Michelle Duff is one of NZ’s most highly regarded journalists. She’s an award-winning writer, who worked as part of Stuff’s #MeToo team and is also an author, having penned the best-selling biography, Jacinda Ardern, and more recently, Surplus Women – a collection of stories. Here, Michelle reflects on her time as an opinion writer, where she spent much of her time mining her own trauma for clicks – something that so many women, yet so few men, are expected to do…
For several years starting from 2015 and leading into the #Metoo era, I was an opinion writer for leading news website Stuff.
I regularly wrote a column a week, sometimes two. They riffed off news events, re-framed sexist chat, called out politicians for inaction, and generally ran a feminist lens over everything from body hair removal to gendered abuse.
I had just had my first baby when I was asked to take on the role, and it seemed like a good way to get back into the newsroom — I’d be writing, but without the pressures of daily reporting like I’d been doing before, and I’d still be able to engage with the news.
A ‘well-performing’ column would be among the most-read content on the site, generating around 120,000 views. It was difficult to predict what columns would hit — sometimes it seemed to be whatever generated the most comments (saying I hated shaving was far more controversial than you’d think) while other times it was a hot take on an issue of the day.
There was one tried and tested formula that always worked; telling a personal story. Over the years I wrote that column, I shared the story of my abortion, being sexually assaulted, struggling with mental health after childbirth; the list goes on. I would use the story to highlight a current event — I wrote about abortion when law reform was underway, to say I didn’t regret mine, and about sexual assault to highlight how ubiquitous it is.
But as much as I liked the feedback I received from these pieces, the sense I was doing some good — readers wrote to say they felt less alone, or to share similar stories — it started feeling like I was taking pieces of myself out and laying them there for others to dissect. In a way, writing those stories started to feel like a lie. Sure, it was my life, but I was writing about it for the benefit of the story; to generate interest, and to generate clicks.
I started to wonder; what is the commodity here?
Then, there was the hate. It came thick and fast, in my inbox, in the comments. I would like to say I got used to it but I never did. Some editors were supportive but others were not, expecting me to brush it off or not understanding the extent of the damage. Male journalists never got the same abuse — the slurs, the rape threats. And in the 15 years I worked in newsrooms, male journalists were never asked to mine their personal lives online in the way young women were. (In a piece for the New Yorker, writer Jia Tolentino described the personal essay-style confessional column of this era as a time when “so many women wrote about the most difficult things that had ever happened to them and received not much in return.”)
Weirdly, it wasn’t until I started writing fiction, a collection of short stories called Surplus Women, that I began to think about this. The stories I was writing were about everyday lives, the kind of funny and silly and sometimes sad and powerful stuff you talk to your friends about, the things you think of before you go to sleep at night, the love you wished you’d had or the letter you couldn’t send.
When the book got accepted for publication, people asked what it was about. I copied something I heard another writer say once. “It’s about women’s experiences,” I said.
But then I thought about the column I used to write. And I thought that maybe it was bullshit that I would need to sell my work as “woman’s experience,” as if this was a niche genre that only certain people would want to read, or something that I, a pākehā cisgender woman in 2025, could lay some kind of special claim to.
For years, in literature and in storytelling and every facet of modern life, men have been telling the story. I interviewed Jessica Hansell, AKA Coco Solid, for a Sunday magazine profile once, and she put this better than me. “I’m sick of getting the same old stories told to me over and over again. The same authoritative, white, male perspective,” she said. “It’s like – I know this, I’ve known this since 1840, whatever. It’s time for a switch-up, you know. It’s the 21st century, where the women at, where the brown people at, where [are] the different genders, different orientations, different class perspectives, different struggles? I’m sick of it.”
And yet, men’s experiences still get seen as the default. “Women who write about women drinking and writing and sleeping around have until recently been dismissed as less serious, less ‘universal’, than men who write about men drinking and writing and sleeping around,” wrote feminist theorist Toril Moi recently. “It remains more difficult than it should be to get critics to acknowledge that women’s experiences, too, can say something about the human condition.”
Just like that, a light-bulb went off in my head. No, it was bigger. The whole world tilted sideways and the fabric of the night sky split open and I could reach up and pluck out a star, and I pulled it down into my palm and turned it over in wonder as it revealed to me the secret we’ve been searching for this entire time.
Are women — HUMANS?????!!!!
No-one’s out there saying they wrote a book about men’s experiences, just like men aren’t (in general) writing personal essays about their innermost secrets in an effort to get you to take their issues seriously.
They say they wrote a book, and they tell you what it’s about.
So. I wrote my book full of stories about hilarious, clever, gritty, outrageous, thoughtful, badly-behaved characters you want to root for because these are the women I know, and because they turned up, and they made me laugh and cry. They come from all walks of life. Taken together, I think the stories might say something about what it is to grow up as a girl in Aotearoa, but I also think they just say something about what it is to grow up.
The stories in my fiction aren’t real. But they come from my heart. After all this time, that’s the real gift I’m giving to myself, and to my readers.
In this way, they feel closer to the truth than I’ve ever been.
Surplus Women, $35, is published by Te Herenga Waka University Press and available now from all good bookshops.
