Digging for Spain

As her children grow up, and her strong sense of Christian faith wavers, Penelope Todd realises that she has to make some drastic changes to her life. She leaves her nursing job and risks everything - as Mansfield once said - in order to pursue her wish to write. Using day-to-day observations of people, nature, weather, New Zealand and Spain, the author carefully untangles her life and decides to go through psychoanalysis. She uncovers a fiercely focused need to open herself up and to explore and discover new horizons. She glances in and out of the past, showing how the present is tugged at by memory, and how memory shudders through the present. This is a portrait of the growth of a writer, of the challenges of faith, and the route one woman takes to reach a better accommodation with herself, and her family. The author questions her closest relationships, and some of the stifling patterns she has fallen into. Yet it will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever tried to juggle relationships, the craving for solitude, and the urge to write or to devote oneself to a career which demands total intellectual focus. Delicately written, yet tough at the core, this memoir shows the astonishing versatility of one of New Zealands award winning writers.