Author Pip Williams is a huge success. She is the first Australian ever to have a novel selected for Reese Witherspoon’s book club. And her bestselling debut, The Dictionary of Lost Words, has been enjoyed by readers all around the world. Yet growing up, Pip struggled with dyslexia.
“I was slow to learn and I’m still a very, very slow reader,” admits Pip, 54, who now writes full-time. “I’ve always used writing as a way of expressing myself, but when I was young that writing was very flawed and often incomprehensible. My parents were amazing. They didn’t focus too much on the errors and the poor handwriting, instead they focused on what I was trying to say. That meant I was never scared of writing.”
Pip says people with dyslexia are often lateral thinkers and creative problem solvers, both useful skills for a storyteller. With her parents’ encouragement and the help of teachers, her reading and writing improved.
Still, her pathway to becoming a novelist has been a meandering one. It all started when Pip, who had carved out a career as an academic, decided to move with her family from their home in Sydney to five acres in the Adelaide Hills.
“We were full of good intentions,” she recalls. “We were going to grow our own food and have a permaculture garden, and hopefully one day live off the land. But we were useless at it, to be honest.”
Fruit from their trees rotted on the ground because there wasn’t time to pick it. Foxes killed their chickens. Trying to work full-time, raise two kids and lead the good life was exhausting and stressful.
“One day, I had an accident in the car park at work because I was half asleep,” tells Pip. “It was the culmination of a couple of years of burnout and it was the wake-up call we needed.”
Realising something had to change, she and her partner Shannon decided to embark on what Pip describes as “the best thing our family ever did”. They quit their jobs, took their 12 and nine-year-old sons out of school and flew to Italy to become WWOOFers (willing workers on organic farms).
“We chose Italy because it has a very similar climate, and we wanted to know how to make the most of our beautiful piece of land in the Adelaide Hills and learn to grow things,” explains Pip.
Travelling around Italy with her family was a fantastic experience. They made time to visit tourist sites like the Colosseum and Pompeii, and went all the way south to Calabria. But eventually they had to go back home and resume real life.
“I had been depressed before we left – which was why we left – then I was depressed when I came back because nothing seemed to have changed,” recalls Pip.
“It was actually Shannon who suggested I write about our trip and what it meant to me. That’s when I realised what I really wanted and needed was to be a writer.”
Pip’s memoir, One Italian Summer, found a publisher but, perhaps just as importantly, writing it had equipped her with the skills she needed to tackle fiction. Even so, she embarked on The Dictionary of Lost Words in secret.
“I wanted to work on it alone, with no pressure, because I knew the idea was a good one and I was really afraid that I might let that idea down,” she says.
The Dictionary of Lost Words is based around the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary. It’s a feminist tale about a young woman who grows up around the men who are choosing the words to be included in the dictionary.
To research it, Pip spent time in the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary – and it was there that she came across a short piece of film footage from 1925 that ended up inspiring her second novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho.
The film showed women at work in the bindery and, as she watched it, Pip started wondering. She explains, “I thought what if there was a woman who worked in the bindery, and what if she was highly ambitious and really, really wanted to read those books written by Oxford University scholars. And I had a character.”
Pip is now hard at work on her third novel, which is set in modern times and closer to home. She says the secret to her productivity is that she is still very careful never to scare herself off writing. In fact, her goal each day is simply to write one single word.
“If I only achieve my minimum, I don’t walk away feeling like I’ve failed,” she says. “But the thing is you never do stop at one word. Sometimes I might write 20, sometimes 300, sometimes 1500, and I’ve done that because I’ve been in a good frame of mind and the words have flowed.”
Pip Williams will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival. For more details, go to writersfestival.co.nz
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