Family and friends did everything they could to help, but in the end I had to help myself. I got over it. It would be ridiculous to say that The Blue Lawn played a part in my recovery, but its reception did serve to take my mind off how I was feeling.

The reception for the book was both positive and negative. Extremes really, with not much in the middle. The book was reviewed by Jack Shallcrass on Kim Hill’s ‘Nine to Noon’ programme on National Radio. I was told when the review would be broadcast, and I toyed with going out for the day or at least mowing the lawns and not listening to it. However, I faced the ‘music’ and compromised a little. I turned up the volume on the radio and busied myself by climbing a ladder to clean some windows—possibly not a wise move given my recently stapled ribcage! I needn’t have worried: it was a great review. Indeed, I climbed down off the ladder after the opening couple of sentences.

I didn’t worry about its reception when it became a topic on talkback radio; I didn’t bother listening. Paul Bradwell phoned and told me that the thrust of what was being said fell only slightly short of requiring that I be hanged, drawn and quartered for the crime of inflicting such dirty tripe on young New Zealanders. Parliamentarian, Graeme Lee, quoted in the press, considered the work scurrilous (I think he even mentioned it in some parliamentary debate). An association of secondary school principals in the lower South Island blacklisted the book and pronounced that it would never, ever be stocked in their schools’ libraries. Times change, of course. Some years later I visited several from this group of schools and was enthusiastically received. I didn’t say a word when I discovered The Blue Lawn well and truly in evidence in the libraries of all. My later novel Jerome, a far more graphic exploration of the same theme, was also in evidence in one particular library. I could see that the copies in stock had been well used. ‘I haven’t actually promoted the book,’ the librarian told me. ‘But solely by word of mouth it’s done the rounds of every senior pupil in the school.’ I was very pleased.

HarperCollins did their second printing of The Blue Lawn. In 1995 it won the Senior Fiction Award in the children’s book awards of that year. It did well in Australia, and I spoke about the book there and watched a scene from the novel ably dramatized at the youth section of the Melbourne festival. Later, the work was dramatized by a Wellington actor, and staged for short seasons in Upper Hutt and Wellington. It was a good production and kept faith with my story.

I have a lot of letters from readers about this book. Many, if not most, open with ‘You have told my story.’ Others, ‘You have told my son’s story.’ Some have said that I have told a friend’s story, a brother’s story. One or two, the saddest of all, let me know that I have told their story…but leave the letters unsigned. The book has been quietly around ever since, selling the odd few copies here and there. Paul Bradwell left HarperCollins, and I did try to interest his successor in finding a wider market. I don’t know whether he tried very hard.

Following my 1997 Writer-in-Residence stint at the Palmerston North College of Education, English lecturer Mona Williams, a storyteller and writer herself, sent me a collection of short stories with a gay theme and asked for my comments on the work. It was an American collection published by Alyson Books of Boston, a small firm publishing exclusively gay titles. There was a note from the publisher in the back of the collection.