DREAM CHASER
It wasn’t like this, 10 years ago. Things became truly awful then, one ghastly misfortune after another for Elizabeth Knox. Life hurling shit at her, the Wellington writer trying to cope, trying to stay standing. Her mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Her older sister suffered mental health issues. And then her brother-in-law was mown down by a drunk truck driver in the Cook Islands and killed. All that in 2009 – as well as the disastrous movie of her novel The Vintner’s Luck, which betrayed the story and left Knox devastated.
“That year, that crazy, crazy year,” recalls Knox. “Gastric bleeds, cellulitis – I was so sick. God, it was just too much, too much.”
Nothing got easy quickly, her sister remaining unwell, her brother-in-law’s killer being tried for manslaughter and jailed, and Knox helping care for her mother till her death in 2012.
“It’s amazing that Fergus and I survived it,” she says of the stress on her marriage to publisher Fergus Barrowman.
In 2013, her novel and the young adult book were published, their completion having been tandem distractions from – it was part of my coming back to life.”
