From a telephone interview with Keri Hulme conducted by Laurelyn Douglas '91.
LD: Is there anything in particular you would want Americans to know or to get out of the book?
KH: I don't know what I'd expect Americans to get out of the book. I've had oh, upwards of about seven to eight hundred letters from American people and what they seem to get out of the book is what they start out with having themselves. The letters fall into three different categories, or they seem to quite nicely. And I wouldn't mind a dollar for every time somebody starts out a letter to me that says "I have never written a letter to a writer before, butŠ" -- it comes up so often that it's almost ho-hum. But, the letters. They are from people who have been in abusive situations one way or the other, or they are from people who, however easily or uneasily, come from two different cultural backgrounds, or they are from people who -- like myself -- like to get wrapped up in a story, and they enjoy a story that can encompass them for a little while. I don't know what I would hope American readers to get out of that book about New Zealand for instance except the sense that we are a large and growing and strange society that's a bit fraught, and we are not the same as Australia.
