We’re celebrating a milestone with this podcast, the 300th episode of The Joys of Binge Reading show. And it’s wonderful to be able to share it with best-selling author Helen Brown.
Helen is a good friend and a former colleague who is appearing on the show for the second time, so it’s just like all the stars are aligned. She has a remarkable gift for creating stories readers love with a mix of memoir and imaginative fiction that crosses international boundaries.
Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and this is the second to last episode of The Joys of Binge Reading, at least for the time being.
We love having Helen here to share it with us. She talks about her latest book, Mickey, The Cat Who Helped Me Through Times Of Change. Those of you who know Helen’s work, know that cats feature prominently.
Her classic memoir Cleo, The Small Black Cat That Helped Heal A Family has sold over two million copies and been translated into 18 languages, sold in 42 countries.
Mickey is another heart touching gem, a wistful coming of age true story about the transition from childhood to adolescence, and the small stray cat that helped guide the way.
We’ll get to Helen in just a moment. But before we do, I want to say a few words about the show. As I’ve indicated, both today and earlier I’m retiring it at least for a season, to pursue other things like writing my own books.
Our Giveaway This Week
With that in mind, our Giveaway this episode is Poppy’s Dilemma, Book #1 in my latest series, The Sisters Of Barclay Square, set in Sydney in the late 1860s. Poppy Barclay’s privileged life shatters when her father’s investment company collapses amidst shocking allegations of fraud.
Download for FREE
DOWNLOAD E BOOK
https://dl.bookfunnel.com/8qspkbukp3
Jilted by her fiancé, shunned by the elite, the beautiful heiress finds herself an outcast, her dreams of a perfect marriage in ruins.
She’s determined to fight back, but Poppy’s quest for justice puts her up against tenacious journalists, Thomas Yates, who is bent on exposing the truth behind the Barclay’s disgrace.
You can get a free copy of Poppy’s Dilemma from the download link in the show notes for this episode on our website, the joys of binge reading.com.
Here is the link to download:
Alyssa Maxwell’s Newport murder mysteries
I’m halfway through the first draft of the second book, working title Posey’s Peril about Poppy’s twin. And without the podcast to take up my time, I’m planning to finish it next month. As I foreshadowed, this will be our penultimate show.
There will be one more episode, # 301, because I committed to featuring historical mystery author Alyssa Maxwell’s was latest book months ago, before I’d made the decision to give Binge Reading a rest, and we recorded the interview in April or May – quite some time ago. I’m going to stay true to that and do that last episode so it doesn’t waste the effort of being interviewed on Alyssa’s part.
The show started in August, 2017, so we’ve been going for seven years straight, podcasting weekly for the first six years and fortnightly for nearly the last year.
It’s quite a load to carry, forever lining up new guests, reading their books, researching their careers, and then doing the technical work of sound and transcript editing for every episode. The technical side of it in particular has become tedious and time consuming, and ironically, I’ve had lots of problems getting this last show recorded.
The reasons for that are too boring to go into, but suffice it to say that after 299 reasonably straightforward episodes, #300 has proven particularly difficult technically speaking.
Technical issues sorted – at last!
It’s appropriate that I had to call in sound engineer Dan Cotton, who edited the show professionally for me for the first few years, to sort out the problems in this, our second to last show. There’s a nice circularity about that for me.
Thanks to everyone like Dan and Abe who recorded the intro we’re still using, for their help and support, and warmest gratitude to all our listeners.
We’d developed a creditable audience and I’ve met some wonderful people along the way. The show will be out there long after this ending. I’m in the process of uploading all of the audio onto YouTube podcasts, and it’s on all of the major platforms.
You’ll still be able to find wonderful chats with favorite authors for a long time to come. That’s enough said. Let’s get to Helen.
Links to items mentioned in this episode
Previous Binge Reading episode featuring Helen:
https://thejoysofbingereading.com/helen-browns-feline-adventures
David Brooks How To Know A Person – The Art of Seeing Others Deeply
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112974860-how-to-know-a-person
Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes To Heal – How Transforming Ourselves Can Change The World
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195888446-what-it-takes-to-heal
The Rest Is History by Dr Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/rest-is-history-9781526667748
Poetry Unbound: Fifty Poems To Open Your World
https://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Unbound-Poems-Open-World/dp/B0BCL3VW15
Trip to Romania for environmental research
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nicolae-Ceausescu
Snow globing: Watch comedian Mae Martin explain it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE77WFTc8PI
Where to find Helen online:
Website: https://www.helenbrown.com.au/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Helen.Brown.International.Author/
Instagram: @helenbrownauthor
Hello, Helen. And welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Helen Brown: Oh, thank you very much, Jenny. It’s lovely to be here.
Jenny Wheeler: Look, this is our 300th episode, so it’s really wonderful to be finishing it off, talking to you, an old friend. We’re talking about your latest book, Mickey, The Cat Who Helped Me Through Times Of Change. Tell us about Mickey.
(Ed note: Because of the aforementioned technical difficulties, this small intro was not recorded on the raw sound file – goodness knows why not! Apologies.)
Introducing Helen Brown author
Helen Brown – International best selling memoirs
Helen Brown: The inspiration for Mickey goes back to those Covid days. Jenny.
I don’t know how you went through them, but for me, I felt so isolated and disconnected from the world and I experienced a deep kind of loneliness.
I never thought I was a particularly sociable person, but that feeling of disconnect was so strong, and I know people felt that all around the world.
I was sitting in my study here in Melbourne feeling very isolated and alone, and I thought, oh my God, I haven’t had this feeling for so long.
But it’s a little bit familiar and it reminded me of when I was 12-years-old, transitioning into adolescence, feeling as if I belonged nowhere, and wondering how on earth to go forwards.
And at the same time, my father was a wonderful photographer and I have quite a few of his photos, his colour slides printed out and mounted on my walls here. And in that deep chasm of silence of those Covid months and years, his photos became more vibrant and more powerful, and they beamed into this room and the characters became more real than living characters.
And I just thought, oh my goodness, I’ve got to write about these people. They’re my friends again at this moment, mom and dad, and my sister and brother.
Mickey rescued from gas works poison
And then of course, I was reminded of my saviour at the time, who turned out to be a cat. My father was manager of the local gas works in New Plymouth where we lived.
We were quite an eccentric family. Jenny, I don’t know if you’ve picked that up from the book.
Helen Brown: One day my father said, ‘would you like to come for a drive?’ And I thought, oh gosh, he’s never asked me for a drive, so I said yes.
We jumped in the old blue gray Zephyr. It was pouring with rain and he drove me off to the gas work.
I thought, ‘oh no, we are going back to dad’s work. I’m just going to sit outside here in the car while he does something important. ‘
But no. He went in and came out carrying this cardboard box. He opened the door and put the box on my lap and he said, ‘take care of this, will you?’
And I lifted the lid of the box, looked inside, and a face looked up at me. The face of a three-month-old gray tabby.
And in that moment, that kind of visceral moment of connection, I felt the presence of another soul and someone who could really help me through this difficult time.
But… Helen’s Mum hated cats…..
Jenny Wheeler: Now, this is probably the first of many interactions that you’ve had with cats. We perhaps should mention now that you’ve done a number of other cat books, some of them have been international best sellers.
But there was one other thing about this amazing family that you grew up with. Your mother didn’t like cats?
Helen Brown: No. She was a country person and she thought cats belonged in barns. To her, their only use was to catch rats. She didn’t dislike animals. She quite respected dogs, but cats she did not like.
As a result of this, when dad gifted me this scruffy tabby – the rest of his family had all been poisoned – we had a pact that I would have to hide the cat from mum, because mum was going through her own crises at the time.
She was auditioning for The King and I and the local operatic society and mum took her theatrical life incredibly seriously.
When she was auditioning for something we all knew we had to take a big step back and just hope to heaven that she got the part. So it was quite a good time to try and introduce a hidden cat into our crazy household, because she was so distracted.
Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned this crazy household. You were also living in an amazing house as well, in a provincial town in New Zealand, in New Plymouth,
An Italianate dream, still standing today
Jenny Wheeler: And that house is still standing today.
When you came back to New Zealand on a book launch tour you actually revisited that house. How was that for you?
Helen Brown back at the house that is featured in Mickey
Helen Brown: Oh, it was profoundly magical. And I’m so grateful. The current owners Jocelyn and Peter Rich welcomed us. And they’re not only that, Jocelyn is a total cat person.
She’s got cats that she adores and one of the things I write about in the book is the food we ate in the sixties. These were times of such change, and on one level, food was one of the great changes.
I remember mum introducing us to pizza for the first time. It wasn’t really pizza, it was just pastry with cheese on top. But she was saying it’s Italian.
And when they had parties, they made these sticks with cherries and cheese and pineapple on them. And this is what Jocelyn so kindly made us the day we visited the old house.
It was just so moving. My sister came along too. It was something that’s very hard to put into words, to revisit those spaces. And at the same time, to acknowledge that it’s their home now. And it’s special to them too. And they’ve renovated it beautifully, whereas we lived in it like wild things.
I don’t think mom and dad could afford to do anything much to it. Dad was always up a 60-foot ladder trying to paint something like weather boards and it had this great tower and a turret where I kept my white mice.
A ‘far from ordinary’ family
That was one concession actually, that we were allowed quite a lot of freedom because of the wild nature of that house.
It was very elaborate. I think someone said the designer is Italianate. You had to be insane to buy it, especially in the sixties when everyone wanted to live in a pastoral colored box, so nobody really wanted to buy it. I think mom and dad got it pretty cheaply and we were lucky to live there.
Jenny Wheeler: Look, this family of yours. In the book, you do refer to them as “far from ordinary.” Do you think that most families are “far from ordinary” or were you just particularly lucky to be brought up in this one?
Helen Brown: I suppose no family is entirely ordinary and everybody has their quirks. But I think because mom and dad, they were very unusual really. Dad was 13 years older than mum and they were both visionaries in their different ways.
In some ways I wanted the book to be a homage to mum’s generation of women because during the war when all the men were sent off to fight and battle. young women like my mother were given wonderful jobs while they were away.
Mum got a job, Jenny, you’ll appreciate this, as a full-time reporter on the Hawera Star, not just the women’s page.
And she looked back on those four years as the best four years of her life. When the war ended, she, like many other women, was encouraged to give up her job, give it back to a man and get into an apron and have babies.
Mum was a very intelligent and talented person and the society she was squeezed back into really didn’t suit her.
I think in today’s world, she would be a very fulfilled professional woman of some sort. And then dad was very unusual in his own way. He was an engineer who played the piano. They both loved music and that’s what brought them together. And so he was a gas engineer who loved the arts. You were allowed to be a Renaissance man in those days, I think.
Not that he was sporty at all. The other thing that was different about him was he didn’t go to war because he had only one kidney. He stayed behind, and I think we felt even as a family, we felt a level of – I don’t know – guilt that he hadn’t gone and fought for his country
Keep fairies at the bottom of the garden
Jenny Wheeler: Look there is also quite a strong mystical aspect to this book.
A sense that there is a dimension to life, which is not just everyday domestic. There’s a whole other dimension. And I wonder if, for you, that’s always been the case, if there’s always been a mystical or a visionary aspect to life.
Helen Brown: Very much. I think part of that comes from dad, who always used to quote Shakespeare about there ‘being more things on this earth, Horatio than any of us could dream of.’ (Ed note: from Hamlet.)
And he always said to me, ‘keep fairies at the bottom of your garden.’ Which I took quite literally, because I actually had saw fairies in my bedroom coming down the wallpaper at night.
That was one of the things going back to the house. I thought I need to go back to my room and see if the fairies are still there. I went and looked.
The fairies used to open my bedroom window every morning at quarter to seven when I asked them. Jocelyn said, “oh no, we put a lock on that window so the fairies aren’t doing that.”
I did look up at the wallpaper and I thought it could have been reflections from the milk truck in the mornings, but then I used to see them at night. But also I had eye problems and I was lining myself up for more eye surgery, partly to get more attention. So yeah, the mystical. It was very much encouraged too by that house, because it would creak and in earthquakes, it became a shuddering kind of, I don’t know, another world.
And even through all of my life, I think I mentioned to you the fifth wall in every room. I love that idea of being open to what’s in the gaps, because if you’re a creative person, that’s where your energy, your creative energy comes from. It doesn’t come from sitting in front of your computer trying so hard.
True inspiration from the non physical world
It comes from releasing and letting energy come from the gaps, and that’s what I often try and say to aspiring writers. Don’t push it too hard. Go for walks, look up at the trees, let the gaps become a bit wider so you can get some true inspiration from the non-physical world.
And I find that also with cats. Cats also are very attuned to the non-physical. They sense us when we walk into a room. They sense the energy of a house. They work out whether someone is a cat person or not, and if they’re not, they might like to go and sit on them, I find.
Jenny Wheeler: I totally agree. As you were speaking about them locking the window, it occurred to me. Maybe they had to lock it because the fairies kept on opening it.
Helen Brown: I know. And I said to Jocelyn and Peter, I often dream I’m walking around this house, so if you ever feel there’s a ghost here, it’s probably me. And she said, Oh, Pete, did hear footsteps down the back hall one day, and he’s a doctor, he’s a scientist. So it was very generous of them to accept there might have been some other spirits there.
Jenny Wheeler: I referred to the fact that you’ve got at least one international bestselling book, and that was also about a cat called Cleo, who had a very special role in your family. Cleo has sold 2 million copies and is available in more than 40 countries.
Helen Brown: She came into our lives at a very different time. There is a gap between where Mickey ends Jenny, and where Cleo begins. I got into journalism for bizarre reasons, really, because Mum said to me practically from birth, don’t, whatever you do, don’t get pregnant before you get married.
But you must have a qualification for a job as well before you get married because you have to be able to look after yourself.
Desperate to get married
By the time I was about 18, I was bloody desperate to get married, so I ended up marrying this British radio officer whom I’d met at a ship’s party. I flew off to the UK, and I had done the one year Polytech journalism course in Wellington.
I really wanted to be an artist or a ballerina. I gave up ballerina because my bones were too big. And the course to become an artist was going to take four years, but the course to be a journalist was only one. And I knew about journalism from mum, because she did keep writing columns and things for most of her life.
So it wasn’t a scary choice for me. I ended up taking the one-year journalism course in Wellington and then flying to the UK to marry my boyfriend who I’d met at that party.
We’d written for three years. I thought I knew him through the letters, which I interpreted in my own way. I had a bit of journalism work in the UK though, which was great.
But I remember two weeks after I was married, putting a little flower in a flower arrangement on top of the toilet system and thinking. My God, I’ve made a terrible mistake and I thought, oh my God, what do I do now?
I thought there’s only one thing I know. I know what will fix this. A baby. So I gave birth to Sam at the age of 19 in Wellington’s St. Helen’s Hospital, and of course it didn’t solve everything.
In fact, it made life more complicated. I think I had postnatal depression, which the doctor gave me Valium for, and that only made me cry more.
So I was put into a corner and thought there’s only one thing I have any training and know how to do. That’s right. Journalism.
I started writing little pieces for the local rag, a little throwaway paper the Karori News, about things that made me laugh and cry and competitive parents and waiting for the postie to toil up the hill because we were in this desolate new subdivision.
A macabre train journey opened doors
I’d write these little pieces and people seemed to quite enjoy them. And then I wrote one piece about catching the Northerner train from Wellington to Auckland. There was a body in the carriage behind us, and every stop at a station through the night, we’d hear the station masters at various stops saying, oh, how’s the body?
Oh. Where’s it going to? Who’s in it? Blah, blah, blah. And it was quite funny. I wrote that up and then Dear Brian, who ran the Karori News, came back to me, and said, look that piece you’ve written, he said, it’s too good for us. I don’t think we can publish it. And I was too naive to realize that was rejection, Jenny.
You must have rejected many a piece in your time?
Jenny Wheeler: Can’t recall ever doing so dear.
Helen Brown: I sent that piece off to The Dominion, which was the daily newspaper in Wellington. They took it and I think they paid me a princely sum, like $40. It seemed like so much money. I think it was double what I was getting from the Karori News.
Ultimately they started taking these pieces every week, which was wonderful. I found I could sell them to other newspapers, and for a while they were syndicated to seven newspapers around New Zealand and it was great.
But then in 1983 Sam and his brother Rob, found a wounded pigeon under a tree in our backyard and they wanted to take it to the vet because Sam was a great animal lover.
They persuaded their father, who was looking after them, to let them put the bird in a shoe box and take it down, walk down to the vet. They got only part way there. Crossing the road, Sam stepped out from behind a bus and was mowed down and killed.
A life blown apart, shattered
He was nine. And our lives were blown, absolutely shattered and blown apart, as anyone who has lost a child would know. Jenny, you have experienced something similar.
Jenny Wheeler: Yeah, I have. Yeah. Yeah.
Helen Brown: And there was no grief counselling in 1983. I was only 28. I didn’t know where to look, or what to do. Anyway, about three weeks after the funeral, this woman arrived on the doorstep with this little black kitten, and I just thought, I don’t want this.
I remembered it because Sam had chosen this kitten from a litter about a month before the accident, and he begged to have this kitten for his birthday, and he’d already named her Cleo, and I was about to turn this woman away, and Rob, who was only six, came running out behind me, said, “oh mom it’s Sam’s kitten.
It’s Cleo. Welcome home Cleo.” And I think I realized at that point that this little kitten was there in some kind of healing role for all of us, even though I didn’t really want it to begin with.
And Cleo brought… she was very funny. And with her, she had that feline, or perhaps animal ability, to know when people actually needed her on their lap or in just her presence. Or she could perform tricks, like fighting with the rubber plant, and because of her, Rob finally managed to go back and sleep in the room he’d shared with Sam.
She offered our family so much. The other thing, Jenny, with this tragedy was I thought, I don’t know how to move forward. I thought maybe I’ll stop writing. Or I can pretend that I’m still this happy suburban, housewife and write jolly pieces that would be fake or I can write what happened this week?
I remember sitting up in bed with my typewriter, my portable typewriter, just putting in bare facts about what had happened, and it got published.
And then in the days after that, our letterbox – it was way pre email – filled up with envelopes from people offering such solace in the way that so many other people hadn’t been able to, people who didn’t know what to say.
The comfort from strangers
Some of those were from other parents who lost kids and I got the greatest comfort from them because they told me, our son went for a walk in the bush one day and he never came home.
Or our daughter had terminal cancer. They told me their stories and they would say, this happened to us and our lives have changed, but we have survived and you can survive too.
From that I felt a great debt to those people, and that is one of the reasons I sat down to write the book, about Cleo in the hope that it might help others going through loss.
It doesn’t have to be a child, any kind of loss. We all have broken hearts, I hoped that it might be a way to reach out to them and say, Hey, you are not alone. We’re in this together.
Jenny Wheeler: Wonderful, Helen, and you did. There was quite a gap between that experience and the book. But in those years, you continued to write columns that touched people’s hearts, and that’s what you do in your books. You bring a human sense of loss and just what life’s about that’s international. That crosses cultural and geographical boundaries, doesn’t it?
Helen Brown: As human beings we are all pretty much the same. You don’t have different wiring if you’re born in Russia or Ukraine. We all have the same wiring. We all need love, and we’re all vulnerable and we’re all broken in some way.
We’ve got so bad at communicating deeply with each other, at looking into each other’s faces and seeing each other. We really need to relearn how to be human, especially with all the technology and AI. The message from that, as far as I’m concerned, is we just need to remind ourselves how to be human.
No computer can truly love us or comfort us, but that involves looking at each other again, seeing each other again and reminding each other how to be present for each other in ordinary life.
Don’t buy them a phone, get them a pet
Jenny Wheeler: I don’t want to get all theoretical about social media, but today we are really encouraged to try and keep up a big front of being. Fine. Everything’s fine. We don’t even want to start that work of acknowledging some of these vulnerabilities. Do we?
Helen Brown: No, it’s too binary, isn’t it? Because the other side of that. I remember just recently I opened my phone and there’s a picture of someone’s blood in the toilet and you just think, oh my God.
The other extent is that we have to be enormous victims. We are capable of so much more, and we’re not going to solve all our massive problems until we tune into those complexities. Otherwise, we’re losing it. One of the things I was thinking of, I was 12 now and a bit remote. I wasn’t very good at making friends.
If you read Mickey, you’ll find, I think, my sixth birthday, I hid under the bed while all the children that mom had invited, played, and I waited for them to go home.
Today, I probably would’ve been diagnosed with something and my parents in their deep concern would probably have given me a phone and I would’ve disappeared into that for at least a decade, I think.
Whereas dad gave me a cat. And Mickey taught me a lot of things that no phone or. Any available…. There were no adults or peers available to teach me at the time. So yeah, I suggest to people that before they give their early teenage kids a phone to consider, at least consider a pet.
I noticed that girl who won the skateboarding at the Olympics, a 14-year-old Australian girl, and her parents said she could have anything she liked as a reward, and she said I want a pet duck.
I thought, oh my goodness. It’s the same thing. She would love a dog or a cat, but they travel so much. They couldn’t commit to an animal like that, but a duck. Yeah. So I thought, whether it’s 12-year-olds or 14 year olds they haven’t changed much have they?
Another special cat for a special time
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Now we are starting to run out of time. It’s been fabulous. But tell us about the next book. because that’s also a beautiful story. Jonah followed Cleo and was also incredibly successful, particularly in the USA, where you’ve got a really big following.
Tell us about Jonah. That book won a literary prize in France.
Helen Brown:. Weird things happen. I never know what’s gonna happen. Jonah came many years after Cleo had died and Cleo lived to be 23. I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had a mastectomy and my darling sister Mary came over from New Zealand to look after me and I was lying in bed.
(Helen has lived in Australia for many years. – Ed note)
I couldn’t walk very well because I’d had a reconstruction. They’d taken fat from my belly and made a fake breast with it. And she said, I’ve just been down the neighborhood and I’ve just seen something really special, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. Talk about big sister energy. So what is it?
Where is it from? She’d walked past a pet shop, and I know you’re not supposed to get animals from pet shops, but this is 15 years ago and so I hobbled down there because I couldn’t stand up straight with Mary.
And in the middle of the pet shop was a cage full of kittens. But one of them was particularly insane and it was using the other kittens as a trampoline and bouncing off them and climbing up the wire.
And it was a little white thing, like a little white clown, and it climbed up the mesh wiring, fixed me with these two blue eyes, put its paw through the wire and touched me. I was chosen. He had to come home and we named him Jonah after Jonah Lomu because that kitten was so athletic and crazy.
Learning to be a risk taker
Jenny Wheeler: Now just tell people who Jonah Lomu was, for those who don’t remember him.
Helen Brown: Oh yes. Someone called him Liquid Bronze. He was a wonderful New Zealand rugby player. Unfortunately, he died of kidney disease, far too young. He was very charismatic, a wonderful athlete.
Jenny Wheeler: And when I was doing a little bit of background for this chat we are having, I came across this a magazine article from a number of years ago in which it was described a book launch you had, where you had yourself carried in by some more bronzed men and also you did a one person tour at one stage where you wrote the script and performed it all around New Zealand.
You’ve always been an amazing risk taker. I look at you and think, wow, how does she do it? Have you always been like that?
Helen Brown: I think partly because I suffered that tragedy at an early age of, 28 when the worst happens, you lose fear ultimately. You can just implode and try and hold onto the remnants of the life you’ve lost, but after a while you become very open to ideas and because, nothing lasts…
You’ve lost, what you treasured the most. I think it’s not, maybe not risk taking. I’m just open to fun and joy and I don’t feel I have a lot to lose really, and I suppose a low boredom threshold. But that was fun. That night with those boys, they said to me, oh, how much do you weigh?
We had this chaise longue and I was in this mermaid outfit. I don’t know, I think I might’ve lost a bit of weight for that, but they were gorgeous. That was a fun night, Jenny.
And what? Oh, the show. Life’s A Banana Cake. That was partly ‘because of New Zealand jazz singer, Malcolm McNeil who said, ‘we should do something together sometime. Let’s do a show.’
We wrote a life story around his singing and that transitioned into a more simple show just with a piano. And we raised over $40,000 from that show, partly for hospices around New Zealand. Some for a curtain in my old school.
Yeah, I think Jenny. Life’s …you gotta go for the fun. If it shows itself, if it’s on offer….
Cleo and Rob – helping children grieve
Jenny Wheeler: That’s absolutely wonderful. As we’ve been sitting here, I suddenly remembered that also you adapted Cleo for children.
At the time we talked about the need there was for a children’s book, for children facing massive grief as well, and there wasn’t really anything there for them. Tell us about Cleo, the Child Edition.
Helen Brown: I called it Cleo and Rob and because Rob’s now a middle aged man, but I felt utterly helpless for him because there was nothing to help him through that time and to even acknowledge what had happened to him.
I think children do grieve differently, certainly on the outside, from the way adults do. At the time Rob became pretty quiet and withdrawn, but he could still seem very happy at other moments.
It was complex watching, observing him. When Cleo, the adult book became such a success, I felt there was a gap there.
It would be lovely because people – maybe 13 year olds up – read Cleo and I’d get emails, I still do, from that any age group right up to 90 year olds, but I wanted to maybe try and communicate a sense of hope and acknowledgement for smaller children who are actually going through it right now.
The book is found some good places. It’s one of those books that will show up where it’s needed. I believe it’s in some funeral homes and hospices and even normal kids like to read it.
Just about every kid, , in their school years… There’ll be one summer where somebody doesn’t come back from the holidays. There’s been a car accident, there’s been something.
I think this book was a way to try and help children who know of the loss of other children, just to make it out there as a part of the conversation.
What Helen is reading now
It was interesting going to primary schools with that book when it came out. I was so impressed with how emotionally intelligent kids up to the age of 10, are. The questions they asked were so matter of a matter of fact, in some cases, profound in others. They were just curious and they welcomed the opportunity to talk about death and what happens afterwards.
Jenny Wheeler: We always like to ask our authors about their own tastes in. reading and what have you been reading lately. Have you got anything you’d like to recommend to listeners?
Helen Brown: Oh gosh, you should have told me that. I always forget what I’ve read. I’m reading a wonderful book at my How to Know people.
It’s by an American columnist who’s so famous. I’ve forgotten his name now. It’s downstairs. I’m loving it because it’s about this whole thing we’ve been talking about, connection and how we’ve got to… particularly in the States.
I was just on tour in the States and we’ve got such polarization of ideals and people are just shouting at each other that what they call snow globbing, and we need to stop doing that.
We need to come together. Someone’s got very different views from you. Get together with them, find out why they have those views, and then you don’t have to hammer your views back at them, but just see them as human.
Jenny Wheeler: We’ll put those in the show notes for this episode.
Jenny Wheeler: So, you’re reading mainly nonfiction?
Helen Brown: Yes. They’re both wonderful. Not so much fiction.
I’ve written one fiction book and I know how you can get totally absorbed in that and it’s not real. I
I’m more interested – because of my journalism background journey – I’m very interested in people’s views of real life.
I’m very interested in history, podcasts, anything that helps me make sense of however many years I’ve got left on this planet and for my children and grandchildren to understand the complex and miraculous honour of being human.
Looking back down the tunnel of time…
Jenny Wheeler: Looking back down the tunnel of time, if there was one thing you’d change about life, I’m talking now about your creative career, what would it be?
Helen Brown: Oddly enough, I would take more risks. I think if I have any regrets, it’s lack of confidence. It was a different time in the seventies and eighties and nineties, when I was working full time as a journalist.
It took me quite a long time… In fact, it wasn’t until someone wrote an article, that I found out that all the male columnists were earning double what I was, and I was the solo mom.
I was supporting a family and two kids. There was a quite a bit of misogyny. With those commitments, wasn’t in a position to take great many risks. One of the most wonderful things was when one of my bosses, Judy McGregor, said, oh, why don’t you apply for a press fellowship to Cambridge University?
And I said no, I can’t. I didn’t go to university. She said, oh, that doesn’t matter. They’ll be interested anyway. Just send a sample of your work and a subject you’d like to look at.
And I thought, they’re probably not even going to read my application. I’ll think about this as in 1989. I said I would like to study environmental issues from a spiritual perspective.
And I thought, there you go, Cambridge University. And then about a month later I got a letter of acceptance, which I was completely nonplussed.
And when I got to Cambridge, it was big, because I had to leave the kids behind for three months. This little man came and met me and said, ‘I’m going to be your supervisor. Unfortunately we don’t have an environmental department. I’m a geographer.
Environmental disaster areas – take your pick
Only hippies believed in the environment and. And I said what can we do? He said ‘the only university I know of, there’s one in Romania that teaches every subject from an environmental perspective, including dentistry.’
And I said, ‘oh would you come to Romania with me?’ There’s the risk taker. And he said, ‘oh no. I actually can’t. He was a very timid little man, but I did persuade Philip and Lydia to come with me when the fellowship ended.
It was 18 months after Nicolae Ceaușescu had been killed.
The whole place was in disarray. I went to the university where every subject was taught from a environmental perspective, including dentistry, and I sat in the staff room. And it had a very weird energy. And I looked at the wall behind me and it was covered in bullet holes because students had been killed there 18 months earlier.
And they said what do you want? And I said I’d like to see an environmental disaster area. And they said. Okay. We have 15 environmental disaster areas. Take your choice. So it was a wonderful adventure.
Jenny Wheeler: And just for those who don’t know your family situation, Philip is your husband, and Lydia is one of your girls.
Helen Brown: Yes, she’s become a clinical psychologist, which is probably a reflection of growing up in an insane family. And we have four grandchildren, granddaughters
Jenny Wheeler: You always turn everything into such an amazing adventure. So what did you end up writing about for your Cambridge stay?
Meeting with the Dalai Lama
Helen Brown: I came back to New Zealand incredibly inspired because also because of that, at Cambridge, I met the Dai Lama’s chief interpreter and he gave me an exclusive interview with the Dai Lama, who also wasn’t fully developed in his ideas about environmentalism at that point.
He has since though. Of course I couldn’t teach him anything about spirituality, but we had a wonderful half hour together. Anyway, I had all this material. I took it back to my New Zealand publisher, and I was pregnant with our daughter, Kath, and he said, oh, this, it’s an international book.
We’re not really interested in this. Could you write a book about old people? Now I’m old, I probably would be honored to write a book about old people, but I lost my confidence.
I have a friend actually in Wellington who says, I must write about that time, and maybe I should!
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that sounds wonderful. That that brings us very nicely to my last question, and that is what are you working on now, as an author? What’s, what does your next 12 months look like from your desk?
Helen Brown: From my desk? It’s got tissues, it’s got magic stones or crystals. It’s got piles of paper, but it does have the best book on screenwriting you’ll ever need.
It’s called Save the Cat, because someone had the film rights to Cleo for 10 years and eventually, I decided to claim them back.
My dear publisher Jude is encouraging me to write a film script. We do have some interest from a New Zealand company, but we’ll just see how we goI did write for television, a New Zealand on Close To Home, and Country GP, so I know how to do a script. I’m thinking I’m having a crack at this. I feel like I’m in my own power
It’s quite fun and it’s not so lonely. I think like writing books is very lonely and you do go insane, I think, with loneliness. And this, at least there’s some collegiate work involved, though they’ll probably destroy every word I’ve ever written in it, but who knows?
And then there was the Japanese death tour
Jenny Wheeler: They do talk about the collaborative process with scripts. Yeah.
Helen Brown: I’m open to that. My ego is… I think it’s that you write this long for these many years, you don’t have a hell of a lot of ego left. I still have a lot of curiosity and a lot of gratitude. I can’t believe the wonderful things that have happened in the places I’ve been.
I haven’t even told you about the Japanese death tour. That was fantastic.
About going up to Sendai.
Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about that.
Helen Brown: When Cleo came out in Japan I was invited to Sendai where the tsunami had been five years earlier, I think. And then to attend three Death Symposia. The first one up was up there.
And it was fascinating. I remember because these people had been through so much and the women in particular were very self-contained, and the men, I didn’t know how to touch them, but I remember talking and at the first talk there was a row of photos at the back of the hall and it seemed to be of women holding babies.
And I thought, oh, that’s nice. I’ll go and look at those. I got there and the babies were all dead and it was their way of dealing with some of their grief.
Some of the women in the community were knitting clothes for dead babies, and I just wasn’t sure what to do except be myself. And it turned out they would come running and say Helen San and want to just be held by this big antipodean teddy bear, which I was very honored to do.
‘Magnificent elements of death and dying’
There was a symposium in Tokyo and Kyoto. It became so fascinating because Japan has had to deal with death so many times, from Hiroshima right through to the tsunami and so many other ways that, and they were speaking to people somewhere medics, a lot of medics trying to find a way.to handle grieving.
The traditional Japanese village way, which was there were a lot of rituals around that, but they were finding increasingly they were putting people in hospital beds and just pulling the curtain in the Western way, denying the more subtle elements and the more magnificent elements of death and dying.
And they were trying to relate the two so people, because people weren’t living in villages anymore, how they could find ways to embrace death without being too sterile, and linking back to their own culture and they have some wonderful. rituals that we would benefit from.
I love the one every year they bring up the burial pots of their beloveds and put them around the table and have a wonderful feast with them.
And I thought we wouldn’t be doing that in Taranaki probably, but I thought it was really healthy, so they taught me a lot.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic Helen. Just a final one question. Obviously you. enjoy interacting with your readers, probably more than many other authors. I know you get fantastic response.
How do you handle all that and where can people reach out to you?
Where to find Helen Brown online
Helen Brown: Oh I’m on Facebook and Instagram. I do love hearing from people. It’s a two-way thing really, because as I said, that goes right back to that connection when parents who’d lost children helped me.
I was giving a workshop recently on memoir writing, and someone said, if there’s one piece of advice, what would it be?
And I said it’s ‘Get a Maureen.’ I have a wonderful reader who’s read my stuff for 40 years. She first wrote to me. She lives in Rangiora in New Zealand. And she’s since knitted clothes for all of our grandchildren. And when I get writer’s block and I become too self-critical, and I can’t go on, I sit at the computer and think, oh, actually. Maureen would quite like this.
No, this isn’t soap. This is a little bit funny. Maureen would smile and I said, you don’t actually need a physical Maureen. You can have the Maureen inside yourself, who’s kinder to you, kinder to your creative self. I do value my readers very much.
Jenny Wheeler: Helen, that’s the most wonderful way to finish off. Thank you so much.
