Camping on the Faultline - A Memoir

Sun fading to cover. Foxing to pages. Published by Random House NZ, 2000.

The memoirs of writer Marilyn Duckworth. Marilyn was a wide-eyed 22-year-old when the letter arrived from London accepting her first novel A Gap in the Spectrum. A dozen more would follow. Today she describes herself as a New Zealander in her wooden tent above a faultline, practising the trick of permanence. There was never much of that in her rather hectic earlier life: two countries, 49 houses (and a shelter shed), 12 schools, four husbands, passing lovers and friends who die - the ultimate desertion. But there are constants too - her sister, poet Fleur Adcock, her four lively daughters - and weaving through all this, her writing. The reader accompanies her through the stirring sixties and seventies and as far as the nervous nineties. Hovering over her story are the benign ghosts of her first love, Richard, and his friend Dan, whom she married 20 years after Richard's death.