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Teacher’s encouragement bears fruit 30 years later When Amy McDaid was a student at Titirangi Primary School in the late 1980s, her teacher Mr Smallfield, told her she would be a writer one day and she believed him. Just over 30 years later Mr Smallfield’s encouragement and faith in Amy’s early ability came to fruition with the recent publication of her debut novel Fake Baby. Much of the novel is set in the Titirangi and Green Bay area where Amy still lives and she says she was driven to write from childhood. “I love language, words, books. I was an early reader and hardly ever watched TV,” she says. “I love to write, I need to write. Writing is part of who I am.” She says she was “middling in high school English” and after leaving school did a nursing degree but continued to write short stories and poetry. For the past 12 years Amy years has been a neo-natal nurse at NICU, Auckland Hospital’s newborn intensive care unit. But writing never went away and as well as her fulltime job and a little girl of her own, Amy undertook a masters degree in creative writing at Auckland University in 2017. She won the Sir James Wallace prize which recognised the student taking the degree as having completed the highest-quality manuscript. She says the financial prize bought her time to take a year off work and help pay childcare costs for her daughter while she wrote full time. “I didn’t expect to get published,” Amy says. “Publishers only take on about one book a year from about 1,000 applications.” In 2019 she was the one selected by Penguin Random House New Zealand, and a year later Fake Baby was launched. The book tackles the themes of grief, anxiety and mental illness in a story of three intersecting lives over a nine-day period in Auckland. “I didn’t set out to write a novel about mental distress and while the characters are very much invented, I have worked in mental health areas in my job as a nurse. I’ve had personal experience too. I had a brother, Carl, who committed suicide when 16, and my brother Nicholas has bipolar disorder. I’ve had depression and anxiety on and off. “I didn’t know what I was going to write and had no structure when I started it,” Amy says. “I started with characters and took time to get to know them. I had an idea, then another idea and then another. I had to spend time in the characters’ worlds
to see how the story unfolded. “Walking is extremely valuable for writing. Many of my ideas came from walking 35-40 minutes each day. There’s something in the repetitive nature of step after step after step that just triggered ideas and thoughts.” Readers have been quick to comment on Amy’s vividly drawn characters. “A sharp satire on modern life. Wonderful dialogue. It was hard to put down,” wrote one. Others have admired this ‘intelligently written novel’; ‘superb, darkly humorous’; ‘a beautiful story of three characters with varying mental health issues. Their stories are told sensitively with laugh out loud moments’; ‘wry, lyrical and touching – a beautiful work.’ “The whole process has been stressful but also really enjoyable and exciting ... a bit like a roller coaster, but I’m really happy to have the book out there.” Amy says the seeds of another novel are already planted in her mind. “The character is called Cerys and she’s a bit of a trouble-maker. That’s all I’ll say but I’m looking forward to spending more time with her.” And Mr Smallfield? “I’ve been able to track him down on the North Shore and I’ve sent him a copy, thanking him for his encouragement.”
Local writer Amy McDaid: “Walking is extremely valuable for writing.”
– Moira Kennedy
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