One Minute Crying Time

Description

The dazzling memoir of one of New Zealand's best-known actors In 1962, the young New Zealand actress Barbara Ewing left for London, to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She went on to have a distinguished career in the theatre and in television and film, and to write celebrated novels. This vivid memoir covers her tumultuous childhood, adolescence and young-adulthood in Wellington and Auckland in the 1950s and early 1960s. Evocative, candid and brave, this entrancing book takes us back to a long-ago New Zealand with its often difficult relations between Maori and Pakeha. And it explores, with the help of old, fading diaries, the enduring but mysterious interweavings of love, memory and truth.

Barbara Ewing is a New Zealand-born actor, novelist and playwright. She completed a BA in New Zealand, majoring in English and Maori and then, in 1961, won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. After graduating she went on to become a well-known television, film and stage actress. She has written nine successful novels. She is home in New Zealand every year.

'Ewing writes that "we can only know the real plot of the story of a life, how one event led to another, in retrospect - and even then only perhaps if we have a clear enough record". The record she candidly examines of those formative years in her own life, years full of heartache and yearning, frustration and delight, years in which she was at times crippled with anxiety and a desperate desire to know more, has given her (and us) a deeper understanding of how we "become", of how our memories flicker in truth but can be rewritten, rearranged or even erased to suit the needs of our present.' - Michael Hurst; 'I like the idea of this book, the older woman revisiting her young self ... Ewing is an intelligent and analytical observer of her own life, and an honest one.' - Linda Burgess