Author Joe Bennett turns his first three decades into a memoir

This is the point where the English-born columnist and author concludes his just-published memoir, From There to Here. It might seem unusual to stop an autobiography halfway through a life, but Bennett explains that most of the adventures that make interesting reading happened in his earlier years.

He finally settled down when he chose New Zealand as his home, and he’s happier for it. “Until then, everything I owned you could get in a suitcase and a half,” he says. “My feet had always itched. Then I chose to come here, and it felt like a watershed. I bought a house, got a dog, and then it was all over. It seemed like a break in my life. Everything built up to that age and I’ve been resident in one place ever since.”

For 25 years, Bennett has made a living as a writer, penning 20 non-fiction books, thousands of syndicated newspaper columns and one novel. When we speak, he sits in his Lyttelton home, on the brink of his 66th birthday. He is about to go on a holiday up north and has just finished a column for a newspaper about scientists recreating mammoth meat. The week before he’d had ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot making headlines, in his sights.

I can’t see him to talk about his memoir because he can’t work the Zoom link. He speaks about technology with the same fiery ranting that infiltrates his columns, a view that many of his fellow Boomers may relate to. “Technology makes my head boil. I would rather it wasn’t there. It’s a diminished world that kids come into.”

Mind you, he credits one tool – his computer – with his ability to get published because he describes his writing process as slow: 500 words a day, a lot of editing and cutting and pasting, whether it is a book or a column. His memoir is a good example. It took five years to write. “Yes, I found this memoir hard to write and I hope that doesn’t show.’’

However, writing is his passion and it was what he wanted to do since he was a boy in England. In From There to Here, he shares his journey to taking up the craft, via stints teaching in Europe and obtaining an English degree at the University of Cambridge.

Since 1998, he has been writing columns for newspapers and the Stuff website, often two a week, and he hasn’t missed a single one. Judged New Zealand columnist of the year five times in the national media awards, he describes his work as observational. He also doesn’t shy away from the controversial, sparking anger with columns targeting the use of te reo on RNZ and arguing it was a dying language.

Outrage aside, he relishes the immediate response that columns can provoke, the way he enters people’s lives, which is different from books where any responses from readers take time. “I write anything that gives me a spark of emotional interest. But as a columnist, you’re as good as your last piece of writing. You can be sacked tomorrow, so you’re very much on your toes because there are lots of people who want your spot.’’

Bennett’s segue into columns happened via the short stories he began writing for women’s magazines. As an adolescent, he had attempted novels, which were never published. At 40, he was teaching English at Christ’s College in Christchurch when he wrote a romantic short story, sent it off to a women’s magazine and managed to syndicate it to other publications here and overseas. “When you study them [romance stories], the formula is quite simple. The audience wants the couple to get together and you put a barrier in their way – usually a smooth rival – and something exposes his flaw. And so the guy that she should have been with, she’s with in the last line.