Now, 24 years later, as her subtitle calmly announces, she, now a retired academic, has written her own first novel (after undertaking in retirement the MA in creative writing at Victoria University) in which she simply and quietly traces the development of the ''lesbian life'' of Ngaio, the protagonist, seen against the background of the radical changes in the social attitudes to lesbianism between 1959 and 2000.
Novels by Renee, Beryl Fletcher, Annemarie Jagose and Cathie Dunsford stand between Cherry's novel and McLeod's, showing how depiction of the lesbian life has found at least a small place in New Zealand fiction. However, the list of New Zealand lesbian novels is still relatively short compared to the list of novels focusing on the male homosexual life, and it is significant that the launch of McLeod's novel by the lesbian novelist Stella Duffy before a large audience at the Women's Bookshop in Ponsonby was an important event in this year's Auckland Pride Festival.
''All of these stories are inspired by real life events. Some details happened in real life, some did not. The characters are fictionalised and given fictional names.''
McLeod's note preceding the text itself prepares us for a mixture of fact and fiction and also, by referring to the 10 separate sections as ''stories'' rather than as chapters, tells the reader not to expect the unified structure of the traditional novel, a supposition supported by the ''snapshots'' of the subtitle.
Structurally, the book is closer to a memoir such as James McNeish's Touchstones: Memories of People and Place than to a novel with a resolved plot. Its 10 ''stories'' are all told by the main character, Ngaio, and are in chronological order, but with large temporal gaps between them, each focusing on a single year: 1959, 1967, 1970, 1974, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1997, 2000.
The ''snapshots'' are all of Ngaio, but with a changing cast of others in a variety of places and situations that illustrate the shifting social attitudes to lesbianism over a 40-year period, from the puritan New Zealand of 1959 where lesbianism is never acknowledged to the 1997 transsexual public ''gender-bending'' of New York or the ''workshop on non-monogamous relationships'' at a women's studies conference in 1997 in St Louis.
Ngaio observes and is involved in fads, movements and events that mark the radical changes in social attitudes to feminism and alternative sexualities: in swinging London in 1967, flaunting the lesbian-dyke sense of style, but feeling the inhibitions against explicitly self-identifying as lesbian; in Auckland in 1970, relating to ''the girls'', a group of young women leading a promiscuous, hedonistic version of the lesbian life, but conforming to social expectations enough not to raise a stir; in 1974 participating in the Maori Land March and wishing she could really belong to something as her Maori friends did, then finding a temporary sense of belonging in the academic world by denying her lesbian sexuality in an affair with a young male academic colleague; in the later 1970s, having a three-year relationship with the older Maori psychiatric nurse with whom she had had her first lesbian sexual experience in 1959, but finding as she discovers her true intellectual interests in feminist theory and women's writing that she could not share them with her lover; in the early 1980s taking part in co-counselling with a self-therapy group and celebrating the matriarchal goddess with a Wiccan group - riding the wave of New Age feminism while having an affair with a female student; in 1986 celebrating the passage of the Homosexual Law Reform Bill and finding success and fulfilment as a lecturer focusing on women's writing, but at the same time being disappointed by the women's studies department failing to give a chair to an outstanding feminist theorist because she was a lesbian.
Elizabeth Heritage in a thoughtful review on the Booksellers New Zealand ''We Love Books'' blog comments that ''looked at from one angle this is a fascinating piece of social history, showing us one woman's experience of feminism and lesbian culture in twentieth-century New Zealand (from the 1960s on)'', a series of informal snapshots that offer us ''a fascinating glimpse into a side of late twentieth-century New Zealand that is not often discussed''.
The snapshots are ''compelling'' because they are ''personal'', with a narrator who ''talks candidly and engagingly about the trials and delights of coming out and of forming and breaking relationships with women (and men) throughout her adult life''.
The ''stories'' are like the personal anecdotes of a good conversationalist, with the details included because they happened and are of intrinsic interest rather than to make a general point.
But Ngaio is more than a recorder of personal impressions. The snapshots add up to a portrait of a developing person, an autobiographical but fictionalised character in a novel such as, say, Paul Morel is in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.
As such her development raises questions, as Heritage says, about ''the ways in which we structure our own identity in terms of gender and sexuality'', to which we might add related questions about the long-term effects of growing up in a dysfunctional family, the ''cunning, baffling, powerful'' effect of alcohol as a dangerous self-medication for depression, the difficulty of making one's own values and self-identity in a world in which there is possibly no ''power greater than ourselves'' to guide us and give us strength and no fully satisfactory social model.
As Heritage says, Ngaio's life in the book ''becomes a process of examining and querying and arguing'', without offering final answers. The last story, set in 2000, deals with Ngaio's three months in rehab, attempting to control her addiction to alcohol. As with the other stories, it is filled with vivid pictures of people and experiences. In the last pages, ''graduated from rehab'', she tells her partner Kathy a revealing and hopeful anecdote of her childhood and Kathy answers with a supportive gesture.
Ngaio's life at the end is still a life-in-process: she could self-identify as a committed lesbian feminist, as a ''competent and successful teacher'' who had had a positive influence on her students that made her career ''worthwhile'', and as one who ''had been in good relationship for 15 years'', but now the challenge was to be able to self-identify not as a ''functioning alcoholic'' but as a ''recovering alcoholic'' (unlike her mother, who died as a helpless alcoholic). The final anecdote suggests the possibility of achieving that goal, but the ending is left open.
A fictionalised autobiographical memoir-novel cannot have the psychological distance on the narrator of an entirely fictional first-person novel and the sometimes too neat selection of plot events of a well-made novel and therefore lacks the structural and thematic unity of many traditional novels, but it can have, and in this case does have, a freshness, liveliness and engaging anecdotal interest that have their own value, both as an evocation of an individual in process and as concrete social history.
Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
