Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers, and guests. This week: Elizabeth Cox, author of Mr Ward’s Map, which won the Bookhub award for illustrated non-fiction at this year’s Ockhams.

The book I wish I’d written

Any and every book by Margaret Mahy – my goodness, what a genius she was. Not only her young children’s books – Bubble Trouble and The Lion in the Meadow are just two of my favourites – but also her young adult books, especially The Haunting.

The book everyone should read

Potiki by Patricia Grace. Grace is a national treasure, and led the way in so many ways. I love that she wrote Potiki in 1986 about a battle to save ancestral land, and Patricia herself was still fighting – and won – her own legal battle to save her tūrangawaewae 30 years later.  I would also put in Robin Hyde’s The Godwits Fly in there – she grew up in Wellington in the 1910s in the suburbs near where I live and talked about it so beautifully. She had such an incredible but tragic life, and was so talented.

The book I want to be buried with

Another children’s book – a little book called Elizabeth by Liesel Moak Skorpen, which my mother bought me when I was young and has my name it in, in her handwriting. I wonder how many hundreds of times I have read it? Very precious.

Fiction or non-fiction

I’m obviously a non-fiction writer, but mostly I read fiction for fun. I find that I can’t read fiction while I am in the midst of writing, though, as my brain is too full of all the stuff I’ve had to read for research. An exception was with Mr Ward’s Map – I got to read lots of Katherine Mansfield, as she was stalking around the city as a young woman just at the time Ward was drawing the map, and she later described the city of her memory in deliciously accurate detail. She was so accurate I could follow her around the city on the map.

It’s a crime against language to … 

Hands down it’s to write bad children’s books – books that patronise or try and “teach” kids something, or that don’t have a proper rhyming scheme, which will bug you the first time you read it and then for the hundredth time. Lots of American kid’s books have some sort of moral or teaching and they’re boring and icky.

The book that haunts me

Books where people get trapped by circumstance freak me out the most. Books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or 1984, where the character thinks they can “work the system”, or get free of the system, but where the system is always, and was always, rigged against them. Absolutely terrifying, because it really could happen to anyone, if the “system” chooses to turn against you. Especially, of course, to women and children – how many women of colour, rebellious women, menopausal women or children with any “difference” were shut in places like that? New Zealand has yet to properly face up to the reality of what happened at places like Lake Alice.

The book that made me cry

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. At the moment where Kip hears about the nuclear bombs on Japan – “It rolls across cities like a burst map, the hurricane of heat … This tremor of Western wisdom”. He realises that the nation he has been loyally serving in the war would bomb any nation of people with brown skins and sets off to make his journey home, leaving behind the people he loved, but can’t love them any more. I have never watched the film version as I didn’t want their version overlaid in my memory over the top of my own memories of the book. 

Oh and also Dogger by Shirley Hughes! My kids got used to me trying and failing to read it to them at bedtime all the way to the end, where the big sister buys back Dogger back for her little brother. Tears (mine) every time!

The book that made me laugh

I have always loved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. 

The book character I never believed

Is it terrible to say almost every woman character written by a man?

The plot change I would make

Oh that’s easy – Little Women. Sure, I’m still not over the trauma of Beth dying (sorry – spoilers) but equally, or perhaps even worse, Laurie ending up with Amy and not Jo. It did not compute in my teenage brain that Laurie and Jo could be with anyone else other than each other, and it still doesn’t. Probably it shows some emotional lack in me, but I can’t – and won’t –  understand Jo refusing him. So that’s what I would fix – Amy and Laurie – oh, and Beth surviving of course. 

The book I wish would be adapted for film or TV

I’m sure Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt will be made into a film soon! The claustrophobic life in the children’s home and the slow unfurling of the horror they are living in, would be perfect for a film. It’s easy to see it on the big screen.  

Encounter with an author

Well, I just met Catherine Chidgey briefly at the Auckland Writer’s Festival and told her what I was going to say for the question about the film above!

What I’m reading right now

I just finished reading a few books in preparation for the Auckland Writers Festival – and now I have just started Ingrid Horrocks’ All Her Lives and will follow that with Tracy Farr’s Wonderland – two more novels about Wellington women!

Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street by Elizabeth Cox ($90, Massey University Press) is available to purchase at Unity Books.