Megan Dunn will speak about The Mermaid Chronicles at the WORD Christchurch Festival. Photo: supplied by Penguin/Random House
Writer Megan Dunn explores her lifelong fascination with mermaids in the new book The Mermaid Chronicles.
She tells Kathryn Ryan that, like many young girls growing up in the '80s, Daryl Hannah's captivating performance in the 1984 film Splash was what set it afloat.
Megan Dunn's lifelong obsession is turned into a midlife memoir
Megan Dunn will speak about The Mermaid Chronicles at the WORD Christchurch Festival.
At the time, Dunn says she "totally believed" in Hannah's character Marion - a mermaid with a blonde Botticelliesque mane and a bright orange koi-inspired tail.
"As a little redhead, subliminally, I was very magnetised to this tail. It has a wonderful visual pop underwater."
For Dunn, Hannah's depiction of a mermaid forced out of her underwater home ignited a real sense of magic and possibility.
At home, in the bathtub, she tried to imagine her own mermaid tail forming. Later, she named a goldfish Madison.
Splash! bounced back into Dunn's life when she was at art school in her 20s, making video works with cut-up movies rented from Video Ezy.
"This very serious feminist tutor told me I could make a work about mermaids but I'd have to get a tail myself and swim - I couldn't just be cutting up footage of Daryl Hannah."
Daryl Hannah as a mermaid in the 1984 film Splash. Photo: AFP / Touchstone Pictures
At the time Dunn baulked at the tutor's criticism, but years later she has ended up tracking her own mermaid-inspired journey of self-discovery in The Mermaid Chronicles.
"I didn't realise 'Oh, hey, this is really about me going deeply into midlife and transforming, getting older, having a daughter myself and looking out across the internet and seeing all these amazing mermaids and deciding I needed to go on an adventure to meet them'."
For a long time, Dunn says she didn't want to turn her attention to writing about motherhood, believing that a lot of other writers out there did it so well.
Now she sees that exploring her lifelong passion for actually helped her develop empathy towards others and herself and also tune into "the maternal voice inside".
"I didn't realise until I reached the end of the book that that was something I've been doing along the way."
As well as sharing some of her own story in The Mermaid Chronicles, Dunn writes about legendary mermaids like Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, New Zealand's own Pania of the Reef and the real-life professional mermaid business.
For a long time, despite her best efforts to make contact, Dunn's first and deepest mermaid love - Daryl Hannah - remained elusive.
Eventually, at the end of 2022, after a piece about her mermaid research was published in The Guardian Australia, Hannah dropped Dunn a line.
"That was kind of like the final ingredient that allowed me to finish the book. Daryl had finally, after all these years, just come in on a tide like a message in a bottle."