S3E3: Caroline Barron

In this episode of Bad Diaries Podcast, Tracy talks with writer Caroline Barron about diaries, speaking your truth with kindness, and the power and particular melancholy of nostalgia.

Caroline is the author of two wonderful books – a memoir, Ripiro Beach, and a novel, Golden Days – and in this episode of the podcast, we talk about how both of these books use and connect with diaries. We talk about Caroline’s decades-long and very consistent diarykeeping practice, and we look at her latest project, My Year of Rereading, and how her diaries from the 1990s gave this 2024 project a starting point and a structure.

Caroline Barron (Te Uri O Hau / Pākehā) is an award-winning New Zealand author. Her first book, the memoir Ripiro Beach, won the 2020 New Zealand Heritage Literary Award for Best Non-fiction Book. Her debut novel, Golden Days, was published in 2023 in Australia and Aotearoa. She has a journalism degree, a Masters in Creative Writing from University of Auckland and, from the early 2000s – when she was only in her twenties – she owned and ran Nova, a leading model and talent agency.

As well as being a writer, Caroline is active throughout the New Zealand book ecosystem as a manuscript and funding assessor, reviewer, story coach, writing teacher and presenter.

Find Caroline on her website.

Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.

Thanks for joining us for Bad Diaries Podcast! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.

Bad Diaries Podcast Season 3 is recorded and produced in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. Seasons 1 & 2 were also recorded in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.

Transcript

Tracy: Hello, I'm Tracy Farr. Welcome to Bad Diaries Podcast. My guest for this episode is Caroline Barron. Caroline is the author of two wonderful books – a memoir, Ripiro Beach, and a novel, Golden Days – and in this episode of the podcast, we talk about how both of these books use and connect with diaries. We talk about Caroline's decades long and very consistent diary-keeping practice. And we look at her latest project, My Year of Rereading, and how her diaries from the 1990s gave this 2024 project a starting point and a structure.

Caroline Barron (Te Uri O Hau / Pākehā) is an award-winning New Zealand author. Her first book, the memoir Ripiro Beach, won the 2020 New Zealand Heritage Literary Award for best Non-fiction book; and her debut novel, Golden Days, was published in 2023, in Australia and Aotearoa. She has a journalism degree, a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland and, from the early 2000s – when she was only in her twenties – she owned and ran Nova, a leading model and talent agency.

As well as being a writer, Caroline is active throughout the New Zealand book ecosystem. She's a manuscript and funding assessor, a reviewer, a story coach, a writing teacher, a presenter, and so much more. It was a real pleasure to nerd out about diaries with Caroline, and towards the end of our chat, she ambushed me – in the nicest possible way! – with a bit of a love bomb about my new novel, Wonderland, which she made me promise not to edit out. And I always keep my promises. So there it remains. 

So with that, it's a real treat to welcome to the podcast Caroline Barron.

Caroline Barron, welcome to Bad Diaries podcast.

Caroline: Oh, it's so good to be here, Tracy. Thanks for having me.

Tracy: Well, thanks for being here. There's so much we can talk about, including those big boxes of diaries I can see behind you in the Zoom, but there's so much we can talk about in terms of the ways that diaries play a part in your published writing, including your latest Rereading project. But let's set the stage by looking at your own diary or journal or notebook practice. So I know you're a diary keeper, and I get the impression that's been a very constant thing for you. So talk to us about when you started and how regular or irregular is your practice.

Caroline: Yeah, great. Well, yeah, I definitely am a diary keeper. And since I was 13 in 1990, 13 turning 14, it was my very first diary and it was a gift, I think, in my Christmas stocking from Mum and Dad – I mean Santa – and from memory it had flowers on the front and it was about half-an-A5-sized and it had a little lock and key. That is the only diary I have disposed of.

Tracy: Fascinating. It’s remarkable-slash-not remarkable how often the women we talk to on our diaries podcast, their first diary was about that age, and it was a little diary with a lock and key. It was for me, too, mine was a little five year diary. It was pink and a little bit sparkly and I would have been about 13. It was a gift from a friend for a birthday, I think. And I was 13, you know, a good decade or more before you were 13. So, you know, it's not just one generation. It's interesting.

Caroline: Yeah. And I think I think your last guest on the last episode had a five year diary as well.

Tracy: Yeah. Fascinating.

Caroline: So, look, I've kept diaries since then and for the most part, a daily diary. And I, at some periods in my life, I've kept a more general sort of notebook style diary. But I feel that that doesn't give me the routine practice that I enjoy and the, you know, the sort of lovely pressure of recording the day; before I start reading in bed at night, I will write in my diary. At the moment I'm finding it like my diaries are really, “this happened and then this happened and then this happened”. They're really boring. But I wonder if that's because, you know, I'm using my creativity in other ways. But regardless, they're super useful in terms of keeping an idea of timeline and what's happening, and in what order things went, even if I'm not being particularly specific.

Tracy: Yeah, yeah. That charting of the day and that charting of what happened and now. So you said at the moment you're writing at night, so at the end of your day, this happened, this happened, this happened. Has that always been the case? This has always been a kind of a looking back at the day or has that changed?

Caroline: Look, in the early days – I've got a couple of my really early embarrassing ones here to show you. And this is the first one that I have, which is 1991. I mean, look at this.

Tracy: Oh, Caroline, that is beautiful.

Caroline: So you can see things stuck in there, tickets, all sorts of ephemera. [Things like] photos. All sorts. This was with me at all times, and I was writing in it all the time, you know. And my friends were writing in it, and I was cutting things out and sticking them in. So, yeah. It has changed over the years. But for the last as long as I can remember, it's been an evening practice for me and a bit of a time of reflection and a place to sometimes get things out. You know, if you're feeling anxious about the workload or the family or whatever, it's a really good place to just get that out of my mind and onto the page. And so it's been, my diaries have been very stalwart friends over the years, that's for sure.

Tracy: Yeah. Yeah. Just thinking back to that first diary that you received as a gift from Mum and Dad. No, Santa. Was it that that motivated you to start keeping a diary? Had you thought about it before? What was it that compelled you to keep going? After you'd filled that first diary, do you think?

Caroline: Really interesting question. And I can't really remember what the reason was, except for … it probably was because I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed untangling my own thoughts, and it felt like a good practice for me to – although I wouldn't have called it a practice, of course, when I was 13. But yeah, now I just feel a compulsion to do it, you know? And I remember my aunt used to keep a diary, and I remember sneaking in when she was staying with us. She lived down the line, and she came and stayed with us. And I remember sneaking in and having a little nosey at her diary when I was a child. And I was incredibly disappointed that it was like, “went shopping, had tomato soup for lunch” you know, and I'm like, oh, that's a bit boring.

Tracy: Spice it up Auntie! Spice it up.

Caroline: Yeah.

Tracy: Now. So, a couple of questions about the objects. Talk to us about where you keep them. I can see behind you – on the screen for me – I can see two of those big plastic roller boxes with books in them. And they look, they're not all the same kind of book.

Caroline: No they’re not.

Tracy: Talk to us about where you keep them and what kind of objects they are.

Caroline: Yeah, sure. So for a long time they were in boxes up in the attic of our old house, but we don't have an attic. And now I have, my office is in a cabin down in the garden. And this is, you know, my space. And so they're actually just in these two big plastic Sistema boxes which I slide under the bed. Hopefully no one's going to listen to this and come and decide to rob them and embarrass me greatly. So I keep them here, and I keep my current diary, actually, just in my bedside drawer. And so these are having two teenagers – daughters – there is that weird thing of, when I'm not home, I wonder if they read them. And I'm sure they have done in the past. Or maybe they do it regularly. Who would know? So when I'm writing now, I must say that I do have a one sort of thought for that when I'm recording what I'm recording, particularly about my daughters. Whereas when I was younger, single, living my own life, I could write whatever I wanted. So perhaps I'm a little bit more self edited.

Tracy: Yeah, okay, so many questions. An element of that self editing is because of your daughters potentially reading those diaries, but is it also because over the last five years or so in your published work, you've used those diaries in different ways? And is it a little bit that you're also, you've got an eye or an ear or a mind on publication as well. A little bit, maybe?

Caroline: Their usefulness perhaps down the track. Yeah, maybe. And maybe that's a part of why I, you know, insist on, to myself, every night writing things down because I've learnt from experience how useful even the most basic kind of facts of a day, so that you can piece things together later, because you might not write in great detail about how you felt in your sensory observations and all of that. But at least if you know that that was the day that you, you know, you went to your daughter's school and had that meeting with the teacher, or you had that amazing experience while teaching that changed the way you think about something. So it puts you, it's enough to put me back there to be able to then write about it.

Tracy: Yeah. And are there, do you sometimes go into some of the detail or the scenes of what's happened during the day? Might it be, “Tracy said blah, and I, you know, and I couldn't think of an answer. So I said blah” – you know, do you sometimes go into that detail, or is it more kind of just capturing the basics of the day and the structure of the day?

Caroline: Bit of both, you know, and I also at the top of the page, I always write down the walk that I've done that morning. Like, you know, whether it's the Ōrākei Basin or the loop with my dog – who just snuck in, which is why I had to pop to the door a moment ago – so I keep that, I keep … and then it's a variety, really. I keep both, the broad sort of strokes of the day. But then if I'm really thinking about something or considering something, or wanting to excavate a feeling or understand what I'm thinking about something, then I'll go more into depth with that. Not so much conversations with others, but more just internal thoughts really about things.

Tracy: Yeah. And – more logistics and detail questions because I love that kind of stuff – so do you limit yourself to one page or two pages or an opening or something per day, or is it just how much comes onto the page?

Caroline: Well, it's generally one page. I'm using at the moment, the Moleskine diaries, which so many writers I know get and never use because they're too terrifying. But I really, really love them. I love the paper, and I love the thickness of the paper because of the pen that I use. And I find they're a really nice they're a really nice size. So, you know, I love sort of A5, smaller than A5, you know, side of the page per day.

Tracy: That is printed with the date at the top of the page.

Caroline: Indeed. Yeah, indeed. So it's a one-page-per-day diary. Some of my favourite diaries – and you can't get them any more, but I did them for a couple of years. What year is this one, two thousand and … sixteen, 2016. And it was by Deadly Ponies, who actually make handbags.

Tracy: Yeah, yeah.

Caroline: But they made these little leather diaries, and I just think that they're the most. Look at that. I mean, how pretty.

Tracy: Beautiful endpapers.

Caroline: A little purple leather-covered diary with beautiful front and end papers. And that's a page per day, but that's about half the size of the Moleskine diary. But I just felt at that time that that was the perfect sort of size.

Tracy: And I can also see that you've still have those ephemera in there. Still got the bits and pieces tucked in there. I saw something from the National Writers Forum from 2016.

Caroline: And I still do that, you know, like I've got things shoved in the back. You know, there's the Grand Palace in Thailand brochure and the – whatever that is, something about something. And plane tickets. You know, I'm always the one to print out my boarding pass because I like to have it for my diary, which, to my husband's dismay, he's like, come on, get into the current century, darling.

Tracy: I love that.

Caroline: And then I also, of course, which we'll get to later, I'm sure, record the books that I've read in the backs of my diary, but we can come to that soon.

Tracy: And are you a shover-inner of ephemera? Let it go where it is. Or a sticker-inner-er, so that the placement is retained?

Caroline: So I've got a bit of a nerdy process, which is that at the end of the year … I'm a shover-inner-er until the end of the year.

Tracy: Right.

Caroline: And then I'll grab everything out and I'll stick it in, glue it in with a glue stick in its rightful place in the diary, and then it's finished for the year.

Tracy: I love that, I love that, and what a perfect year-ending ritual of putting-in-place, right?

Caroline: I think I also – in fact, I did – used to, have another end-of-year ritual which was doing a bit of a summary of the year, but I haven't done that for a long time now.

Tracy: Okay. Now, we've talked a little bit about the kinds of notebooks you've used, but I can see in the box – I'm just so distracted by the sight, in a good way, by the sight of those behind you – I can see that there's something like an ordinary old Warwick exercise book. That big red, the red cover there. So, you know, from Deadly Ponies to Warwick jotters. There's a, there's a bit of a … you welcome, you welcome all books, really.

Caroline: Oh, look, I really do welcome all books. This one was actually … it's not a diary as such, but it was like … I remember when I was doing My Year of Rereading, that there was sort of a gap that I couldn't find any diary for. It was … there was a more generalised notebook that I'd been writing in, and then there were all these gaps. And then one day I just had this eureka moment, and I rushed to my piano stool and lifted up the lid and found this, because I knew that that was the year that I'd been writing songs a lot.

Tracy: Oh, wow. Okay.

Caroline: In this book are all the songs that I'd written, and that in itself is a diary. Because that's all the feelings, but put in onto music.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: So that's that guy.

Tracy: Well, look, that leads me a little bit into a related question, which is about compartmentalisation of diaries and records and things. So, I wonder about process or project notes for your writing. Do you keep these, do you keep them separate from your personal journals? Do they bleed into each other? You know, have you got, in a project book for Golden Days, have you got a page where you're just pouring your heart out, which really, you know, “belongs” (I'm doing air quotes) in your personal diaries? Talk a little bit about that and about compartmentalisation or its lack.

Caroline: Yeah, sure. So I've got a couple of different ways that I record things as they appear. These little cardboard notebooks, you find them in three packs. That is always at my handbag. So if there's something that comes up and it's not specifically about writing, it could be, you know, anything. Anything. Quotes. At a concert and think of something that I need to write down. Things to buy. Notes from conversations with people, notes about the current project ideas. So in addition to those little small cardboard cover diaries, I also …

Tracy: So that's sort of a little A6 size, stitched binding or stapled binding.

Caroline: Yeah, exactly. And it's got a little pocket in the back so you can shove stuff in.

Tracy: Yeah, love those. Yep.

Caroline: And you can also tear the pages out so you can see, I've used it for scrap paper at some point. So I've got lots of these. The other thing that I do is voice memos when I'm out walking. I think a lot when I'm walking. Sometimes in silence, sometimes listening to something, but quite often in silence. And that's a big part of my creative processes is moving and walking. And so I've got lots of voice memos on my phone that I then, you know, eventually, you know, transcribe and put into whatever I'm working on.

Tracy: Right.

Caroline: And then – there's so many different things.

Tracy: I love this.

Caroline: There’s this guy.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: Which is like, I think, about an A4 size Warwick 2B8 hardcover lecture book.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: And that's what I would call like my Everything Book.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: So this is the book that's always by my side and by my computer and always goes in my bag if I know I'm going to be working in the house and it literally is everything. So it's, you know, notes on the interview for the Bad Diaries Podcast with Tracy, to invoicing notes for clients for my family business. 

Tracy: Right!

Caroline: To notes on structure; or how to write – here we go – ‘How to write great short stories’ course outline; to manuscript assessments that I'm doing. Notes for clients too. So I know, and at the end of this, I'll put a date on the front so that I know that it's anything, that if it’s anything that I need to know that I've been doing while working, then it's likely going to be in there. So I've got a stack of those.

Tracy: Oh, I love that. Yeah, that really is an everything book. Yeah. And so your project notes for any given project – so for Golden Days, your first novel; for Ripiro Beach, your first book, your memoir; and for your current project – they're all interspersed and interleaved in those books I'm imagining.

Caroline: Yeah, they are, but also I have like a big, maybe, a box for each book, in the garage somewhere, that will have the various versions of manuscript that I've printed out and notes. And will have – it's a bit random, maybe I've printed out the spreadsheet, I do a spreadsheet for timeline and characters for each book, so I might have printed that out. I guess on my computer file for each book, there's quite a lot of digital types notes and a spreadsheet and structural outlines and character summaries and paragraph summaries too. So a lot of that stuff I actually keep on my computer.

Tracy: Do you write on keyboard or … ?

Caroline: Yeah I do, yeah, I can type faster than I can think. And I've got very messy handwriting.

Tracy: Yeah, yeah, I can type faster than I can think, too, but I still hand write. I can write onto the keyboard, but I usually choose not to. And, and in terms of – a little sidebar – in terms of software, in your writing, do you use a standard kind of a word processing software like Word, or do you use Scrivener, which a lot of writers use, or …?

Caroline: Yeah, I use Word. I think I had a look at Scrivener and then I thought, well, Word’s really working for me. It's no drama, I love it. I can just … I've got my nice, you know, basic font that I use. And so yeah, I just always [use] Word. And I think before I said I can type faster than I can think. I think what I meant to say was, I can type faster than I can write. Keep up with my thinking, is what I meant to say.

Tracy: But I like both ideas though as well. That is that you're almost channelling whatever the thinking is before you can think it, you know, as well. So yeah, I think both ideas work.

Caroline: I agree.

Tracy: So, before we talk about your current project – although it's probably going to come up with this – one of the questions that I like to ask writers is about the way that they've used diaries in their published work. I think about it in sort of two broad ways that we use that we might use diaries. And the first of them I think of as the Helen Garner approach from Monkey Grip and The Spare Room, which is have you drawn from your own diaries and sort of use diaries as a resource or a reference in your published work. So that's kind of thing number one. And then thing number two is using diaries or letters or diary-like notebooks as devices in your work. So, you know, a character writes a diary, another character finds it and reads it. And I think of that as the AS Byatt Possession approach. So, yeah, sort of talking about those different ways that we can use diaries in our published …

Caroline: I love that you call that the Byatt versus the Garner approach. That's really, really cool and really clear as well. So in terms of diaries as things that I have referenced and using them as an archive. Hell yeah, I've used them to death. So in Ripiro Beach, I referenced old diaries and the first part, the first part of the book, there's a lot of going back into childhood and life, and then there's sort of moving forward with the present day and forward through time. So I definitely used a lot of looking back at the diaries. And in fact, one of my earlier drafts – that Geoff Walker was my manuscript assessor for, I got one of those through the NZSA – and I had in that draft, verbatim, italicised diary entries interspersed in the prose.

Tracy: Right.

Caroline: And one of us … and I was very attached to those, and he said to me, I don't think it's working. I think it takes the reader out of the story, and I think it messes up the rhythm. And I really had to sit with that for quite a while because, like I say, I was attached to them, but he was absolutely right. And I find myself saying that to clients quite a lot.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: And what I said instead was to integrate them into the prose. And I've got a copy of Ripiro here. And I'll give you an example of how I did that.

Tracy: Lovely.

Caroline: So this is: In my diary I write of wondering when I'll feel uncreased again, smoothed out with a thumbnail like an Easter egg wrapper. Smiling, shiny, upright again. I write of being out of balance, literally. Two nights earlier I’d fainted in the bathroom and hit my head, resulting in concussion and a visit to the doctor. The minute things get unbearable, I write, I fold myself up, smaller and smaller, until I'm not even there.

Tracy: Thank you for that. That's beautiful. And so that drew pretty much word-for-word from your diaries of the time?

Caroline: Yeah. So that had originally been a verbatim excerpt, dated, in the manuscript. And then instead of having that like that, I just put it within the prose and quoted myself really as saying that, as writing that.

Tracy: There's quite a lot of folding in Ripiro Beach.

Caroline: Yes there is! And I hadn't realised that until recently, when I sort of skimmed over a few bits and I'm like, oh, right. There's a lot of folding in there. And then I guess for Golden Days, I did both a Byatt and a Garner in many ways, because Golden Days, the scene, the setting of Auckland's High Street in the mid 90s, I mean, that is, you know, blatantly my time of coming of age in Auckland city and the bars, the clubs, the shops, the streets, they were all places that I knew super well.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: And then so I drew on my diaries for that. You know, things such as the fashion, you know, I sometimes used to draw. I used to go out a lot to clubs and bars and I used to often draw – I'm not a good drawer, but – a wee sketch of the outfit that I wore out, you know. So have those in the diary. I was like, oh yeah, that's right, I remember that. I could draw on the clothing and the timeline of when a certain club had been open.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: The music we were listening to. So that was a really valuable resource to go back to. And then also as a device. Zoe. So our main character is Becky in the book, is in first person. Becky. But Zoe, her best and worst friend that Becky ever had, she sends letters to Becky in the present day of the book, which is when she's in her 30s.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: So I guess, yeah, I use a diary as a letter as a device in that situation. Yeah. Oh, and also in Golden Days  – it kind of surprised me when this happened – I didn't really intend for it to happen, but I ended up using a couple of poems that I'd written sometime between ’94 and ’96.

Tracy: Okay.

Caroline 00:27:28  In the book, used as poems that Becky had written to accompany Zoe's artwork.

Tracy: Right.

Caroline: Yeah, and I had a look this morning, and I thought it would be really interesting to explain the sort of genesis of how that happened. Is that interesting?

Tracy: Oh, that would be wonderful. That would be wonderful. I'd love that.

Caroline: So let me start with Golden Days so we can track that backwards. I'll just read this little bit here.

*

Zoe was staring at me, an amused look on her face. ‘Watcha got there, Anne Frank?’

My cheeks flushed hotly.

‘Come on, hand it over,’ she said. ‘I know you've been writing in that bloody diary of yours every spare moment. I've seen you doing it.’

It crossed my mind that perhaps Zoe had rifled through my room at some stage. When I was in the bathroom maybe, or taking a phone call. I immediately replaced that thought with another, blaming myself, as usual – so much for thinking I'd been discreet. Journalling, including the poems I wrote, was a lifesaver for me. The only way, sometimes, I could get the roiling torrents of feelings out of me. It was as vital as breathing.

On the inside cover of my 1995 diary, I'd written this Marcus Aurelius quote about journals: The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts. That was so me at that time, with one foot on the dancefloor and the other in literature and philosophy, pulled in opposing directions.

*

Caroline: So then I go on to Becky reads the poem to Zoe, and the poem is called ‘un/relatable’. 

*

un/relatable

it is not currently advertised that 

my body isn't the only thing in the world. 

conceptually i know it

but i can't get 

around it

over it. 

i want to get inside it

curl up into it and 

trace around myself

cut it out and 

pin it on a wall somewhere

this is me: 

a shape you think you know.

*

Caroline: So that's the poem …

Tracy: Yes.

Caroline: … that came from this diary, which is the 1994 diary.

Tracy: Yes.

Caroline: And you can see the original. I'm just holding up to the screen. That's the original poem in there. And then once I'd made a poem in my diary or anywhere else.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: Then, type it out.

Tracy: Right.

Caroline: And put it into this folder here, this black ring binder of all the poems that I wrote around that time.

Tracy: There are a lot of poems in there.

Caroline: There are a lot of poems.

Tracy: That is a thick wad of poems.

Caroline: And they're all equally as terrible as the one that I just read. Very angsty. I was obsessed with Sylvia Plath.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: There were a lot of big feelings going on …

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: … myself.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: But isn't it cool? I know that, you know, 18-year-old me would have been so excited to think that one day one of the poems or two of the poems were published. Not in the way that she would have thought.

Tracy: No, no. That is absolutely delightful. Thank you so much for taking us through that. And I had part of that quote sitting in my notes as well, on the inside cover of my 1995 diary, I'd written this Marcus Aurelius quote about journals. So yeah, we've focused in on that same little, same little element.

Caroline: Synchronicity.

Tracy: I know. I was ferreting around on the internet as one does, and I came upon Rachael King's review of Golden Days in Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books, and she talked about the book being “about memory and trauma”. She said, “The Auckland of the mid-90s is brought to life with vibrant specificity”. And, you know, Rachael was in that moment too, you know, at the same time as you were, and I love that she zooms in on that vibrant specificity which having the diaries as the resource for that is obviously where that vibrant specificity comes from. Also in Rachael's review, there's a lovely quote which I'm going to read you. She says, “Barron expertly portrays the particular melancholy of nostalgia, when we look at our younger selves (‘optimistic, expectant, unscathed’), and feel a hopeless sort of yearning”. And so I love that quote of Rachael's. And this feels to me like what we do when we look back on our diaries. We look, you know, with that melancholy of nostalgia and that yearning.

Caroline: That's beautifully put, isn't it?

Tracy: Yeah, yeah.

Caroline: And interestingly, Rachael used to work at Pavement magazine, which features quite heavily in Golden Days. I think you're right there, Tracy. I think there is quite a yearning for those golden days of youth, particularly the times that you the time that you were coming of age and becoming yourself and becoming who you think you are going to be. And that was really heavily influenced in terms of this book by the Lost Nightlife of Inner City Auckland Facebook group which came out during lockdown in 2020 and was just so cool to witness that unfolding in every, you know, it had like tens of thousands of followers and it was just this downloading of people wanting to talk about the 90s and that particular scene and the bars and the clubs and the character of the people, you know. And now when you think about it, you know, we're all in our, you know, 40s and 50s and beyond. And a lot of people are passing and a lot of people, you know, their lives have changed a lot. And it's also a way to keep a, you know, keep an eye on that too. But yeah, that was really part of what inspired me to write Golden Days, because I just saw how we all were obsessed with this time period in our life. And nostalgia. You know, it's … I think that I can't remember the exact Latin definition of nostalgia, but it's something about a coming home, I believe, isn't it?

Tracy: Yeah, I think so. Is it also a pain?

Caroline: Yeah. The pain of coming home, or the pain of going home?

Tracy: I think the —algia bit is about pain.

Caroline: Yeah, yeah. But I think as well that nostalgia of looking back, I think sometimes it can be, you know, it can glow very brightly, the past. But I also think, there's a tendency not to acknowledge the darkness of those times. You know, as a young woman on the party scene in the 90s, you know, and I was clubbing when I was 15, or even 14 I might have been going to Alfie's.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: But, you know, you're in an environment where there's older men, there's … you get yourself in situations, and, you know, some of the darkness of those times started to come through … 

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: … in that Facebook page, and certainly in my conversation with friends and it prompted a few conversations with friends about, hey, do you remember this night? Then this happened? What was your take on that? Yeah.

Tracy: I'd like to just touch on Ripiro Beach. I don't think we have enough time to do it justice, but I … I loved that book so much. I love the way that it didn't shy away from depicting rage – a woman's rage, a mother's rage. But, yeah, it's a book that is about PTSD, a detective story about family and about self and about finding and making a way home. Just a beautiful book.

Caroline: Oh. Thank you.

Tracy: The one thing I'd just like to touch on in that book is the place or the role of photographs, because you use them so generously throughout that book. And it seems to me that in that book, but also often in our lives, photos are a kind of a diary, a kind of recording, aren't they? But we usually – we take photos in order, in most cases to share them. Whereas we write diaries, usually not meaning to share them. So. Yeah. Any comment about the use of the photographs, particularly in that book?

Caroline: I think in more general terms, diaries and photographs together paint a broader picture than either of them on their own. Yeah. I've often found that if I'm looking back, if I've read it, read something in my diary, and I've gone, oh, well, just let me see what else was going on that day. And I look on my phone for a photo, I'm like, oh, well, that's not even mentioned. There's a whole lot of other things going on there.

Caroline: But in terms of Ripiro Beach. Yeah, I found that I wanted to share photos with people – with readers – so that they could visualise all the complicated things that I was trying to talk about.

Caroline: There's one photo, of my grandma, my dad's adoptive mother, that I found on a database. It was so random. I found a database, and I was looking up tramping club photos because I knew that she'd been in the tramping club with my grandpa. And I was looking through this database through a specific time period, nothing under her name. And then I found this photo of her, my grandma, as a young woman under a bivvy.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: And it was just like, this most amazing sense of the universe is trying to get me to tell the story. And that was the way it was, right through the book.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: But yeah, I mean, I always love seeing photographs, particularly in memoirs. And even this morning when I was just having a flick through Ripiro, I sent to our little family – Barron family – chat, this one, which is of the girls dancing at Ripiro Beach, and that was the first time they’d ever set foot on the sand there. I sent that to the girls. And they were like, ohhh.

Caroline: But yeah, no, I think photos are, you know, a really wonderful way to add to the text and to paint a picture for your reader.

Tracy: Even though, in Ripiro, you not always but often describe those photos in the text as well. But, something about – as you say – something about them, the text and the image working together is more than the sum of the parts.

Caroline: And then photos themselves had a very strong impact on the story unfolding in the book as well.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: example, when I was starting to find out about who my dad's birth father was. Well, birth family was. And then seeing those first photos of some of the male relatives.

Tracy: Yeah. Yeah.

Caroline: Because right away I could see features or, my father's hands or his eyes or the colour of his skin or myself or my daughter. It was a very surreal experience. So I thought those were important to include, to show the reader, too.

Tracy: Yeah, so they are really part of the story, aren't they? They're a device. They're embedded in how the story unfolded. Yeah, yeah, good point. Look, let's turn to your current project or your most recent project, My Year of Rereading. Tell us about that.

Caroline: Oh my goodness. My Year of Rereading. Look, towards the end of 2023, I kept walking past the bookcase by my front door, and looking at all these wonderful books that I'd read in the past, and I thought, I just love to, you know, just have time to reread all those books. And then at the same time, I was going through prolonged back pain. And the last two years I've had four back surgeries, the last of which was in December 2024. And I am good. Now.

Tracy: Good, good.

Caroline: But it was pretty much two years of chronic pain. Very hard on the mental health. Anyone that's lived with chronic pain will understand that it's … it weighs very, very heavy on you and you're not quite yourself. And so towards the end of 2023, I thought, right, this is going to be a fun project for the year ahead. I'm going to do My Year of Rereading. And then as that idea started to develop, I then started thinking about how am I going to choose the books? And then I thought, oh, all these book lists in my diaries and so I raced out to my office and I looked in my big box of diaries to find when the first diary was that I'd started that ritual, and I found this in the back of my 1994 diary. So that was when I was in first year at AUT studying Communications. And this list is quite a short one. I think there's about a dozen on this list: Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Bone People, The Famished Road, The Old Man and the Sea, The Secret History, Titus Groan, Door to December, Songs of Enchantment, I'll Take Manhattan, Illusions by Richard Bach, Women by Bukowski. I can't even read that one … Perfume; and Love Love Love. So that was my list for 1994. And that got me thinking that maybe I could use those 30-plus years of book lists somehow. And in the end, what I landed on was something that was a structure that I felt would kind of support the project, and that was: for January, I was going to choose books from my ’94 list; in February, choose from ’95; March from ’96. And that's really how that project began. And I kind of set out with some ideas of what it was that I was hoping to achieve, which was, you know, a sense of nostalgia, reconnecting with the person I once was, how I see or feel or read books differently now with a writer’s eyes, but also as a 40-something-year-old woman. So all of those things and yeah, all of those things did happen, but so much more as well. And part of the project ended up being, well, firstly, it was just going to be an Instagram page, which it's online for anyone to see, which is @myyearofrereading.

Caroline: And then I sort of started writing. I just had a document, Word document, and I started just sort of writing as I went, and it actually became a manuscript in itself. So, you know, I'm just putting the putting the final touches on it now. But it's about 87,000 words. And the format has surprised me, early on. And that is that each month is a different chapter. And then at the beginning, I have the books that I read, at the beginning of each month. So, January, books read; and then also wellness things that I tried, too, because going through that pain, there was a lot of things going on with that. And then I did, at the start, before I go into the present, a bit of a summary of that year. So, a summary of 1994 from the diaries. And I hadn't anticipated that was going to be part of it, but it ended up being such a valuable process for me because it made me see some really clear patterns, in my life and my decision making. And then after I've done the then of the 1994, the dated entries. So I guess a little bit like a diary in manuscript form? But not what I was writing in my diary. It was its own thing that I was writing.

Tracy: And those dated entries are from 2024?

Caroline: Yeah, from the present. So it might be 2nd of January. And I'm writing about what's going on. And some of those entries, of course, are ruminations over the books and discussing the books, each book themselves. But it's also just general life. So it's really become a memoir, I guess, and it's like a biblio-memoir.

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: A lot about chronic pain as well, but that sounds depressing. But it's actually quite hopeful. it was a great project to work on last year, when I really just needed something that I could hold on to, that was one bite at a time.

Tracy: Yes.

Caroline: Read a book. Write about. Summarise the diary. Yeah.

Tracy: And what I'm hearing: you didn't set yourself unreachable targets. Like each month I must read, you know, so many books.

Caroline: No.

Tracy: It was just: the books I read will be from this list from that year in the past.

Caroline: Yeah. And it did take a little bit of planning, because some of the books I don't have on my shelf. And so I was trawling Trade Me and lots of secondhand bookshops and things to find the books. And what I really did is I just sort of looked at the lists and sort of thought, what are the ones that I really want to reread and which ones sing to me?

Tracy: Yeah.

Caroline: Which ones can't I even remember reading?

Tracy: Yes.

Caroline: Like Jon McGregor. I'm just having a mind blank of what the book was called, but anyway, one of my favourite books of the project, We Might Speak of Remarkable Things [If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things] – something like that.

Tracy: Okay.

Caroline: I couldn't remember ever reading it before. An absolutely beautiful, beautiful book. So a lot of surprises through the project, that's for sure.

Tracy: Oh. That just sounds marvellous. I love the premise. I love the approach. And I love the sound of what it's turned into. So, I hope that we'll all be able to read about that very soon.

Caroline: I hope so.

Tracy: Look, time is marching along, as time has a habit of doing, so I am going to hit you with – in a loving way, not in a violent way – I'm going to hit you with our Bad Diaries Podcast questionnaire to finish off for today. So, we call it Six of the Best. Right. Are you ready, Caroline Barron?

Caroline: I am ready. Hit me, baby, hit me.

Tracy: Okay. Hit you one more time. Right. First up, your best food or your best film?

Caroline: I like most food. Best film, I would say. The film I’ve most got on my mind at this time, because I've just watched it with my daughters, and it was the very last film I saw with my father before he died. And I was astounded that he loved it so much. And that is Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Tracy: Oh, wow, how marvellous! They're doing a remake. They've announced that they're doing a remake.

Caroline: Oh, oh! Who can beat Guy Pearce and Terence Stamp? I mean, no one.

Tracy: They're going to be in it. Well, Guy Pearce is, at least, because I saw a comment from him. There might have been a bit in the Guardian just this week where he said something like, I'm not going to look as good in a frock now as I did 30 years ago. So.

Caroline: My God, it's just such a great. It's just such a great film and it looks so hokey now when you watch it. You know, in terms of filming and all of that – you know, “a cock in a frock on a rock” – you know, and my daughters, to be honest, wandered off halfway through as Jeremy and I were roaring with laughter, you know, watching it. And they were like, what is this? This is weird.

Tracy: The bus was recently discovered. Priscilla was recently discovered, or maybe five years ago. And it was on a farm somewhere, you know, with the wheels off. Yeah, yeah. And so I don't quite know what's happened, so I'm sort of telling a story without really knowing any of the facts or remembering the facts.

Caroline: It’s enough for us to go off and have a little bit of a Google.

Tracy: I think so. I'll put it in the show notes, I'll put it in the show notes. Okay. Number two: your best rule or your best room.

Caroline: Look, it would have to be my best rule. And I'm still practising this one all the time because I find it really hard. And that's one of the patterns that I saw from the diaries, weirdly. And the rule is: speak your truth with kindness.

Tracy: Okay, I like that rule.

Caroline: Yeah.

Tracy: And number three, to finish up: your best shoe or your best snog.

Caroline: The first thing that comes to mind is my old dog, Lucy, who was a Basenji. Not many people know what they look like, but Guy Pearce weirdly had Basenjis.

Tracy: Basenjis have, like, a curly tail, a coiled tail.

Caroline: Yeah. African hunting dogs. A small, small dogs. Anyway, I inherited Lucy. Long story. And I've got this image of her in my mind, chewing on the slingback of this pale blue Italian kitten heel that I paid stupid amounts of money for when I owned the modelling agency. And. Yeah, and they were ruined.

Tracy: Oh, naughty Lucy.

Caroline: There was a little shoe shop on High Street – or no, Vulcan Lane – and I can't … Cesar something … but it was a beautiful, beautiful shop with far too expensive shoes.

Tracy: Now, I thought that where that anecdote was going to go was it was going to be a lovely kiss from the smelly dog. But no, it went to a shoe.

Caroline: Lucy would just as well have bitten you on the nose, than kissed you. Let's just say that's a little bit about her personality.

Tracy: Lucy sounds like a little bit of a horror.

Caroline: She was. She was a horror.

Tracy: Well, on the horror, that is Lucy and your lost blue slingbacks, I think we will wind this Bad Diaries Podcast episode to a close.

Caroline: Can I just talk about a favourite book of mine at the moment?

Tracy: Oh. Please do.

Caroline: Do you mind? Sorry to interrupt, but here it is here. Oh, so you can't see this but I'm holding up Tracy's novel Wonderland, which I read in two nights. In fact, a night and a bit. It absolutely blew my mind. Like, it is an astounding book, you know, Wonderland, like the concept of Wonderland, the old amusement park in Wellington in the early 1900s and imagining that Marie Curie, incognito, stayed there, you know, with the family.

Caroline: But there's something just magical about this, Tracy. I think it's quite extraordinary. I loved the point of view changes, you know, with the triplets as the “we”. That was so well done. And it wasn't until I sort of went back that I realised, oh, yeah, those are all in “we”, that point of view was “we”. So I would like to see this stocked in more shops actually, Tracy, I'm not sure how we're going to get this into more shops, but it deserves to be well read and I will be absolutely blown away if it's not on the Ockham shortlist next year.

Tracy: Oh, you're so kind. Thank you. Thank you. It means a lot. That means a lot. Oh well, I can't really edit that out, so that will have to be ...

Caroline: Please don’t!

Tracy: My modesty will be overcome by my sense of pride that you …

Caroline: And willing to sell more copies. And if anyone's looking for copies, the best place to probably go is bookhub.co.nz, right? That's a link for independent bookstores.

Tracy: Yeah, BookHub’s fantastic, bookhub.co.nz, fantastic resource if you're in New Zealand and looking for books. 

Tracy: Caroline, thank you so much for everything. You've been an absolute dream. Thank you for your books. Thank you for loving diaries as much as I do. And thank you for nerding out about diaries – all things diaries.

Caroline: Honestly, it's been such a pleasure. I've been so excited about this conversation because I really have loved listening to previous episodes and can't believe that I get the chance to talk with you about diaries and the creative process. So thanks, Tracy.

Tracy: Oh thank you. Now we just have to get you on a live Bad Diaries Salon and we'll be set.

Caroline: Love to.

Tracy: You've been listening to Bad Diaries podcast. We'd love you to hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss any of our episodes. And you can rate and review us wherever you find your podcasts. Head to our website, baddiariessalon.com, for show notes, live, salon news, or to get in touch. You can find us on Instagram or Facebook at Bad Diaries Salon.

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