Nikki Gemmell wrote new book Wing in under six months
The exhaustion of family life, work and the effects of perimenopause took their toll on one of Australia’s most popular authors. But Nikki Gemmell has bounced back with a new book.
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She’s a with 20-something books under her belt, a big personality and is raising four kids in Sydney with the man she loves. But for the better half of the past decade, Nikki Gemmell lost her confidence. Her spark. Herself.
It could have been the menopause “that stole her waistline”. It could have been the still-unexplained breakdown of a female friendship that broke her heart in that pesky way grief has a habit of doing. It could have been the sheer exhaustion of raising kids for the past 23 years, trying to nudge them in the right direction without interfering or upsetting the pack — well, too much, anyway.
Her words wouldn’t come out. And for a writer, that’s quite a problem – waistline or no waistline. But then Gemmell did something she hadn’t done for years.
She rested.
For a month. The whole of January 2023. And suddenly, the words came.
Five months later she had written her new book, Wing. And just like that, Gemmell got her voice back.
“I was exhausted,” she says.
“I was just so tired from everything, from just waking kids up in the morning to getting them out the door to school, to full-on work and all the rest of it.
“So I got to the summer holidays and, for the first time in so long, had a big rest — and that meant to sleep.
“I didn’t go anywhere. I just stayed at home and didn’t write. I had lazy sleep-ins like I hadn’t had for so long, and by the time it got to the end of January and pouring the kids back to school, I finally felt rested and ready.
“I just think it was years of accumulated exhaustion – a lifetime of exhaustion – on top of the bewilderment of perimenopause, where I was waking up at 3am and having these really disrupted sleeps.
“I’d put on weight, my body had changed. I kind of was living with low-level depression, and I feel like I just came through it, physically and psychologically. As I moved beyond those awful perimenopause years, I found my strengths and my confidence again.
“But the key was that I actually had a circuit breaker of rest, which happens so rarely for me in this crazy, busy life.
“So I began Wing on like the first of February last year, and it had to be delivered on the first of July. I finished it on the 30th of June.”
The words came thick and fast for Gemmell, now 57. Perhaps it’s because she’s writing about themes she’s lived. The demise of seemingly steadfast female friendships. Teenage daughters. Menopause and the invisibility of older women. Where the education system fails our youth.
Wing, which was published this week, follows four cliquey teenage girls and one male teacher who go missing on a school trip, and what happens when the girls return but the teacher does not. It’s described as Lord of the Flies meets Picnic at Hanging Rock, with a dash of Promising Young Woman and the flurry of c-words in the opening chapter alone will leave you open-mouthed. In a good way.
Twenty years on from her incendiary novel, The Bride Stripped Bare, which defined womanhood and sexuality for a generation — and was originally published anonymously — Wing is Gemmell’s next foray tracking a woman’s journey through life.
Much like her own.
“I lost one of my best friendships a couple of years ago, and it was worse than any break-up that I’ve had,” she admits. “It knocked me for six. It broke my confidence.
“I couldn’t write; I felt mentally fragile. I feel like I was constantly about to have a heart attack. This went on for about a year of my life.
“I felt bullied by the other woman, and I realised when you know the potency of exclusion as bullying, I was kept away from things. I was not invited to things, I was suddenly on the outer and I had no idea why – and I didn’t handle it very well.
“I’m still processing it and, down the track, I’ll do another book on female friendship, but this was certainly something I wanted to make a central part of Wing, because there’s such a potency to female friendships.”
To know her masterfully crafted book is now out in the world isn’t exciting for Gemmell, though. It’s terrifying to its core.
“This one feels strong, and I feel kind of quietly confident, but I can never call it, so I get really nervous when books come out,” she says.
“It’s not actually an exciting time for me; it’s a nerve-racking time.”
It’s not easy to publicly admit she’d lost her confidence. And only now that she’s reclaimed it, can Gemmell share her truth.
“It’s one of those moments where you just think, ‘Oh, f--k, oh, God – am I the only one? And is this pathetic? And should I even be saying this and admitting this?’
“But I think, for me, that also had a lot to do with the shitshow that is menopause.
“I got it so badly; I got every symptom under the sun, all at once, for like six or eight years. “And then I have friends who say they barely knew they were going through the perimenopause, they barely got a symptom.
“But for me, one of the big things was a loss of confidence – and what am I even doing? Who do I think I am? I can’t do this any more. I’ve come to the end of the road. I have to just do something else.
“That was a big thing a couple of years ago.”
Looking at her own children — including a 17-year-old daughter — Gemmell wants them to be strong, to be independent, to be able, and admits that what they’re experiencing with social media and technology would have floored her as a teen.
When she thinks of the 30-odd adult years she and her husband will have spent rearing their brood to adulthood, she’s just as floored.
“My husband and I’ve now calculated that the intense parenting years – from baby through to presentation day when they’re 18 – that will cover 30 years of our adulthood.
“So for 30 years, we are just getting kids up for school and wrangling them and nagging, loving them and having a lot of fun with them too,” Gemmell laughs.
“I feel like, for us, through the four kids and all these years of an incredible kind of distilling of what works best – and to be honest, what works best, we have realised, belatedly, is letting them go and leaving them alone and kind of nurturing the benign neglects, you know, where they make their own mistakes, set themselves up, learn resilience.
“Like my youngest one, it’s like he competes for attention within the family with kindness.
“It’s beautiful – and he’s worked that out himself, that if he’s compassionate and kind to everyone around him, he’ll be noticed within the mad scramble of the four of them. And it just breaks my heart with love and joy and a little bit of guilt.
“But we work as a team, my husband and I, much more so now than what we ever did when our first was younger.
“It’s taken us a long time to get this really finely honed teamwork, and we never fight any more because we’re just too tired.
“But I’ve got a 17-year-old daughter, and I look at her and her beautiful young friends – all of them, they’re so gorgeous – and I think, ‘Will it really be so different for them in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years?’
“This is all that we hope for, all that we’ve fought for, all that we’ve raised our voices for, and just hope that things will change.
“I worry, still, but at the same time I’m in awe of these beautiful young women around us, too.
“I feel like they’re so much more confident than us; they can talk to adults in a way that I certainly couldn’t.
“My God, if I was a teenager now, I would not have survived. I would not have coped.
“I would not have known how to do the whole social media thing, because I’m really sensitive, and that whole ‘bullying is exclusion’ thing – if I’d seen on Instagram things coming up constantly that I wasn’t invited to, I still get this thing of ‘Oh, what’s wrong with me?’
“I feel this generation is at a crossroads. We’re all watching them also with our hearts and our mouths, thinking, ‘My God, it must be so hard for them as well.’
“It’s hard for both sexes. It’s just a very complicated moment in terms of gender politics, gender history – and I tried somehow to encapsulate all of that in Wing.”
She sat on the idea of Wing for a long time before it came out in a whirlwind.
“I sold it to my publishers, and sat on it for two years – that was all to do with my loss of confidence,” Gemmell explains.
“And then, finally, I sat down and wrote it, and as soon as I started writing it, from like the first paragraph onwards, it just came so strong and so sure, because I know this world.
“I have lived this world, through four kids. My oldest is 23 and my youngest is 13 – I’m still living this world.
“It has been such a huge chunk of my life that I just kind of knew exactly what I wanted to write, but I must say that does not always happen with my writing.
“Like my previous novel, The Ripping Tree, took 10 years, and it was torturous to get that book out of me.
“It was just revision, revision, revision. ‘It’s not working. I have to change the ending. I don’t like the protagonist’ – whatever it was.
“But Wing just came. It was like a bullet.
“It was powerful in terms of the writing process because I felt confident about what I wanted to say and, on top of it, it’s like I’d really found my voice, as I have with some previous books like The Bride Stripped Bare. It just clicked.”
This is one of the first times Gemmell has discussed Wing with someone not within her inner HarperCollins publishing circle, and she is buoyed by the prospect.
Someone else important to her who was able to read it was best friend and publisher in her own right, Louise Thurtell. Thurtell loved Wing and was able to give some notes, some suggestions, some love, before she died suddenly, just a few weeks ago. One of the first copies of Wing was still on her bedside table.
“She absolutely loved it, and she particularly loved the protagonist at the centre of it – Cin, the girl who is the leader of the pack – she just said ‘I adore that character’,” Gemmell says.
“And for Lou to have said that (was special) because I wanted that character to be like Lou, which is kind of blazing and stubborn and sloppy. And at times you want to wring their necks, but they are so glorious, and you just want to go, ‘You go, girl – you just blaze your way through the world, and may no one ever break your spirit.’
“That was the kind of character I wanted to write about, a teenage girl like that. I feel like her spirit is in this book, so that’s beautiful.”
In addition to taking time to rest, Gemmell says oceanswimming has helped transform her life. “I now swim every day, except when I’ve got a migraine or it’s raining,” she says.
“At the start of this year I took up swimming. I used to swim in my 20s, before I had kids, and I just kind of slowly got back into the rhythm of it, and now I just feel like my posture has changed.
“I can feel my body is so much stronger, and it’s the joy and equilibrium that I have in my head. It’s like I remember those days when I used to just be basically optimistic and happy, and I had that again.
“Swimming has taken me out of my head, and taken the weight of the years that I was carrying. The weight of motherhood, or whatever it was – the world was kind of wearing me down.
“I was just existing in the world, financially, as a parent, job-wise and everything.
“But swimming just makes me buoyant.”
It’s so meditative Gemmell will construct columns or ideas and rush out of the water to jot down the perfect sentence before it falls into a menopause-sized gap in her brain, she laughs.
While swimming, Gemmell also thinks of her friend. “She was just a woman I absolutely adored, and she just died suddenly; she was 59 and we still don’t really know how,” an emotional Gemmell says.
“And she was a real swimmer, so I’m swimming for her every morning now. I just take her with me.
“And as I look at the sandy bottom and the light through the water, and how it reflects off the sand, on the floor of the water, I just, I just think of my beautiful friend.
“Now all the new copies of Wing, and future copies and the e-book, will have ‘For Louise, my blazing friend.’
“She just knew how to nurture friendships, and she knew how special they were, and she just she was the light in my life.
“But also, I realised at her service last week, she was the light in so many people’s lives.
“We all thought she was our best mate, but she was the best mate of so many of us, which makes me love her even more.”
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