What You Made of It : A Memoir 1987-2020

The third and final volume of C. K. Steads memoirs, from leaving the University of Auckland to write full-time until today.

These are my encounters and engagements with the world of books and writers, and of teaching and writing about them, C. K. Stead writes in this third and final volume of his memoirs.

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 Steads 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 Curnows designated Critic across the Crescent; or alternatively to be labelled the Tonya Harding of NZ Lit? How did poems emerge from time and place, sometimes as naturally as leaves to a tree, sometimes effortfully? And how did novels about individual men and women retell stories of war (World War II, Yugoslavia, Iraq) and peace?

Covering Steads 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 Steads famously lucid story-telling prose.