What You Made of It: 3 A Memoir, 1987-2020

Having left the university to write full-time at the end of volume two, Stead throws himself into his work. In novels like Sister Hollywood and My Name Was Judas, criticism in the London Review of Books and the Financial Times, poetry and memoir, Stead establishes his international reputation as novelist, poet and critic. It is also a period when Stead's fearless lucidity on matters literary and political embroil him in argument - from The Bone People to the meaning of the Treaty to the controversy over a London writer's flat. What was it like to be Allen Curnow's designated 'Critic across the Crescent'; or alternatively to be labelled 'the Tonya Harding of NZ Lit'? Covering Stead's travels from Los Angeles to Liguria, Croatia and Crete to Caracas and Colombia, as New Zealand poet laureate and Kohi swimmer, What You Made of It takes us deep inside the mind and experience of one of our major writers - and all in Stead's famously lucid 'story-telling' prose.

Table of Contents:
By Way of Introduction x 1. Oxford and Consequences 1 2. France and French and the French 31 3. The Home Front 51 4. Identities 79 5. The Datson Story 107 6. Life and Death in Liguria 129 7. The Writer at Work - 1990s 155 8. Who Would You Trust? 179 9. The Pakeha Poet and the Tangata Whenua 195 10. The Curnow Factor - His Last Two Decades 219 11. Croatia, and 'Last Season's Man' 247 12. Hitler and So On 279 13. High Octane 309 14. The Dark Angel and the Black River 333 15. The Trick of Standing Upright Here - and There 365 16. Nunc Dimittis 385 Appendix: Absent Friends 404 Index 410

About the Author :
C. K. Stead is an award-winning novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist and emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland. He was the New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2015–2017, has won the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and is a Member of the Order of New Zealand.

Review :

The third volume of memoirs by this country’s leading man of letters, CK (Christian Karlson ‘Karl’) Stead, does not disappoint. His meticulous research is backed by impressions recorded at the time and, in many cases, checked back with those involved. It usually means getting the last word as well. This is what makes What You Made of It so valuable.’ — Nevil Gibson