Reading the room

Reading Ambassador and author Kate De Goldi has been preparing for her new role for years.

- BY MICHELE HEWITSON

It is 10.30am on a Saturday and the new Te Awhi Rito Reading Ambassador, writer Kate De Goldi, should, surely, still be in bed. Her friend, fellow writer and former neighbour, Lloyd Jones, wrote a piece about her in which he intimated that she spends almost her entire life in her bed, from which she receives visitors.

So I had a vision of her reclining in a sumptuous boudoir in a bed strewn with books and fancy pillows while wearing posh pyjamas. He described her as “lolling”.

“Oh, bloody Lloyd,” she says. “He's such an exaggerator. Lloyd reckons that every time he came down I was lying on my bed, no matter what time of the day it was. But I wasn't lolling. I was actually working. By reading.”

She doesn't even own a pair of pyjamas. She wears old T-shirts. “I have been known to receive people in bed though.” I am very pleased to hear this because, otherwise, she is a disappointment.

“Well, I'm so sorry. I'll try to think of some other bad behaviour.”

Bloody fiction writers. She might have been known to make up the odd thing herself. I was agog to know about great-uncle Curly’s scandal, which she mentions in the her lovely essay, Landscape and Memory, and which was supposed to have taken place in the 1940s. Of course I was agog to know because who wouldn't be?” And the truth is, there was no disgrace, but I just used him as a character and imagined this disgrace, but I forgot that there was no disgrace.” In other words, she made it up. Anyone would think she was a bloody fiction writer.

She is, of course, a fiction writer, mainly, but not exclusively, of books for kids including the Lolly Leopold stories and ACB with Honora Lee, and books for young adults.

What she does is play with words for a living. In Eddy, Eddy there is a character called Brain who is inordinately fond of big words. Here are some: cruciferous, adumbrate, phlegmatic.