Linda Burgess 
You’re born either a cheery soul or a gloomy one, reckons Linda Burgess – but what happens when gene pools from opposite ends of the spectrum collide? In our shoeboxes of photos that we have to sort out before we die or get demented – because who IS that kid on the plane, or that … Read more
Linda Burgess on the soundtrack to her life. We drove up to Auckland last month. Our darling Edward, who, if suddenly out of sight, could well be found waving from the roof, was turning four. Unlike the time before, we weren’t turned back at Havelock North, when our phones, and the phones of the friends … Read more
The original series about a Yorkshire vet was a late-70s television phenomenon. Could the rebooted version scratch a similar itch for recovering Anglophile Linda Burgess? There’s something about TV programmes that start with someone running. It not only depends on where the camera is – at foot level? uhoh… the camera’s a voyeur and we’re … Read more
Having started the pandemic storyline, God, or perhaps the scriptwriters working on the world’s stories, have lost the plot. By Linda Burgess. Even my internal monologue is boring. Even reliving old fights with my sister, old crushes, old ideas for stories, is like trudging along a street where all the houses are meanly built and … Read more
Over the last few months, Linda Burgess has cheered herself up by watching food television. And saying fuck. For fuck’s SAKE! I say as my husband grates the broccoli. And I think, when did fuck become tame like – well, like for god’s, or even for goodness, sake? I listen to so many podcasts, ours, … Read more
Linda Burgess puts on her mask, goes to the mall, and finds herself slipping into a dystopian level two nightmare… We’re in hell. Sartre wrote hell is other people, and he wrote that when malls were just a twinkle in Mr Westfield’s eye. Given that I’ll be living in track pants for the oxymoronic foreseeable … Read more
Linda Burgess reviews Curtis Sittenfeld’s much-anticipated novel, Rodham. I read Rodham a while ago now but I put off writing about it. I was waiting. Waiting for what exactly? Well, waiting to see if they do what Trump kept insisting they do, back then, when the world seemed what we nostalgically think of as normal. … Read more
Judith is the youngest of six. Gerry is the oldest of five. Jacinda and Grant? Youngest of two and three, respectively. But where are the misunderstood middle children in our parliament? Linda Burgess investigates. If my younger sister – the cute-as-a-button baby of the family – smoked, which she doesn’t, she’d have inhaled, nostrils tightening, … Read more
The Man Booker prize-winning novel makes its way to our screens courtesy of BBC and TVNZ, but does it make the transition unscathed? Linda Burgess reviews. Oh god, wild seas. A sailing ship – ah, so it’s the olden days – all creaking wood tossed on those heaving seas, the moon a ghostly galleon, with … Read more
A new essay by Linda Burgess, author of the collection Somebody’s Wife and a stack of other sublime writing which you can read here. The handbag My mother often said that when Labour was in power there was never anything in the shops. Which goes part way to explaining why, whatever your Dad did for … Read more
Linda Burgess climbs the eternal staircase at the Opera House in Wellington to watch the virtuoso actor. At the interval her legs are aching. But in the second half, magic happens. There’s one person wearing a face mask, just the one, and it turns his face into a disposable nappy with two scared eyes above. … Read more
Summer journeys: In the first of a special summer travel series, Linda Burgess looks back on the not-so-glamorous New Zealand holidays of her youth. The Spinoff Summer Journey series is entirely funded by The Spinoff Members. For more about becoming a member and supporting The Spinoff’s journalism, click here. American girls, in their early teens, … Read more
Linda Burgess on the biggest-selling, most-loved book of summer: Becoming, the memoir by Michelle Obama. Celebrity memoirs are usually written by someone else. I’m fairly sure this isn’t the case with Becoming. There’s a lengthy list of people to thank in the book’s acknowledgements (“Many of my former staff helped confirm critical details and time … Read more
We asked former All Black great Bob Burgess to review a new book on his team-mate Keith Murdoch. But then we changed our mind, and asked his wife Linda Burgess to write whatever she wanted about rugby. This was originally published 8 August 2018. A rugby game lasts a whole day. Your father wears a … Read more
All week this week we count down the five best books of 2018. Number four: Linda Burgess reviews the Ottolenghi cookbook Simple. Why the hell do people buy recipe books? Someone should do their PhD on the number of people who buy one, use it three times, then go back to the usual 10 things … Read more
Content note: this essay may be distressing for some readers. Years later I read that fighting with your partner while pregnant can cause the foetus life-threatening stress. I remember Fiji, where Robert doesn’t notice that he’s used a $US100 note to buy something. American notes all look the same and he thinks it’s a single … Read more
We asked former All Black great Bob Burgess to review a new book on his team-mate Keith Murdoch. But then we changed our mind, and asked his wife Linda Burgess to write whatever she wanted about rugby. A rugby game lasts a whole day. Your father wears a gaberdine raincoat and takes the family to … Read more
Linda Burgess celebrates a collection of reviews and essays by the great New Yorker writer Lorrie Moore. Someone has decided that Lorrie Moore’s writing is so good, and so lasting in its impact, that it’s worth gathering up 30 years’ worth of her pieces in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The … Read more
Linda Burgess reviews the biggest-selling book at the New Zealand Festival in Wellington in the weekend – Salt Fat Acid Heat, a cookbook like no other. At one of Samin Nosrat’s two sessions at the New Zealand Festival’s writers and readers festival in Wellington last weekend, Nosrat referred to herself as a stalker. This, she explained, was … Read more
The year’s biggest literary prize, the Man Booker award, is announced on Wednesday morning, October 18 (NZ time). All week this week we review the six shortlisted titles. Today: Linda Burgess reviews Fiona Mozley’s Elmet, and History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund. At 29, Fiona Mozley is the youngest writer on the Man Booker Prize shortlist. … Read more
Linda Burgess reviews the latest novel by the prolific Damien Wilkins. Note: the headline was her idea. Any Wellingtonian reading Lifting has to work hard not to see Cutty’s as Kirkcaldie and Stains. Well, it is, isn’t it? A large department store in Wellington, with a piano, and a top-hatted doorman, going through hard … Read more
Linda Burgess reviews the Spinoff’s choice as the best book of 2016 – Anne Sebba’s extraordinary portrait of women in occupied France, Les Parisiennes. You’d like to think that if the barbarians did come through the gate, you’d at the very least make it clear you didn’t welcome them. You’d even hope, that given the usual … Read more
Linda Burgess examines the case of American novelist Cathleen Schine, who seems more famous for leaving New Yorker film critic David Denby for another woman than she does as a writer who is adored by Meg Worlitzer and Alison Lurie. One of the things you can judge a book by are the author’s acknowledgements. If … Read more
Linda Burgess urges you to read a new novel by a modern master – My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout (Random House.) Elizabeth Strout is my current literary crush – though I’m fairly sure that this time, it’s the real thing. She is fabulous. Damn her, she knows everything, and she puts just a … Read more
Wellington author Linda Burgess gaily set out to write a book about churches with her husband, former All Black Bob Burgess. Would their marriage survive? ‘Oh how lovely,’ people said. Even people who knew us. ‘How lovely, to do a book together.’ We’ve done it twice now. In 2007 Random House published my book on … Read more
Wellington author Linda Burgess chooses this and that and above all she chooses the book you want to buy several copies of this Christmas – The Scene of the Crime, by Steve Braunias (no relation to the Spinoff books editor). Thinking of what to recommend from what I’ve read this year, I realise how much of the … Read more
The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age by Joyce Carol Oates ‘As a writer,’ writes Joyce Carol Oates, 241 pages into her memoir, ‘I have not been drawn to what is called memoirist prose because I have never felt that my life could be nearly as interesting as what my imagination could make of … Read more
For a couple of years in the 1980s I had a wonderful part-time job – I taught two 7th form English classes at a Catholic High School and was paid an extra four hours a week to be teacher librarian. I went to the bookshop with someone else’s wallet. I bought The World According to … Read more
Wellington author Linda Burgess gaily set out to write a book about churches with her husband, former All Black Bob Burgess. Would their marriage survive? ‘Oh how lovely,’ people said. Even people who knew us. ‘How lovely, to do a book together.’ We’ve done it twice now. In 2007 Random House published my book on … Read more