Claire Mabey reviews Josie Shapiro’s debut novel Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, winner of the inaugural Allen & Unwin Fiction Prize.

The aggressive misogyny of the early 2000s is the skeezy world in which Josie Shapiro’s quietly magnetic character, Mickey Bloom, comes of age. As a reader of the exact same age as Bloom, the sinister environment of open slather on women, which Shapiro deftly recreates, struck me hard and it struck me deep. 

Which is not to say that Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts is not a feel-good novel, because it is, and unashamedly so. The journey of underdog competitive runner Mickey Bloom is one of ambition and catastrophe before it comes sweet with recovery and growth. There are even moments along the road where the trajectory prickles with rom-com energy (another signpost of the early 2000s). And yet, in this commercially appealing, carefully held book, the author is doing something subversive. I clung to this story in a way that both surprised and, at the risk of sounding schmaltzy, healed me.

The book begins by bringing us up to speed with Mickey’s formative years, which are drawn to show that Mickey is not a privileged kid. By the time she can walk (“late” by that cack-handed invisible rule book that all parents seem to inherit from the aether) her parents have split and her dad (a pompous journalist, disdainful of sport) is distant and disinterested, even cruel; at school it becomes clear that Mickey is dyslexic, can barely read and is bullied for it; money in a single-parent household with multiple children is always tight. Flailing at the edges, Mickey is pitiable, the anti-dynamic protagonist. But when she watches the women’s marathon at the 2000 Sydney Olympics on TV, Mickey’s mettle coalesces to drive the rest of the story.

Not since Tessa Duder’s Alex quartet has a character so vividly captured the experience of a young woman in possession of athletic power. For the runners among Shapiro’s readers, the evocations of the heady kind of freedom one can attain is intoxicating. It makes you want to put the book down, get your gear on and speed out the door: “I felt high, as though I was floating above the ground, my mind clear and crisp as a diamond.” 

Throughout, though, Shapiro’s eye remains true to the legacy of that sick naughties violence. The kind that hollers abuse before using the “defence” of “but it was only a joke”. You’ll recognise that sort of tiresome dickheadness in all-too-familiar scenes like this one: “Out of the corner of my eye I saw the man in the passenger seat, his fingers in a V over his mouth, his tongue slicing through the centre. Someone else let loose a whooping cry that seemed to stay in the air for a few seconds. Before draining away beneath the receding grunt of the double exhaust propped on the rear. I kept running.” 

The first implosions in the novel happen when teenage Mickey is drawn into a training methodology that works actively against her body. There is abuse from coaches in both an overt sense (sexual), and as a result of toxic ignorance about health and nutrition (over-training and under-eating). In both instances, Shapiro’s light, airy style shows the transgressions without lingering on the horror, which spares the reader from becoming stuck in the unjust nature of Mickey’s plight. After all, we’re already deep inside the mess of woman-hating that defined late 90s/early 2000s pop culture, with passing experiences like this: “On one training run in late June I overtook Nick, a boy from my biology class, and I head him say softly, ‘Fucking bitch.’”

A couple of weeks after I finished Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, with the story still echoing through me, I did a speaking event with athlete-cum-nutritionist Rosa Flanagan. She talked openly and generously about her experience of being an elite athlete in her teenage years, training so hard and eating so little that her bones splintered and she didn’t get her period until she was 20. After the event, I said to her: “That’s what happened to a friend of mine.” 

That’s how hard I fell for Shapiro’s Mickey Bloom: I grew so fond of the fictional character that she crystalised as a memory from the third dimension. It’s rare that a book comes along with such a sympathetic character that they become a touchstone for experience, but it happens. Still, it was an odd thing to do, to claim a character as a friend, and it forced me, against some long-suppressed part of myself, to ask why. 

“Young Women in Sport: Are we training them all wrong?” asks a 2019 article on the ACC website. It goes on to explain that because sports science is based on male physiology – and because of a general reluctance to discuss basic facts of women’s health, like periods – young women are trained into injury, nutritional deficit and scuppered potential. After reading Shapiro and talking with Rosa, I went down the rabbit hole of information that is so unsurprising to me that I couldn’t even get enraged by it. It’s simply no longer news that women’s health is chronically under-researched and under-educated (just think menopause, endometriosis, the autoimmune diseases that women are much more likely to have, etc, etc and so on and so forth). 

The exhaustion with which I responded to the article, I realised, comes from the same place as the bruised person who found a friend in Mickey Bloom. I’m yet another millennial who went through a high school elite sports training experience and didn’t have the appropriate time. At high school my friends and I – tender 13-year-olds – were rowers. A hairy skein of thick-skinned older men took on the task of making us run, and burpee, and hill sprint, and skull our hearts out at 5am every morning. So we could win medals and get abs like Britney, and so they could be coaches of svelte champions. There were training camps in which one of the coaches gave massages to topless 15-year-olds; where my friend got so dehydrated she hallucinated. There was a heady, hormonally charged competition between our crews and the boys (equally pliable, awkward and raw as baby birds) in the training sheds next door. Many of us stopped having our periods but it was never talked about with the adults. I lasted one season and never wanted to look too hard at the reasons why I fled. All I knew was that I wasn’t comfortable and I knew that one of the coaches appeared to loathe me: I was bookish, too small, quiet. Like Mickey Bloom, I didn’t present like an athlete.

Shapiro’s book reflects back the harmful absurdity of that era. One of two recent novels to have done so (the other being Sprigs by Brannavan Gnanalingam, which summons the grotesque boys’ club mentality of the same period). The arrogance of those coaches and the complicit system – from school all the way to Hollywood – that backed them. Apparently it takes a good 20-odd years to unravel such behaviour: Rosa Flanagan is much younger than me; the ACC article is from 2019; this book just came out. 

What Shapiro does in part two of Everything is Beautiful is the healing bit. Mickey gives up running in order to recover from stress fractures that have formed up and down her skeleton. Life slows, she lives with her mum, she gets a job as a barista, she’s back to the butterfly touch of her baseline: almost invisible Mickey.

We learn that Mickey is 27 when she meets Joel, an electrician, who says things like: “‘If you were taller babe, with pins like that. Shit,’ he said shaking his head, ‘you’d be hot. … you could get a boob job.’” He is a basic 90s-style bro. A flinty drunk, and insecure, he is a product of the same misogyny that Mickey survived at the other end of the spectrum. He stirs her well of disappointment by jibing her about not being at the Rio Olympics (2021, bringing Mickey’s life in line with our present), suggesting “If you’d really wanted to go, you would have gone.” 

Because this novel follows the age-old transition from innocence to experience, the older and wiser Mickey shucks the shaming influence of a warped male ego. Even though the severance is catalysed by a heartbreaking personal catastrophe, Mickey’s break from the crappy boyfriend marks a turn in her life and the start of an upward swing in her luck.

In the end it’s a woman who edifies Mickey Bloom. Philippa is the most effervescent character in the novel and is the queer fairy godmother in sneakers that us millennial teenage athletes never had. When Philippa spies Mickey out on a jog one morning she sees the innate talent and offers to train her. By now we’re used to Shapiro’s steadfast style of prose, but when applied to Philippa the tone renders her immediately likeable and trustworthy. A relief. See how she puts Mickey’s insecurities, the past traumas, to rest by stating potential first and understanding next: “I remember watching you win the 10,000 metres. Your record still stands. … I know Bruce Madden and his bunch of clowns up at North Lynn. You aren’t the only one.”

In one fell swoop Philippa reveals to Mickey that her dealings with athletics so far isn’t a hopeless, private shame. From that moment on they train together, working with Mickey’s body to ensure that health and wellbeing is prioritised over ideas like racing weight and callipers pinching at body fat. 

Shapiro energises her spacious, clean prose (meaning really a scarcity of figurative language and a favouring of short sentences) with a useful structural tool: Mickey’s story is told in dual time. In between the life story are chapters in the present tense that track Mickey’s progress as she runs the Auckland marathon. The effect is to offer the reader hope from the get-go. Hope and pace. They are short interstices that build adrenalin in the reader, that push you ever closer to the edge of your seat, because as you come to learn about Mickey’s life you badly want her to win.

Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts gives its heroine a buoyant send-off, but it’s never about winning. At life or otherwise. As I read, I kept thinking about Eagle vs Shark, the 2008 movie starring Jemaine Clement as Jarrod and Loren Taylor as Lily. Like Mickey, Lily isn’t vivacious or academic or in possession of cultural or social capital. But she is steadfast and inspired and wise. There’s a moment in the movie when she tells Jarrod’s cruel father that life is full of bad bits and lovely bits and that Jarrod (Lily’s love interest) is a lovely bit. It’s plain, honest, love-based logic. A similar kind of framework exists in Shapiro’s world: there are bad bits and lovely bits and at the centre is a person upon whom, in the end, the lovely bits are allowed to flourish. 

Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts by Josie Shapiro (Allen & Unwin NZ, $37) can be purchased from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.

Susan Wardell’s first picture book is nominated in two categories at this year’s New Zealand Book Awards for Children & Young Adults. She tells Claire Mabey about the genesis of the book, and what she thinks of the state of children’s publishing in Aotearoa.

Claire Mabey: What was the inspiration for The Lighthouse Princess?

Susan Wardell: The Lighthouse Princess began as a story my husband and I were telling to each other, aloud, as we walked along a wild and windy beach, more than 10 years ago. The idea was a sort of introvert, feminist fairytale … an inverted Rapunzel story, set in a rugged castle on the cliff we were walking towards. Like a downhill snowball it has picked up little details and features over the years, from all sorts of places I went and things I experienced, often around the South Island of Aotearoa. The castle transformed into a lighthouse later, as part of that; and after I had children, and wanted to age it down for them, and then eventually, turn it into a written manuscript.

This is your first picture book. What did you learn?

Both in writing the book, and in hearing children’s responses, I have learnt to respect the nuance children are capable of perceiving. We don’t need to talk down to them. We can take seeds of the things that feel most real to us, and form that into a story. Yes, there can be silliness, and humour, and joy, and play (and pleasure is an important part of reading, however it arrives) but it can also contain big themes and deep feelings. This excites me.

I had a rather unique experience for this book, as the manuscript was used as part of the Gavin Bishop award, which is for first-time illustrators. This meant my text was sent out to any interested entrants, so that they put together some concept drawings and sample pages. These were then judged by a prize committee, in order to pick the person who would actually get the contract to illustrate the book (under mentorship of Gavin Bishop). I didn’t discover Rose’s work until the whole process was complete, and she was announced as the winner… at which point I felt like I had won the lottery, because she is so absolutely wonderful and talented. I feel very lucky.

You write in lots of genres – what appealed to you about writing a picture book?

My own children are 9 and 7. Becoming a parent was certainly part of what tipped me over into thinking about this genre. Particularly when my eldest (a daughter) was small, I was thinking a lot about the type of books and stories she would be exposed to, and what I most wanted to pass on to her.

Picture books require you to fit a lot of meaning, story, characterisation, mood, and nuance, into a short space, using words as carefully and sparingly as possible. In that way, even when I first started, it felt pretty similar to the work I was more experienced with, in writing poetry and flash fiction for example, which helped me feel confident to apply what I already knew. The part that was totally new was the strange alchemy of words and images; the way they come together, to become more than the sum of their parts. The idea of seeing something from my own head come to life on the page, through someone else’s imagination and artistic skills, also intrigued me!

In some ways I feel like this book has already had more impact than all of the other writing I have done in other genres over the years, combined. There is a certain mode of attention that picture books get – read aloud, together, often cuddled up in the intimate space of the evening, sometimes read repeatedly over days and weeks and years – that means they can really become part of a child’s inner landscape. Having that kind of influence feels like a huge privilege, and is a key appeal for me towards continuing to work in the space of children’s literature.

What are your favourite children’s books?

I loved fairy stories and magic stories as a child. This included Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree, which my mum would read aloud to me, and Shirley Barber books, which I would save money up to buy in order to spend ages ogling the amazing illustrations. I was also attached to a few classics like E.M Montgomery (both ‘Anne’ and ‘Emily’) which I mentioned, and The Little White Horse (Elizabeth Goudge). I read quite a lot of ‘old fashioned’ books.

For picture books, a favourite even today is a book called Debbie’s Dream, by Gilbert Delahaye, which features child who dreams of a dancing snowman in a winter wonderland while ill with a fever, and deals with themes of longing, disappointment and imagination in a way that stayed with me. From the same stack of books, I have another called Once Upon a Time in the Meadow, by Rose Selarose, where six little cousins live in a cottage by the meadow, and have picnics, and dress-up parades, and then save an injured rabbit from a trap. Looking back I suppose a lot of my favourites were books that combined a certain cosiness with a sense of adventure, magic, romance or independence … which, now that I think about it, is probably a fairly consistent approach in my own writing too!

What has been most challenging thing for you in the making of The Lighthouse Princess?

Patience and perseverance, because it took a lot of time – nearly nine years – between the first spark of an idea, and holding it in my hands in print. Getting published is hard, especially for a first book. So it required quite a bit of courage, and also humility, to learn to take feedback, and to edit and rework things, but without giving  up. Having a writers’ community to support you, and also help you navigate the sometimes confusing ins and outs of publishing, can make a big difference.

What has been the most rewarding?

I read a lot digitally these days, but a print book is a really beautiful artefact, a treasure really. I used to lie awake after a bad day and imagine what it what would feel like to hold a book that I had written in my hands. It hasn’t disappointed! Seeing it printed and produced so beautifully, touching the cover, admiring the details, feels wonderful.

Seeing children’s responses to it is even more rewarding. On a recent Storylines tour in the Bay of Plenty, I visited 14 different schools and libraries. Kids are the most honest critics, but realising how many of them had already read the book, and had their own experiences, feelings and relationship with it, quite outside of me, was both strange and moving.

What are your thoughts on the state of children’s publishing in Aotearoa?

Children’s books may be short-form – and yes, even have pictures added – but they deserve to be treated with just as much seriousness and care as any other genre of writing. My editor Catherine O’Loughlin at Penguin Random House NZ has modelled this to me in a wonderful way. 

The skill that goes into really good children’s writing, and the value it holds, is not always recognised, supported, remunerated or celebrated appropriately – with the wonderful exception of events like the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, where we all get to bask in the lovely glow of this very special type of literature for a little while; to relive our own childhoods, and put our minds to work again on how to populate the next generation’s childhoods with the most rich, meaningful and joyful stories we can think of. 

The Lighthouse Princess, written by Susan Wardell and illustrated by Rose Northey (Penguin NZ, $21), is available to purchase at Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.

The Lighthouse Princess is a finalist at the 2023 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. It is vying for the Picture Book Award and the NZSA Best First Book Award, while Rose’s artwork is in the running for the Russell Clark Award for Illustration. The winners will be revealed at a ceremony in Wellington on Thursday 10 August.