Digging for Spain

A Writer's Journey

I like to think there’s a story already sealed within each of us. Some of us take a long time to uncover, decipher and assent to it. We start our search when we find that the stories we’ve attached ourselves to prove no longer accurate, their themes too limited … I’m talking about the midlife  quest we’re invited on when all we’ve abandoned or ignored of our earlier impulses towards life begin to clamour for attention. … I knew I was in some kind of trouble the day my finger started jumping.

Here is a portrait of the growth of a writer, of the challenges of faith, and the route one woman takes to reach a better accommodation with herself, and her family. It's a heartfelt and lyrical narrative — as the author questions her closest relationships, and some of the stifling patterns she has fallen into. Yet it will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever tried to juggle relationships, the craving for solitude, and the urge to write or to devote oneself to a career which demands total focus.

Delicately written, yet tough at the core, this memoir weaves together a journey to Spain with several years of internal change. Digging for Spain explores an intensely personal yet common rite of passage: that of a woman learning to separate her identity from motherhood, marriage, and beliefs formed in youthful inexperience. It also shows the astonishing versatility of one of our best-loved writers for young adults.

Readers have said:

… thank you for your brave, insightful, lyrical DFS which, like a glutton, I devoured in a day or two.

Then there was your faith, your family, the whole nine yards, the whole shooting box dished up.  Who could ask for more.

 … a book to live by: meaning that I often think of it when certain things bubble up in my life …

 … everything the blurb says and more. As a writer myself, I found Todd’s dilemmas — particularly the battle to achieve balance between writing and family — echoed many of my own. I envied her clarity of thought and her fine prose in expressing her desire for the freedom to enable her to be truly present in her life, casting off the 'rigid frameworks' imposed by societal expectations and her early experience of organised religion.

… a fine and rather delicate talent … I think Digging for Spain is one of the very special New Zealand books of recent years …