{"id":583734,"date":"2026-08-29T06:00:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T06:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/583734\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T06:00:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T06:00:16","slug":"i-felt-every-one-of-our-cuts-catherine-chidgey-on-finishing-kelly-ana-moreys-epic-maori-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/583734\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I felt every one of our cuts\u2019: Catherine Chidgey on finishing Kelly Ana Morey\u2019s \u2018epic M\u0101ori novel\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ordinary People Like Us is Kelly Ana Morey\u2019s final novel,<\/a> published this week on the anniversary of her death. Catherine Chidgey writes about what it was like to complete the unfinished manuscript while grieving her great friend.<\/p>\n

Over the 15 years of our friendship, Kelly and I often messaged each other about the painful, exasperating and sometimes joyous experience of producing a novel. I gave her feedback on an early draft of Daylight Second<\/a>, her penultimate book (\u201cDoes Phar Lap need to talk, though?\u201d) and she read the manuscript of The Starving Bride (\u201cYou describe blood as smelling coppery twice, swap one out for ferric\u201d). She fell in and out of love with writing literary fiction and would tell me she was going to throw it in and do something else \u2013 something that made more money. She\u2019d return to hospo, she\u2019d work in a gallery, she\u2019d do antiques pop-ups \u201cin the nicer suburbs\u201d and make a killing on the gorgeous little pieces she bought at auction: a Japanese ivory box carved with sakura, a pair of Titian fantail wall vases. She had an excellent eye for the beautiful, the rare, and although she never forged a career in antiques, I recognised many of her treasures as the talismans scattered through Ordinary People Like Us \u2013 because she always came back to writing.<\/p>\n

Between us, we called the book her \u201cEpic M\u0101ori Novel\u201d. It took different forms at different times, and I loved hearing her evolving vision: \u201cAcross a century and a half, family stories, crimes and misdemeanours are revealed layer by layer like an archaeological dig. The reader and occasionally the characters move towards the source of a story and its ultimate truth, rather than away from it.\u201d Looking back on the successful funding application she submitted to Creative New Zealand, she said: \u201cI was kind of rattled to see that according to my CNZ paperwork, I was writing a 19th-century novel set in the gum fields.\u201d On the ever-expanding manuscript: \u201cIt\u2019s fairly obvious to me that this is two novels. I think this duality works for the story, which I envisage as a meeting house, the rafters being the two sides of the rib cage encasing the heart and the breath of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ACatherine Chidgey (Photo: Ebony Lamb)<\/p>\n

But ultimately, she knew it was far too long and needed cutting, and she was in the process of refining it before she died last year. She had already slashed it from 170,000 words to 145,000, but that was still pretty unwieldy and would hamper her chances of finding a publisher. When her cousin Emily, kaitiaki of her work, asked me if I would finish the job for Kelly, of course I said yes, without hesitation, but I didn\u2019t feel we should rely on my judgement alone \u2013 so we invited legendary editor Harriet Allan on board too. She had long championed Kelly\u2019s writing, having published a number of her short stories going back to 2004, and when Kelly wrote \u2018Blind\u2019 for the anthology P\u016br\u0101kau \u2013\u00a0 a haunting story about R\u016bruhi-Kerep\u014d, the \u201cevil old child-eater\u201d \u2013 she urged her to turn it into a novel. It became part of Ordinary People Like Us, and Harriet had hoped to edit the clearly extraordinary book she knew was in the pipeline. The admiration was mutual: Kelly had every intention of submitting the manuscript to her. \u201cHarriet believes in me so much,\u201d she wrote at a time when her confidence in her talent was shaky.<\/p>\n

Harriet and I agreed that I would tackle the editing first so that we didn\u2019t both end up making the same tweaks and corrections. Over the course of three months I streamlined certain unpolished sentences, cleared up continuity glitches, left questions in the margin for Harriet to consider, and cut the brewing, pouring, drinking and savouring of many, many cups of tea. I talked out loud to Kelly as I worked; sometimes I shouted at her. \u201cWTF ARE YOU DOING USING \u2018THE LATTER\u2019 FOR A PERSON, KAM??? IT SOUNDS SO CLUNKY! YOU\u2019RE BETTER THAN THAT!!!\u201c Often I found myself about to flick her a message marvelling at her research into the Pitt Street maternity hospital in Auckland or the firing of Crown Lynn china. Once, she visited me in a dream (we bitched about celebrity plastic surgery, until I started to cry and she stopped answering me).<\/p>\n

I felt the need to tread lightly \u2013 to preserve her syntax, her cadences, her voice rather than inserting mine. I was extremely careful in that regard, while at the same time weeding out elements that I knew she would have knocked on the head herself as soon as they were brought to her attention. That\u2019s how she was: completely devoid of preciousness about her work, and very open to robust feedback. I knew what her editing experience was like with the late and much-missed Stephen Stratford \u2013 he was strict with her, and she trusted him absolutely. \u201cOne of my great pleasures when working with Stephen across four novels,\u201d she said, \u201cwas the pair of us electronically burning pages to the ground as we tightened everything up.\u201d When he died, she told me, \u201cI\u2019m shook. We adored each other. Now I\u2019m going to have to learn how to use the fucking editing software. Stephen always covered my arse and didn\u2019t bother me with stupid punctuation, tense, etc. He just fixed it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"TheOrdinary People Like Us is out on September 1 (Photo: Jane Ussher)<\/p>\n

After I\u2019d finished, Harriet began to work her magic, making some necessary larger cuts where I, feeling too close to the manuscript and too emotionally blinkered, had hesitated. She told me, \u201cI found I was very quickly of a similar mind to you with your changes and didn\u2019t need to interrogate them, so I really hope that\u2019s a similar experience for you\u201d \u2013 and it was, every time. Over the following weeks we kept up a steady conversation about our proposed edits. Given Kelly was halfway through cutting back, the saw marks were still evident: characters removed from one point but not yet from another, draft sentences still requiring some sandpapering, a few splinters and repetitions waiting to be removed. I felt every one of our cuts, but finally, we had a clean 113,00 words \u2013 still a chunky book \u2013 ready to submit to publishers. Since Harriet and I are whiter than Tip Top, I was grateful that copy editor Johanna Knox (Ng\u0101ti Tukorehe, Ng\u0101ti Ranginui, P\u0101keh\u0101) gave the manuscript a final once-over. I think \u2013 I hope \u2013 it\u2019s as close as possible to the version that Kelly would have finished.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I cried as I worked on it, a lot. Sometimes I felt as if Kelly was writing about her own death: \u201cshe takes her last breath in her little house surrounded by blue hydrangeas\u201c. She often mentioned what she called her \u201cspooky old M\u0101ori lady-ness\u201d, telling me about predictions that came true, brushes with a world beyond ours. The ghosts speak in this novel, watching from the rafters, commenting on those who are yet to join them. <\/p>\n

Ordinary People Like Us embraces death and fizzes with life. With her fierce intelligence, acerbic wit and lyrical sensibility, KAM is there on every page.<\/p>\n

Ordinary People Like Us by Kelly Ana Morey ($38, Moa Press) is available to purchase from Unity Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ordinary People Like Us is Kelly Ana Morey\u2019s final novel, published this week on the anniversary of her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[35040,489,7421,156,7422,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-583734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-book-publishing","tag-books","tag-catherine-chidgey","tag-entertainment","tag-maori-writing","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}