You’ve written books, films, TV shows and plays. Which of your projects do fans most want to talk to you about?The one that people react to most, particularly women, is The Woman Who Walked Into Doors [about a woman experiencing domestic violence]. It came out in 1996, but even now – I was at a book signing event in Auckland a couple of days ago and two women told me quietly that that book meant so much to them. I think it’s possibly the best book I’ve written.You’ve been living with Paula Spencer, the protagonist of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, for decades – from the TV series she originally appeared in, to your trilogy of novels. What’s the most surprising way she’s turned up in your everyday life?When Covid started, I went to get my first vaccination, and I felt slightly elated coming home. I was driving and I thought: I wonder what Paula would have made of that? And that’s where The Women Behind the Door came from. By the time I got home and parked the car, I had the guts of the story and I knew that’s what I was going to be working on for the next couple of years.[Another time] I remember seeing a picture on Facebook of a woman I taught when I was a school teacher, who would be in her late 50s now. She was wearing a plaid shirt, jeans and white trainers, and I thought: Paula dresses like that. I gave her the shirt [in the novel], a plaid shirt that her son-in-law didn’t want to wear. And she loves the freedom of it, you know. It’s as if relatively later in life she’s found the outfit that she really likes.In a couple of years you both turn 70 – what will you get her?Well, she doesn’t exist. Sometimes I delude myself, but she doesn’t exist. But I suppose there is the possibility I will give her another book. The only thing is, you need a form of energy – I don’t know how to describe it, a sort of itch – to write. I have it at the moment, I just finished a book, and there has never been a long period where I haven’t had it, but I assume at some point that itch won’t be there. So that would be a good present to give Paula, ie myself: the itch to write another novel.