The Mermaid Chronicles: A Midlife Mer-moir is my latest book published by Penguin Random House New Zealand on August 13, 2024.
Listen to my feature interview with Kathryn Ryan on RNZ Nine to Noon.
The Mermaid Chronicles is about my mid-life calling to meet the real mermaids. It’s been a labour of love, a quest, an odyssey and a siren’s call. I have always been attracted to the figure of the mermaid. As a little girl I saw Splash at the movies and fell hook line and sinker for Daryl Hannah’s performance as the mermaid Madison. I was not alone. A generation of women (and men and non-binary folk) now perform and even work as mermaids. This book is about my drive to find out how and why. What I didn’t expect was that it would also become a story about me. I’ve heard the mermaids singing, each to each. Now you can too.
I hope anyone attracted to the figure of the mermaid, or to Daryl Hannah or just any hellbent woman who had a baby at forty didn’t sleep through the night for two years and woke up and longed to understand why fish are feminine and sexy will read this book. It’s for you. And me. And the mermaids.
My publisher says:
The true tale of how one woman’s lifelong obsession became a midlife mermaid odyssey, from the irrepressibly witty author of Tinderbox and Things I Learned at Art School.
Forty, freckled and facing infertility, Megan Dunn hears the siren call that reawakens her lifelong obsession, and sets off in pursuit of mermaids. Real mermaids.
From Coney Island and Copenhagen to Courtenay Place, Wellington, New Zealand, from the semiotics of 1984 romantic comedy Splash to meet-ups with top professional mermaids, her odyssey takes her fathoms deep, past the wreck and the boardwalk, as she asks the question that has plagued humans for millennia: What is it about mermaids?
Diving into the caverns of her own life, Megan loses the plot but finds her voice and hears the mermaids singing.
Shimmeringly intellectual and devastatingly deadpan, tragicomic and true, this is an off-the-hook tale about sex and death, mothers and daughters, women’s work and marriage, the stories we tell ourselves and the myths that define us all.
‘Her voice is so strong. It’s wonderful.’ — Lorde
‘A treasure of a memoir . . . funny, frank and moving.’ — Kim Hill
‘Observes the importance of fantasy with keen wit and an open heart’. — Pip Adam, author of The New Animals
‘A fabulously witty adventure, written in deeply moving prose.’ — Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan or, The Whale
I consider The Mermaid Chronicles the third book in my unofficial and somewhat irreverent life-writing trilogy. The trilogy began with Tinderbox (Gallery Beggar Press), a book about a woman trying to rewrite Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 – that woman was me. The second was my memoir in essays Things I Learned at Art School, a book about sex, video art and fantasy, and also briefly about Daryl Hannah. The Mermaid Chronicles is a book about Daryl Hannah, and also about me. It’s the book the world almost didn’t let me write, but mermaids never take no for an answer and neither do I.
Collect all three books and go in the draw to win ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Or a damp squib.
