Her Life's Work: Conversations with New Zealand Women

By Deborah Shepard, Auckland University Press, 328 pages, $45.

I was recently privileged to hear New Zealand art and film historian Deborah Shepard talk in Auckland at The Ladies' Litera-Tea. This is now a huge annual occasion where a number of New Zealand women writers talk to an audience of 300 to 400 women, then indulge in a decadent afternoon tea.

Deborah Shepard was there, with two of the women she interviewed for this amazing book: painter Jacqueline Fahey (aged 80 and looking 40!) and anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond. So you see, my appetite was well whet. Her Life's Work is all that the rah-rah of that occasion hinted at, and more.

"Pragmatism, humour, stubborn bloody-mindedness – what else does a woman need to carry her through the ups and downs of her life's work?"

Shepard interviews five creative and successful women, aged 62-89 years. As well as Fahey and Salmond, there is writer Margaret Mahy, film-maker Gaylene Preston and educationalist Merimeri Penfold. Marti Friedlander took the photos.

"There has been a revolution in women's lives," says Shepard in her introduction. She is a fluent and accessible writer, with a stream of impressive accolades to her own name. The preface gives an overview of feminism and social change in the last century, the times that coincided with these women's lives.

The book is set out not unlike the Paris Review Interviews with questions and answers, and with the interviewer adding detail intermittently, like a narrator. The setting is described first, including landscape, weather, traffic, imposing pets – enough context for the reader to be sat relaxed and attentive beside Shepard.

"I interview Margaret Mahy at her home in Governors Bay on an unexpectedly chilly day at the end of summer. Margaret's street is narrow and trees arch overhead, creating a tunnel of dappled light ... At the front door is a terracotta planter with two standard miniature pink roses and, lying to one side, a pale pink boogie board."

Shepard arrives thoroughly prepared. Her questions, often over several sittings, pick up on the subject's life from family quirks and ancestral roots, to tuning in to their place in the cultural and social fabric of our nation; the challenges, and the controversies.

Painter Jacqueline Fahey was married to leading psychiatrist Fraser McDonald and lived much of her married life in psychiatric hospitals. Shepard's interview of Fahey is a compelling read. What a woman!

"The women's movement never succeeded, so we can forget that. Men still control the money."

These are convivial and fascinating interviews with women who have "carved out an impressive career, balancing society's gender expectations with the pursuit of a meaningful identity through creative work". I couldn't put it down.

Don't for a moment consider this an academic rage about feminism. Far from it – it's about ordinary lives made spectacular by courage and creativity and passion. Her Life's Work makes it comfortably into my top five non-fiction reads this year.

• Jessica Le Bas is a poet, writer and teacher from Richmond.

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