Emily goes to Hollywood

Wellington writer Emily Perkins is adapting her award-winning novel Lioness for a TV series optioned by the makers of Nine Perfect Strangers and Big Little Lies, and the star of Netflix show The Mentalist.
Hollywood site Deadline (headline, yesterday: “Friends Co-Creators Recall Standing Up to NBC Executive Who Objected to Monica Sleeping With Someone On A First Date”) broke the news in an exclusive report last week, saying that The Mentalist and Boy Swallows Universe star Simon Bakker will direct all episodes of “the hot book”.
Perkins’ vastly entertaining send-up of a rich and anxious New Zealand couple won the Acorn Prize for Fiction at this year’s Ockham national book awards. It earned her $65,000. The TV rights and whatever other proceeds if it gets greenlighted – Perkins has signed on as co-producer – may earn her a bit more than that. How vulgar to discuss money, but the theme of Lioness is money, money, money – as I mentioned to the author when I phoned her on Sunday, the theme of much of her work is money, money, money. Actually, she brought it up herself. She said, “This is going back into the history of our friendship, but I well remember that time we were talking and you came out with the provocation that my books are all about money.”
I said, “Do you think that’s true?”
She said, “Hm – it’s more a case that I love writing about the relationship my characters have with money.”
I first called her on Saturday, but she was about to get ready to go out to dinner, at Ortega, with her husband, painter Karl Maughan. When I phoned the next day, she said they had got home at quarter-to-eight, and she stayed up til 1am completing a 1000-piece jigsaw of the wine territories of Italy. Rock’n’roll! I promised the interview would take 10 minutes. We talked for 29 minutes. Throughout our interview, I tried to picture Lioness on screen – Perkins said producers are “open” to filming it in New Zealand (the book’s settings include a holiday home in the Marlborough Sounds, “a double-fronted, two-storey villa with wraparound verandahs on both levels”) – and I also formed a general idea of someone beautiful and sophisticated (a Nicole Kidman, not yet a Sydney Sweeney) playing the book’s central character, homeware millionairess Theresa Thorne, married to a much older Viagra-popping and richer husband (a Bryan Cranston, maybe even a Willem Dafoe).
I asked her, “How would you characterise Therese’s relationship with money?”
She said, “It’s complex, because she’s enormously drawn to it, to what it provides in terms of security and comfort and aesthetic pleasures and, you know, nice things. But she becomes disturbed, I think, by having more than she needs.”
Therese’s store sells luxury items. It’s like Tessuti, but even worse. I asked, picturing an inventory of expensive crap displayed onscreen, “What do you think of all her useless objects?”
She said, “Well, I think I might be more interested in objects than I am in money, actually, as a writer. They are both fascinating to me because they both have got so much power and no power at all. It’s like they are what we project into them. Obviously there are a lot of necessary functionary objects, but you’re talking about the useless ones you can surround yourself with. And they become like little kind of receptacles or talismans of feeling and meaning. I think we all walk around projecting things onto our favourite objects.
“Ad as a writer you hope that you’re kind of creating a mood or showing some kind of emotional story through all these….things.”
I said, “I wonder if that’s a similar intent that John O’Hara had, you know, the great short story writer who was obsessed with clothes and what people were wearing.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever read John O’Hara,” she said. “Sounds like I would like it. In Anna Smaill’s new book, Bird Life, there’s this gorgeous sequence of a woman going shopping, with all this attention to clothes, and Anna talks about it as being about the power of choosing and deciding.”I wanted more pictures in our conversation. I asked her about some of her favourite TV shows right now. She said, “Well, there’s Industry, which I really love. Have you watched any of that? It’s totally about money. The third season’s just started and it’s young people kind of completely ruining their lives working in the finance sector, like for a hedge fund or something. I honestly don’t even understand the levels of financial interaction that they’re talking about but they also, like, do lots of drugs and have lots of sex, and it’s all about sort of interpersonal machinations. So that’s fun.”
She could really have been describing Lioness, which goes at sex, drugs, and interpersonal machinations quite rabidly. I told her I asked about TV shows because I wondered if she was forming a kind of Pinterest mood board for Lioness but she said it was too early for that: “Nothing on the mood board yet.”
Perkins is represented by London-based literary agency Rogers, Coleridge and White, who also represent authors such as Anne Enright and Zadie Smith. The TV rights were acquired by Made Up Stories, headed by Bruna Papandrea, who was among 2000 signatories in October of a petition led by Creative Community for Peace, whose mission statement is “to galvanize support against the cultural boycott of Israel”.
Towards the end of our interview we talked for a little while about the intellectually dazzling Marxist analysis of her 2012 novel The Forrests that academic Dougal McNeill is about to publish in his new book of critical essays, Forms of Freedom (his essay on Perkins will appear next week in ReadingRoom). Part of McNeill’s thesis is that the book subtextually deals with “the pressures of globalised cultural and economic flows, and…the decay of the social welfare state and the confiscated futures bequeathed to us by neoliberalism.” Perkins said she wasn’t conscious of that while she was writing it but allowed that it may well be true. Certainly she nailed her economic thinking to the mast back then: she lived in Grey Lynn at that time, and was an early champion of Auckland Central candidate Jacinda Ardern, sticking a great big campaign hoarding for the Labour hopeful in the front garden. After The Forrests was published, over 10 years went by before she returned with Lioness: “I feel like I take ages to sort of gather my energies for another novel again after finishing one. That takes me a while. I do feel like the tide’s gone out, and it takes a while for it to come back in.”
I said, apropos finishing Lioness the book and now starting work on adapting Lioness the proposed TV series, “So you’re at high tide, aren’t you, right now?”
She said, “That’s a nice way to think of it. I don’t know. It’s hard to have a perspective on it myself. I’m just at that stage of thinking, what am I going to put on the Pinterest board?”
“And doing jigsaws,” I said.
“And doing jigsaws,” she said. “Are you an edges-first person or a blobs person?”
“Oh, edges, definitely,” I said.
“Sometimes I do the edges and sometimes I do the blobs. More commonly, a blob.”
I mused, “What does this say about us? Maybe it’s the creator of fictions versus the nonfiction plodder. I need structures. You just dive on in.”
“It’s all a mystery,” she said.
“No. It confirms that you’re wild and creative.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Rock’n’roll!”

Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury, $36.99), named Best Book of 2023 in ReadingRoom six months before the Ockham awards, is available in bookstores nationwide.