then decided they were lovely creatures and began feeding them. He
