Elisabeth Easther (you may remember her as evil nurse Carla from Shortland Street almost 30 years ago) is now a columnist and writer for magazines (particularly travel and lifestyle), an award-winning playwright, a voice artist, a book critic, an interviewer at literary festivals, and she also co-curates the small but mighty literary festival HamLit in Hamilton.
Now she can add novelist to her list of accomplishments, with her debut Seed: the story of two sets of friends, Shelley and Virginia, and Maggie and Hillary. Two desperately want children, and two others don’t, but you don’t always get what you want.
Seed has been number one in the Booksellers NZ list for adult fiction for two weeks, and is now sitting pretty at number three. Probably because it’s one of those books that reads itself in an afternoon.
Trigger Warning: Miscarriage, Fertility Issues, Abortion
In Seed, Elisabeth Easther nails the importance and intensity of friendship. The novel’s two sets of friends – Shelley and Virginia, and Maggie and Hillary – aren’t based on specific people, but are drawn from some of her own and her friends’ experiences. “I was having some miscarriages and getting onto the fertility-treatment train when my friend in London got pregnant despite having an IUD. She was so surprised, then embraced it because her previous child was also a surprise.”
“Another good friend of mine thought that, in her late 40s and early 50s, she wasn’t likely to get pregnant, but she did. She felt she couldn’t tell me that she had to do this difficult thing [an abortion] because she didn’t want to upset me. I said ‘I feel terrible that you felt you couldn’t tell me’ as I wasn’t wandering around going, ‘woe is me’ and many of my friends had no idea what I was going through.”
Elisabeth had actually been told in her early 30s that, because of polycystic ovaries, she couldn’t have children. Was that really upsetting?
“Well, I’d never thought motherhood was going to define me. That made Theo quite a surprise. I went to my doctor saying ‘I’m crying all the time and feeling weird’. She said ‘do a pregnancy test’ and I thought ‘that’s ridiculous’. Then the two lines appeared.” It was a happy surprise. “I was 35. I was feeling a bit lost in London. So I came home and out popped Theo.”
Theo’s father lived in New Zealand. “I had gone home for a wedding. When I moved back to New Zealand, we tried to have a relationship, but we weren’t the appropriate couple to do a long thing.”
Theo is 19 now. “I’m really lucky to have Theo. If someone doesn’t want to have children, that’s great too. But he’s given my life so much meaning and shape.”
Which meant she came to want a second child. After a couple of miscarriages, Elisabeth started fertility treatment with another partner who is now her ex. “We’d had two pregnancies without actually trying, and both were lost, including twins, and I think that made me feel a bit demented.”
“With the first miscarriage, the doctor said, ‘just let nature take its course’. I went home and it felt like labour. I remember having a shower, looking at the blood streaming down.” She went to A&E. “I felt I was bleeding to death, and I was immediately taken to the front of the queue at a relatively busy A&E one Sunday. Then, movie-set lights were brought into my room and shone between my legs. It was like a horror movie. With the next miscarriage, I had a D&C – a procedure to remove the lining of the uterus – and that was also pretty harrowing. I cried as the anaesthetic was administered and was still crying when I came round.”
On one hand, it’s not hard for her to talk about her experience with miscarriages and fertility. “Because it’s so far in the rear-view mirror. But I’m also not a big sharer and suddenly I’m talking about all this personal stuff. When the character of Hillary says, ‘I’m not a very counselling sort of person, I prefer to bottle things up’, that’s totally me.”
The Seed of Seed
Seed started as a book manuscript. “But it’s much easier for me to stage a play than to get a book published.” So she turned the manuscript into an unorthodox play, with the same four characters and quite a few asides to the audience. It won the Adam NZ Play Award, for the best new, as-yet-unstaged play in Aotearoa. After the first production in Auckland in 2014, there was a New Zealand-wide tour the next year. Seed has also been performed in Germany and is about to be staged again in Auckland.
The play has resonated with people. “People laughed and cried and some came up to me at the end. One woman said ‘one of my daughters has three children and the other one is struggling [with fertility], so Christmas is horrible’. For me, it’s an honour if someone trusts you enough to tell you something personal. That shows these problems are universal. Everyone’s version is unique, but we’re all here because one spermatozoon made it through the billions from the dad’s ejaculate.”
Through the play, Elisabeth got to test the story. “I had it vindicated beyond my laptop.” So she did more work on her manuscript for a novel. Her agent, Vicki Marsdon at HighSpot Lit, approached publishers around the world. “It got rejected loads of times.” Then Claire Murdoch, head of publishing at Penguin Random House, said yes.
“Claire gave me two incredibly incisive sets of notes with suggestions for improving the novel. The first set of notes just dismantled the book and I went away almost paralysed and sat for maybe two weeks before doing anything. Then menopause literally came at the same time. Maybe the fear brought it on and I started sweating almost overnight.”
“I remember hearing Kim Hill talking to someone on the radio, saying ‘oh, menopause, once upon a time nobody would speak its name, and now it just won’t shut up’. I thought that was funny. But when it happens, it’s ‘oh, I get it’. I was sweaty, sleep-deprived and had cluster headaches like there was a needle in my forehead. I decided to stop drinking alcohol, to be as clear-headed as possible. Eventually I got some patches and pills that were quite helpful too.”
“I really feel for women in Ukraine, Palestine or Iran, going through menopause during a war with no access to medication. I feel hugely grateful to live in a world where a doctor can provide me with things to smooth it out.”
And when she felt a bit better? “I toiled on the book like I’d never toiled before.”
To do or not to do?
There are some ethical quandaries in the book. Virginia wants to head out on the town, get drunk, hook up with someone, say she’s on birth control and hopefully get pregnant.
“That’s total theft,” Elisabeth says. “Some critics of the play pointed out how wrong this is, but the play isn’t a moral guideline of how people should behave. If someone is murdered in a play, that doesn’t make it pro-murder. What Virginia does is totally wrong, but if somebody’s desperate, and her biological clock is ticking really loudly, you can see why good people do wrong things.”
The other quandary: ultra-busy career woman and mother-of-two Shelley is contemplating having an abortion. Her husband wants another child, so she considers pretending to have a miscarriage. “I can absolutely see how a woman might do that if she can’t fathom having another child, but maybe her partner is religious and won’t agree to it, and she feels she has no choice.”
“But it’s the woman who has to bear the child. So part of me feels she should have more agency over the choice.”
Despite sometimes heavy subject matter, Elisabeth’s trademark humour comes through in her book. “Because fertility is such heavy territory, it would be awful if my book was a glum, long diatribe of ‘woe is me’. Also, I hope people don’t feel my humour is belittling their experiences. When life is tough, I try to find something funny to say.”
And yes, people still recognise her from being Carla on Shortland Street. “The other day I was walking along the street and somebody said, ‘I can’t wait to read your book’. That was the best recognising I’ve ever had in my life.”
“With the book, it’s lovely to honour your life experiences in a way that isn’t ‘look at me’, but ‘look at this’.”
Seed, by Elisabeth Easther is out now. Elisabeth and Emma Neale will talk about their books at Auckland Writers’ Festival session The Mother Of All Journeys, on May 15. A production of Seed is on at Titirangi Theatre in Auckland from March 17-28, with a Q&A session on March 21
