"I had a break [from writing] in the 1990s, when I was looking after someone who was sick for a long time. I guess in my 60s I've come back.
"[The 1990s] was a period when I did very little, so in my 60s I thought, 'well you've got to do all those things that you want to do'. You've got to do them now.''
Kidman has more than made up for lost time, releasing the first volume of her memoirs At the End of Darwin Road last month - her fourth major work in six years - plus editing three anthologies.
"I've been working really hard,'' she says from her home in Wellington.
Kidman (67) admits she is nervous about the interview, saying she always gets very anxious before them, no matter who the interviewers are.
Having worked on the "other side of the media'' as a journalist and running a programme about writing for Radio New Zealand for seven years, Kidman has a simple explanation for it.
"I saw how nervous people used to get. I think writers sit down in a place where they feel private within themselves and they write everything down.
"Then it's in a book and you realise you've exposed a great deal more of yourself than you realised and in doing a memoir, it's very much the case.''
Her memoir, Kidman stresses, is not an autobiography.
"It is my memory of things and I did spend a great deal of time talking to a great many people about the fact they are in the book and I asked them for their version of events.''
The book was not written to be a hatchet job, "although there are some things I recall and have recorded that are, I suppose, saying it the way it was''.
Writing a memoir is a "slightly more selective process than an autobiography.
"In a memoir, you choose what you want to write about.''
Kidman surprised herself with what she eventually produced.
"What emerged, although I didn't expect it to do this, was something more the shape of a novel.''
After initially basing her memoir on the influence of Kerikeri, where she spent much of her youth, it wasn't until she travelled to Menton, France, as the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in 2006, that the memoir took a different form.
"When I went to Kerikeri I found that really it was a town that in one sense had always been quite impenetrable to me and it still is.
"Although I had gone and talked to a lot of people, I realised in Menton that I hadn't really made the right connections to do that sort of book.
"Besides that, I realised that it was really about me more than about Kerikeri and all these other things started falling into place around me.
"It began to feel like a novel structure with real people in it.''
Kidman says she likes to write every day, and after writing seriously for 46 years it is easier because she knows who she is as a writer and what her capabilities are.
The memoir was supposed to be a readable record of a life, Kidman says, not unlike that of many New Zealanders in the 1950s and 1960s.
After growing up in Northland, Kidman worked as a librarian in Rotorua and began her writing career as a freelance journalist in the early 1960s.
Her first of eight novels was published in 1979. She has also published four short story and poetry collections.
In 1988 she was awarded an OBE and in 1998 was made Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to literature.
In 1988 she also founded the Fiona Kidman Creative Writing School, which is now part of the Whitireia Community Polytechnic.
Her last novel, The Captive Wife won the Readers' Choice award at the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
Books have always played a central role in her life, after she learned to read one afternoon in hospital when she was six, and writing was a natural progression.
"Sometimes it doesn't seem easy and I think there are other things I would have been quite good at.
"I was always quite interested in the law and I think if I'd gone in a different direction possibly I would have been, who knows, I could have been a reasonably successful lawyer.
"There are lots of aspects of life which would have been quite a bit easier but I don't yearn, I don't regret what I have done.
"It was the right choice for me and I'm very fortunate.''
Kidman says when she began writing she was ignorant of the fact that "women weren't supposed to be writers''.
"I'd lived quite a comparatively isolated life up until then. I was a voracious reader and I thought other people had written books and I could too.''
Her writing career was prompted by a desire to fulfil a need, she says.
"Once I began to write, once I recognised the urge to do this thing, I found I was really happy and it felt OK to be doing it.
"At that point I became very committed and excited at the idea of doing it. Although I had worked in the library, I had blundered into library work, and it was a very happy blunder, something that really changed my life.
"I was put back in the path of good books and a mentor.''
What Kidman also quickly discovered was that writing "wasn't entirely compatible with domestic life of the young housewife'', which was when she decided to go into freelance writing to earn money.
Young writers in New Zealand are in a much better place than when she began, she says.
"I've really tried in my own small way to make some improvements in lives of writers by being involved in organisations.
"It's something I've believed in because it was difficult when I began.
"I think now young writers can say with pride, `I'm a writer' and define themselves in that way.
"When I first did so it was looked on as a rather curious thing to say.''
