On the 6th of March, the Italian publication of 2020’s novel, Saving Lucia. Title and cover reveal in the new year, plus details of the April Italian tour, beginning in Milan. This is the UK edition, with Bluemoose books. Still time to read. Then 8tto Edizione
Then on 31st March, my memoir comes out. Trauma, survival and the imagination, kid up, explored over twelve essays on the natural world. Reflex Press.
On the 27th of September, my new novel, The Zebra and Lord Jones, is out with Renard Press as UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) edition. Plenty of news to come in the new year and this is currently on US submission.
Then, on the 25th of October, my first book on writing, The Alchemy is out – also awaiting cover. This is very specifically about gentle productivity and writing your book in less than ideal circumstances. This book was recently acquired, like The Zebra and Lord Jones, by Renard Press.
Through the year, you have various pieces of work from me – such as my Mslexia column!
On January 10th, join me here!
Also, in the new year, if you fancy joining me – and the fab team – come and work on your novel for a year; applications open in early 2023 and the new course starts in March. Image below is for the one I am currently teaching on.
On 1st of January, the Curae Prize opens for first submissions. This is a new literary award I have set up, with brilliant support from people across the publishing industry, for writer and would-be writer-carers.
A writing prize – just for writers who are also carers
It is my dream that I go on to build out from this – educational platforms and opportunities for young carers – and, ideally, for carers around the world. We have to see how well this first year goes first!
As to my hopes and dreams? I truly think, eight books published in seven years – by the end of 2023 and one in translation, plus two major columns and over forty features – well…I truly think that if I were going to be a star from my writing and have a big profile, I would have done it with this ouput. I was very sad about this, but then I reminded myself that, in order, I am teacher, reader, writer.
And before all of that, mum.
As to my hopes and dreams? I truly think, eight books published in seven years – by the end of 2023 and one in translation, plus two major columns and over forty features – well…I truly think that if I were going to be a star from my writing and have a big profile, I would have done it with this ouput. I was very sad about this, but then I reminded myself that, in order, I am teacher, reader, writer.
And before all of that, mum.
Things looked very different! I felt much more optimistic and began seeing possibilities.
There are additional needs within my family and it has become clearer to me that focus needs to adjust and I will need to be hands on and flexible, perhaps permanently. We have had no additional support and have been through significant trauma over a long period owing to this. To be frank, I have to plan and to anticipate and there are too many fluid, unpredictable bits in publishing for someone who has additional demands plus a day job – and I also manage chronic illness. I am sure you get the picture. So I am working sideways, instead. It took me months to recover from a novel being comprehensively ghosted by editors. I had not understood that ghosting – a practice of which I disapprove – went on beyond the query stage. Seeing this in action has made me reappraise my approach, partly because I do not have the bandwidth for it. I have so many ideas; so many books I want to write, but the issue is not the writing, but where I meet industry. Thus, while I have a number of books out in 2023, my focus going forward and beyond is teaching and the Curae. With the exception of sending a book of essays out on query in mid February! And unless I get a nice US deal, or someone wants to make a film – or anything which is a big splash in that way. I will be talking about moving sideways and the portfolio concept; being nimble and flexible. I aim to connect it both to The Alchemy and to the Curae. I aim to put in place for others what I needed.
I’ve seen the film twice; once at the cinema, when I was inconsolable afterwards and then, at home, sitting in bed. On both occasions I watched it alone. I do feel it’s a masterpiece, but I do not have the knowledge or the skill to comment in depth on film-making, so thought I would explain instead what it meant to me.
I must tell you that this account will contain spoilers but also that I am speaking frankly of illness, death and bereavement. I am also, for the purposes of this piece, not commenting much on the queer trauma that is also at the heart of the film, so beautifully realised alongside plangent period detail – all of which had me howling. I thought it was wonderful as queer romance. I might write about that elsewhere.
So, over a period of four and half years, late childhood slipping into adulthood, I lost all my immediate family, including my parents fourteen months apart from one another. My father died first, suffering in circumstances that had been very frightening for me – and he died in a way that might be best described as devoid of medical control. Noone ever spoke to me about it. I internalised that terror. But we will come back to that. My mother reacted to his death by turning inward and resenting me even more than she already did. It was complicated, painful and frightening. When he died, I was not invited to sit with her or my sibling in the church and we will return to that one too. I was a teenager. When my mother died, I lost the whole of my father’s family because they broke contact with me. My aunt said simply, ‘We won’t be seeing you again now.’ Like something out of a play. I had just thrown dirt into my mother’s grave. I listened to this. I thought only that I did not know what to do with it yet. Then, my much older sibling began to distance themself from me, before eventually breaking contact. I did not have my much loved godmother to tell, because I had lost her too. The only photograph I have of me as a baby being held is by her, not by my mother. I always felt that told me a lot.
There are many complications here; much dysfunction: a lot I just do not know about. There were some desperately twisted narratives which I have explored elsewhere. I always felt, and was led to believe, that I was a blot on my parents’ lives, particularly on my mother’s. But you see I still respected a lot of the things they were and I still loved them and yes: some terrible things had happened that I am still getting over today. Remember that I said I loved them too.
I know this part of my piece is chilling, I want to tell you things that are intensely optimistic, so stay with me. I used the word ‘yet’ when I said I did not know what to do about being told, graveside, that I would not be seeing a whole side of my family any more.
I know now. At some point I decided there were some things I would do and I had a resolution there; it took me a long time to know how to fulfil it. I think things were broken in my immediate family. That it was traumatic – of course it was traumatic: my whole being has been governed by the impact of developmental trauma because my brain and my litany of physical responses have been conditioned to act in a way that is not conducive to good health or living. Before I knew how to fix any of that, I still thought – I was absolutely sure – that at some point I could.
I thought that my heart could contract and I could hand this on; this pain. Or that it could expand so that I could give and receive love. I also tried to think about what darkness could teach me. Humour? Tactics? More empathy for others? I acknowledged that, in me, was a gleam of intense optimism because I was acknowledging that herein was choice, to be enacted however faltering. I also learned gradually to breathe through feelings of terror and to know how to access the support that would help me deal with my fragmented memory. Trauma memory, we know, is not linear; because of that I lived half in the past and when I did, on a fully sensory level, through flashbacks prompted by a smell, a cold face, some comments – many things. I also gradually learned that I could make myself and not be a composite of other people’s opinions of me. This is what I was. Love – the acceptance that goes with true love – changes all that too. It’s a part of a moving through.
In the film, Adam’s heart, his pain, his early loss: it’s all compact, there and at the core. He feels this hard lump of it, like granite – I know that; I know it so well – and is aware of the way in which his life is predicated on it. If not granite, it’s like an embolus of fear, always there. He is alone. More to the point he is lonely. There are only two people in the block of flats. It is writ large. So quiet. It is through meeting Harry, who is kind, intuitive and deeply sad because he has ‘drifted to the edges’ of his family, that Adam begins to unlock a sense of being out there, laughing, loving, sensuality, identity. He has the opportunity to see his parents again, which I found chilling and deeply beautiful. I had no chance and never will have a chance to say goodbye lovingly to either of my parents; there was no opportunity for talk, healing, fo anyone to say, as I write in my novel Saving Lucia, ‘You are my child. And I am sorry. I am sorry.’ Moreover I had no witness, as Adam, ultimately, has Harry – because Harry sees Adam’s parents too. However, later I had Mr Bookworm. my husband, who listened imaginatively – and still does this.
Adam is a scriptwriter. When we meet him, we learn he has been trying to write something about his parents. A story. Did he invent them into being in order to understand? A narrative. Something (that word again) linear? Did he also invent Harry? Reviews describe them all as ghosts. Perhaps. But what substantial ghosts, operating in the world of the living, either already aware of their tenuous link on this world, like Adam’s parents, or about to experience that, as with Harry. However you interpret this, it is beautiful and very optimistic. Yes. Optimistic.
I have seen people writing about how the film was too painful for them or dreary or too bleak. This was not my experience. It was a film about love and how we may receive it, which is the best of us. We cannot grieve without love and, sometimes, we cannot love without grief. It is good to speak of this openly. Because there is an opportunity, no-one is alone in the film, at the end. Not his parents, who have the chance to say what they need; not Adam – who also gets to comfort them about how they died as they slip away (he is not entirely truthful, of course) from him. Furthermore, he is able to be with Harry, who has died alone, unfound, unnoticed by his own family. And Adam is different. He has been through a terrifying process – the film does not baulk at this – and regardless of whether it is also the story of a man who knows how to invent a narrative, he is loving and he is smiling. His heart is also changed. ‘I should have let you in. That first night’ he says to Harry. ‘But I was scared.’
No-one here dies alone. There is some ambiguity, I think, in whether Adam has also died or was dead all along. There is a spaciousness in the supernatural here. I do not need to be sure.
I said before, your heart can contract or there can be an expansion. What happened to me, in complicated circumstances, did me irreparable damage, but gradually, through professional help and by keeping myself open, things were altered. Broken, but beautiful. If you follow me on social media, you may recognise this phrase. It’s what I want for all of us. We cannot avoid death, or pain, or fear, but we can make the circumstances available so that, however broken we are by loss or suffering, we can still integrate and still create things. We can still love.
In my case, I came to think that I sat in the world awkwardly, with the mess inside my head – but I would do it anyway. I have some lovely extended family, my friends, my boys. I tried to take the pain and make it my teacher, so that I could be more sensitive in my work – from secondary teaching through to creative writing mentoring now. When eventually I started writing, only a few years ago, I developed a strong autobiographical thread, much immersed in magical realism, because that was the mode entirely natural to me. I came to understand more about trauma and, when I felt ready, to think about how I could explore my books in contexts. That is what my PhD is about.
Along the way I met and married a man who asked me for directions in the street and had three children with him. That was a considerable risk. Wildly impulsive. There was something in me which had not withered: I was able to take that risk. It is our silver wedding anniversary this July. I want to say that it is a wide world and there are always more people to love: love is pure gift. It is always ubiquitous, but no less precious for that. We may feel because of trauma, of not being loved, of loss, that it cannot be experienced and felt fully. We may have been separated out, as I felt, and made to feel we are not loveable. That is not so. My experience is the opposite of all this.
Back to the film. It is a profoundly affecting piece of work. As a study of trauma, loss, love, identity and measuring so sensitively the atmosphere, the temperature of a period of time.
There is one thing I hope. That there will be people watching who feel less afraid of their end; of others’. And I want to offer you a few lines from a story. I am a writer, like Adam. It’s about loss and the fear that it engenders. Also, that if you can tell stories, have vocabularly, speak openly, ‘you will not be alone.’
‘Care for your own heart and devise a vocabulary for your loss, unique to you. It comes to us all, but with a word-hoard, you will not be alone. Remember too, that in darkness, as I have seen, there are navy and lavender lights and a star which laughs.’ (‘A Gravedigger’s Lament’ – from Ravished)
The film ends, lovers, friends, together on the bed as darkness deepens. But there are stars in the sky outside. And then there are more.
For the writer-carer. A new, more vigorous approach and a new literary prize
‘I feel so much better. I feel seen.’
Many people who read this piece will be carers. If readers are not one now, they may be later and some of us will always be in this role. A carer (I use the NHS definition) is anyone who looks after a family member, partner or friend who needs help because of their illness, frailty, disability, a mental health problem or an addiction and cannot cope without their support. They are unpaid for this care. 2020 data from Carers’ UK found that there were approximately 7 million unpaid carers in the UK – that is, one in ten of the population; 2023 data shows an increased number of unpaid carers – as many as 11 million and with a significant rise in the 16-24 demographic Around 800,000 young people aged 5-18 are carers, too.
I do not want to focus on me, but I shall share that I began writing partly in response to the level of stress I was under. I hope I have shown, in the breadth and volume I have produced during the past seven years, that it is possible to carve out time, even if it is unpredictable, and to work with what you have. A carer is organised; you must be that way. I was a carer as a teenager. I know what it is like to feel separate and apart. Then, you must have a great deal of spirit too, because as well as caring you may be fighting for acknowledgement, diagnosis, resources, and money. You also need time for yourself; what is more, 640 people leave paid work every day to become an unpaid carer because of lack of support available and 52% of people who request flexible working have their requests turned down. The data makes for difficult reading.
In late 2022 I planned and launched a new literary prize, the Curae, specifically for writers and would-be writers who are carers. I conceived it so that it shone a light on the caring role, and had two ideas for the prize; anyone who was a carer could enter (free) and perhaps they would just enjoy crafting a piece of work, being part of something, and the satisfaction of sending it in. However, I also wanted to make sure that the prize could offer proper industry access for those who wanted it; resources, contacts, advice, training: opportunity in an industry that can look terrifically opaque from the outside. I want to say, too, that I believe creative work is not a luxury; it is, instead, core to who we are, a helpful discipline, a reason to carry on, a break and wonderful for our wellbeing.
Let me share something inspiring and comforting. The prize was profiled in The Bookseller and within hours of publication, people came forth from across the industry: I was offered two generous bursaries and a wealth of support and resources were given by, among many others, Andrew Nurnberg Associates Ltd literary agency, The Good Literary Agency, The Liverpool Literary Agency, Renard and Elliot and Thompson presses, North Bank Talent, Penguin, Arvon, Mslexia, Jericho Writers, The Society of Authors and writers and editors with a number of specialisms, such as memoir-writing and self-publishing – plus I had judges Michael Langan, Amy Lord and Elissa Soave, some amazing sifters and helpers, mentoring, one to ones, special support for carers from under-represented groups and much more – book tokens, bibliotherapy, signed books. It meant we were able to offer good things for our honourable mentions, our shortlist and, over a year, for our two winners.
Three hundred people entered the prize, disproportionately women, and often people who were managing mental and physical health challenges or caring for multiple people in exceptionally challenging people. It was all judged blind, but entrants sent me messages and life stories; some told me things about their feelings that they hadn’t told anyone else, and some people wrote just to say thank you for doing it, even though they weren’t entering. I hold in my heart the entrants caring for parents and partners, offering end of life care in many circumstances, looking after children and young people with life-limiting conditions, often doing the work that, from the outside, you would expect a skilled professional to do or in which you would anticipate they had a great deal of support owing to the magnitude of the task. Alas, requently not so because there are not enough resources to go round and sometimes – this is the thing that has been the hardest of all for me personally – there is an absence of will and compassion. But we have each other. Even heartbroken, no-one need be alone with it – and that is what I am most proud of and most hopeful for.
I hope to grow the prize over the coming years so that we include young carers and in order that a greater range of texts can be entered. As part of my planning, I reflected on what had been unhelpful to me as a new writer, which doors were closed – so I can push those barriers away for others. I thought about what I had needed in industry too and realised that now I had more experience and with all the brilliant industry help, we could lay that out for others. I really hope you read the anthology that sprang from it, and all proceeds go to Carers’ Trust and Carers’ UK. You can buy it here: we have already raised several hundred pounds. https://renardpress.com/books/the-curae/
I would like to offer writers and would-be writers more reassurance: do not wait for ideal circumstances; do not compare; a room of one’s own is ideal but not essential and, again and again, work with what you have and with a broken heart if necessary, because writing itself is immensely beneficial to your mental health and the industry can do more to nurture the idea that publishing work should not only be for those without additional challenges – for the privileged and full of energy.
Caring, even while it happens because of love and because we accept responsibility, is isolating. For this reason, affected writers could consider joining the Society of Authors group specifically for carers to blunt that sense of isolation.
That done, your tribe comes into play. The group of people with whom you surround yourself as you write– this may be in person or, as is more practical for carers, online, and you need not be in similar situations but try to build a cohort of people with whom you can discuss challenges and sometimes cry or be rude and sweary about bad practice or vexation. Ask for their encouragement that you may be bold in your decisions: being a carer can be rewarding; it can also be heartbreaking, not just because of what you see a loved one going through, but because of having to find resources, multi-task, contact various agencies and, not infrequently, see it all fail. I have been there and probably will be again. If you are, simultaneously, working with someone in our industry who lacks compassion, misrepresents you, drains precious energy from you, consult your tribe and gird your loins as you plan to let this person, or these people go. I realise this is a difficult and fraught thing, but I also understand the strain you might be under, and I see you. See yourself, too. Nourish your self-belief. One of the best things about launching the ‘Curae’ prize was that writer-carers found each other and formed their own group. You can already see them wondering how they might pay it forward.
There is genius out there, much founded in intense pain and frustration: I am on a mission to make sure it is nurtured and seen. As writers and as an industry we can work together to ensure that happens.
Soooo I am hard at work on a PhD by Published Works at York St John University TA DA. This foregrounds my own, previously published work and I am here – well, as a distance learner – for a year. It is hoped that this September I can start HEA training which would, post doctorate, give me more options for teaching at university level.
This July, I have an essay collection out. It’s called To Melt the Stars and is all about love. Being me, it’s a bit weird and you’ll be able to pre-order from May. Catalogue and cover when we have them!
This week, we announced the follow-up to the bestselling teaching book, The Alchemy
This new book is called The Elxir and, where The Alchemy focused on getting started and working with what you have, The Elixir is more forensically about craft – and I hope you love it! October, 2025. Here’s one of the announcements in the industry press.
Right. Things I am banning this Christmas. Please relax my darlings. Here are some things from your Momma Book Bear.
1. Comparing yourself to others. This is totally banned.
2. Making yourself ill by pushing yourself to create a perfect tableau. Basically, everyone just wants to eat more crisps and you could consider some sort of crisp adventure; a crisps tableau.
3. Assuming other people’s families live in total harmony and if they truly are pretty harmonious, remember that this is not necessarily earned, but luck. I mean, I don’t have parents, but it’s not because I killed them. (Sorry if that startled you.) So be gentle on yourself there babykins.
4. Looking at social media and seeing it as a consistent view of someone else’s experience. LOOK HOW HIDEOUS THIS PICTURE IS and note that the look in her eye is of escape and slightly sexy because she fancies the photographer, and her husband is dull as fuck and insisted on this joyless, two-tone, spendy co-ordinated tree abomination, when what she really wanted was an inflatable grinch and coloured flashing lights, camp as tits.
5. Assuming everyone else is having a brilliant time and not actually wanting to run away at some point or indulging some secret fantasy of a thing they would do just to shock people – like shagging their particularly hot neighbour
6. Your assumption that people are telling the truth about how they are feeling. EVERYONE has problems. EVERYONE. Some nurse a hideous seething morass of them; a terrible, raging, ongoing existential crisis – but they don’t articulate it other than in, maybe, unattractive moments of passive aggressiveness. Yes – even with glossy folk with what appears to be the perfect line-up. These feelings can be particularly acute at Christmas because of expectations, I always think.
7. Worrying because you don’t have a family, don’t see your family, are estranged from people. MY DARLINGS. There is a whole world of people out there just waiting for you. THEY can be your family and there’s no hurry. As I like to say, family is a flexible construct.
8. Feeling upset because you don’t have children and there’s always some twat going on about how Christmas is special because of children. Baby Jesus is special and an outlier here, and yes children, young nativity play children, can be delightful, but I can’t be the only one who was also breathing a sigh of relief when they fucked off to the park on their own instead. Also, they open their stockings at 3am and then get wired on chocolate and are hideously behaved and you’re knackered. It is ONE way. Pets are also nice. And books. And cheeseboards. Down with this bollocks.
9. I am banning any guilt or fuck me am I weird because I WANT to spend Christmas on my own. NOPE. You are being true to yourself and you can have a gold star for that. There are terrible things happening right now and the last few years have been a considerable strain. Please be true to what your body and mind are crying out for right now if you are tired – bone tired. No way are you doing this Christmas Eve box thing for kids, and you can ditch the matching Christmas pyjamas if you don’t actually want to do that and everyone needs to know that an alternative to making a cake is a massive pyramid of doughnuts from Lidl with maybe some sparklers on top. Sprig of holly if you like. More fun is generally had when expectations are lowered and you’re not too tired to do things or crying because you feel like you didn’t do ENOUGH. That you are alive is the miracle of ages; I mean, it’s amazing, and not everyone gets to be that way. Deep breaths and perspective (and crisp smorgasbord – see above).
10. Also guilt at not wanting to spend much time with family? If it’s going home (I wouldn’t know because I have no experience of being an adult with parents, but I can SEE), there can be discomfort at being swatted back to your earliest pathology. There are narratives which develop in families and sometimes, you know, you don’t feel good about that. At this stage, there may be little or nothing you can do. Have some miniatures in your handbag and don’t feel bad if an uncharitable thought creeps in – but don’t have so many miniatures you say what’s in your head during Christmas dinner. You know, like in the Eastenders Christmas special when it all goes horribly wrong
Just out, The Zebra and Lord Jones, a new novel of magical realism. As I write, we are getting ready for the release of The Alchemy, my first teaching book, which comes with its own platform, and then in November, the anthology of winning entries from the inaugural Curae prize, which I made specifically for writer and would-be writer-cares. For All three of the following books, head over to Renard Press. https://renardpress.com/https://
The book above is the result of the Curae prize for writer-carers which I launched in 2022. It had such wonderful support from across industry. If you can, come to our launch night? It’s free but you have to book.
In just over a week, I start a PhD by Published Works at York St John University. It is on magical realism, the imagination and trauma, and foregrounds my own These Envoys of Beauty and Saving Lucia, together with briefer focus on five other books, alongside contemporary magical realism fiction and literature on trauma across various disciplines.
What else? I had a strong nonfiction proposal put together, Lipstick. A Cultural and Emotional History and, in all honesty, following agent and publisher feedback, it is not going to be saleable as a book. I am not a journalist, I do not work in fashion and beauty and I am not a cultural historian. Nonfiction is a particularly hard sell at the moment, so it’s just no go. I cannot top and tail it with memoir and scholarship because I do not have a relevant platform. However…I like to think whether I can reuse and repurpose so the plan is to publish it as a monograph instead! A long essay. I am delighted to tell you that I do have an offer of publication for early 2025. News as and when I can.
I am in the process of writing a new novel, All the Days I did not Live, having put down a few other things, and as I write, I am going to be head down on that for a week. I also made the decision to seek to change literary agency – this happens a lot, if you were wondering – so I am in discussions about that at the moment. Finally, I am away from social media for a whole year: time and space. To breathe. So much has happened in the past few years in work, and books and in my personal life – it feels good so far.
More news as it happens and, this week, I am will be resurrecting my Substack newsletter. About time!
Stigma. Shame. Embarrassing. Needs to toughen up. We just got on with it my day. We don’t have mental health problems in our family – we are really robust.
Scandal!
Shame!
SHHH!
Don’t you feel exposed?
Weakness.
Keep it to yourself will you, for Christ’s sake!
I don’t know anyone who’s needed counselling, therapy: just get over it.
Oh that’s just psychobabble. Did someone put that in your head?
EVERYONE has trauma these days.
For anyone who’s heard these things, felt them, let me tell me you no, no, no. You are you and managing, admitting, attempting to find help for or recovering from something difficult – just like one in four people, at any one time.
Here is my account of what life feels like on a day to day basis and how I manage it. Please be aware that this involves an account of a child and young person – me – but that I have kept the details minimal
First a history. I think I have been managing difficult things for a very long time. In late childhood and through my teen years I had OCD, most troubling as a child because of what were, to me, terrifying ruminations. Unfortunately, those thoughts took hold at least partly because my parents, particularly my mother, absolutely solidified in me the idea that I was a terrible kid and the bringer of harm. Imagine it like this: that the statements and name-calling and the many physical hurts, accompanied by many nice things too which radically confused me and led me to doubt my own mind, went in so deeply that it has taken me decades to unpick. Perhaps it would have been different had there been appropriate intervention, but no. I learned to manage on my own. I think about that kid, that teenager often.
Suicide attempts. Two. 13 and 17. No action taken afterwards. Hush up. I am jittery writing that. Please imagine the despair. I don’t think I had any confidence at all, a sense of myself: anything could hurt me because my identity was so fragile. And I was shamed.
Self harming. That started at about seven years old and continued right into my early thirties. Fear, shame, as a kid thinking that I were not hit, if I were not having my hair pulled, then I had better do it myself. Because I was an aberration and the bringer of harm. Also stress. I didn’t know what else to do so I did that. I tried to tell people at secondary school and was (this motivated me to teach at secondary level – to teach full stop) told that my parents were wonderful and I should not put them under too much stress. They were wonderful in many ways. They also, with others, did me immense harm. My mother mainly; an acquiescent father. I’ve parked it. Tried to be sympathetic. To understand what they may have been feeling – their hurts. And others in my immediate family. Do I forgive them? Nope. That’s too much pressure. Have I let them go? YES. That’s the goal. I’m not mired in it and anyway I am still dealing with the results.
Major depression. Hmmm. Several times
Anxiety. Yep.
Panic attacks. You bet. On the tube. Once on a beautiful beach.
Recurrent nightmares. To this day. I wake up crying. I yell out. But it’s getting better.
Breakdowns – if we want to use that term. Three. Two postnatal.
Hospital stays. Zero. Outpatients only, which I am told is pretty rare when you read my notes.
Flashbacks. Oh my. Getting better. But forever. Vivid, horrible things: the fear of someone behind me, coming into my room, physically hurting me, kicking me, handfuls of hair, everyone pointing and going YOU YOU YOU. I am in another place. I am not sure I am even Anna as many of you know me, but something else: a composite of others’ opinions? Complex PTSD – it hits all my senses and derails me.
Dissociation. The lower end, thank the Lord. It hangs out with the flashbacks or is triggered by stress, exhaustion, fear or someone being shitty; being unkind to me. I don’t know where my edges are – I don’t feel real. It’s like I look back at me.
Medication. Never done much for me, I’m afraid. I take a low dose of amytriptyline at night because my flight or fight responses have been so totally out of whack – hyper-vigilance lingering and in the last few years looking after an ill loved one and being on watch at night. Also magnesium, crystal sound bowls playlist and lavender oil. I’m really boring, aren’t I?
CBT didn’t touch the sides, CAT – CBT with bells and whistles -over a year was wonderfully helpful. I see the local mental health occasionally mainly because he’s a total dreamboat and I am currently engaged in trauma-focused therapy with EMDR. May I leave you to look any of that up? It’s not NHS obviously so that’s a budget of £200 a month to meet with some extra work. I needed to engage in new treatment because we weren’t there yet – and I needed a specialist. I’ve been lucky enough to find a wonderful person.
What does this mean on a daily basis?
That I have to be careful about who or what I see, to avoid conversations with people who speak a lot about these things without experience (crystals, babe do you live near pylons, it didn’t happen – because I would have known, you’re exaggerating). I have a flashback a couple of times a month and maybe one of those horrid scary dreams once a month and, on a daily basis, I need to regulate my breathing, diet, stretch, read and go gently on myself. I am mitigating anxiety ALL the time, horrid thoughts and memories surface regularly so I acknowledge them and hope they do one. I would say I have two to three brief dissociative episodes a month. The specialist support I have at the moment is helping to regulate and reprogramme and if you want to know what I think and feel, you could do worse than read The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk.
I left teaching full time because I could not manage my health and the work’s full-time demands and I have crafted a life of books, teaching and mentoring in which I can make spaces and have some flexibility and still earn. I have been extremely stretched these last few years because of a loved one not receiving care and that has been a difficult path: you’re dealing with the pain of someone you love hand in hand with lack of resources and lack of will. Sometimes with a lack of kindness.
But I will tell you another thing.
Because I’ve seen the darkness and can never, I do not think, be as scared and lonely as the kid-Anna, I will press on. In 2016 I turned rage into my first book and I haven’t stopped. This is just me; how I am evolving, it’s not better than anything you do. Ten books, seven years, I have built a business, kept a hand in teaching, developed my creative writing teaching. I have written across genres and forms and in my books I was developing the line of enquiry – imagination, trauma, magical realism, reading, nature – that will form the basis of the PhD by Published Works I start later this year.
Mainly, though, I am amazed that I am still here.
So, if you meet someone who mocks, sensationalises or cultivates a prurient interest in mental health problems and mental illness – I tend to draw a distinction, with the latter being more serious than the former, but it’s not without problems – know their ignorance. They know few facts and a lot of fear; they pass it on and it does damage. That’s what tabloids do in this country. THAT is shameful. It drives need underground and seals up routes to getting better.
You’re not weak. You are surviving as best you can with all the resources you have. I see you and hold you in my heart. I always feel like I am in transition or living at the edges of something – hence the liminal in the title – and I think that’s because of what’s happened to me and what I manage. I am not scared, though, to propel myself into the centre – to work and do and be and say, here I am. HERE. So please remember to go out into the world, broken as you are, and remember that broken things are beautiful too.
Tht title doesn’t sound enormously hopeful, but don’t misunderstand me. I am having to adjust and refocus because of life’s strains and must write this without giving too much detail in order not to impinge on privacy or agency.
I don’t know why I didn’t grasp it before, but in attempting to live more carefully in the moment, I had, nonetheless, not noticed the impact of my other behaviours and modes of thought or that my hopefulness and intense optimism were, in fact, harming me. It’s not that I am saying I am going to become more pessimistic, cynical or negative, just that I have kept hoping and trying to find the positive side of things for me, for us – and all that has done is make me more exhausted and, ironically, less able to roll with it and see what is right in front of me. I think what I need to do – what I must do – is to let go of expectations and I will try and flesh that out a bit now. Please proceeed cautiously with the following, because it is sad and possibly, for some readers, enraging – even triggering because it’s been the same for you.
Our family has been extensively let down by senior educational professionals, health professionals, and GPs over a long period. Yes, the past five years in particular, but for much longer than that. All that time, I have aimed to find solutions, be imaginative, LITERALLY project manage mixed groups of health and educational professionals. I’ve been told repeatedly that young people who struggle in school or who have patchy attendance struggle with the rest of life and will continue to do so. Simultaneously, I once ended up writing notes for lesson plans – by request but under the radar obviously – in order to differentiate for my dyslexic son. I have tried to talk about neurodivergence and autism and explain to academics at a university and on one occasion disability and inclusion, with the most concise information I had, that autism is not a mental health condition. I have written recommendations for WHY secondary staff ought to have at least the most basic training on understanding how autism might present. I have done the same on language and stance – how it can have a lasting effect on vulnerable young people. Ditto attendance policy, the legacy of which is disastrous for many children and young people. I have written to Primary Care Liasion and explained that ‘looking like‘ you’re not going to engage or failure to do eye contact cannot just be read as antagonism or setting up to fail, but might be attributable to other things. I’ve just kept going. Because of my background and because I am a terrier and because I just cannot bear it. You see, it is NOT just lack of funding in areas of our health and education provision; in mental health, disability and housing. No, it is also lack of will, hostility to families, and lack of willingness to examine, even for a moment, unconscious bias. Heads of Year have laughed at me behind their hand while education welfare told me, there with my newborn, that other parents managed things perfectly well. On a Sunday afternoon I received a long and startling email from a secondary Head to whom I had written a respectful letter about lack of SEN support and dissemination of profile information among teaching staff. I said I was worried and was there anything we can do? I was told everything was superb and other parents were clearly happy and perhaps the problem was me? I’ve been gaslit by all and sundry; last week, a member of Housing staff at a council told me that families needed to grasp that sometimes people just needed to sleep on the street, regardless of how vulnerable they were – what did people expect really? On and on and on. I’ve had my knowledge and parenting insulted again and again. Oh MUM is an EXPERT NOW IS SHE from highly paid professionals who have not read NICE guidelines. I cannot fight this any more. Because fighting it – and expecting for anything better, being hopeful for it – has achieved nothing. Not for me or for my family. Some of this I chose to do but most I felt I had no choice as a mum. At this stage, I feel that the best bet, at least for me, is to assume that it will just be shoddy and to stop scrapping and trying to improve things. If something or someone comes along who shows differently – of course it does happen – then THAT is and can be transcendently wonderful. I know full well writing this that at least some SEND parents, those who are chronically ill, who identify as disabled, those who are trying to be heard about their ME and CFS, will find me on familiar territory. I just don’t know what to say. What is more, I have not even been able to be an effective parent because, while I would throw myself under a speeding car for any of my kids, I am not a health professional and I don’t have a stake in the council or local authority provision. Furthermore, by battling, I now think I made it worse for my family, because it just exposed the paucity of resource even more. I don’t know now whether engagement is even possibly if good stuff does ever come up. Which brings me to the second point.
Okay, so as a kid and young adult with a radically dysfunctional but unseen (somehow) background I had to teach myself some nifty techniques according to what I had. But I spent my young life being on high alert because of perceived threat. Some of you have read my books which tackle this and may have a little insight into it. I am not sure I have ever switched this off. The result is developmental damage which I have learned to manage, and chronic illness. I have had some good support – after a ten year search hand in hand with advocacy (see 1.) – and I am currently paying for trauma-centred counselling and EMDR because I have had ghastly flashbacks for decades and just learned to deal with it. It occurs to me that in doing less and being more accepting of how shoddy any number of things are and not expecting more, I can perhaps cultivate a state of rest in which I can identify patterns and manage them. My amygdala, you see, has been, as the therapist says, ‘exceptionally busy for a long time.’ Here, also, we get to an awkward truth. It is that, as a child and adolescent, I experienced such fear and such bewilderment that I almost cannot bear for my kids, or your kids, any kids, to feel pain – specifically in the context of their needs not being met or addressed because people would only look, not see. This needs time. I need time.
Control. I have been trying to control things. We all have less control than we think. In writing and publishing that rested on the fact that people would answer emails and read my work. I now understand that the majority of the time, whether you are sending work out, or when your work is sent out by a literary agency, much of the time it just won’t get read because it falls off the desk. Everyone has too much to do. That impacts on me, but there is nothing I can do about it other than lower my expectations for what is possible for me in terms of profile or development because I am not going to be able to get my work seen. I’ve been pushing and pushing. Not any more. It hit me like a ton of bricks (books!) that it’s just making me unhappy. Prod here and prod here; I am working with fab people and meeting all my deadlines. I don’t get invited to festivals and bookshops don’t want to host an event with me. There are others who are more exciting, in demand or right for them and that is just the way it is. There’s nothing I can do about it. What I do is enough, I think. I’ve worked very hard.
So I am talking about giving up and about being less hopeful. I am talking about lowering expectations or having no expectations at all. It has come from difficult things, but maybe there are fine things too. Small and perfect moments. I utterly relish time with students and mentees and, I would imagine, this is probably what I do best. The doctorate starting this December. Quiet focus. I am using my own work and thinking about others’ and apposite theories and neuroscientific texts I want to bring in. I will press on with it. I have no expectations for anything happening with it – like being offered academic work or my publishing stock and profile rising – but I want to do it anyway because it’s an engaging subject, I like writing and exploring and interrogating ideas. I think I might be creative and inventive. If pressed my best qualities are that I will do my best to be kind and reflect on what might be kind in any given context, and I am a very hard worker who can focus anywhere. I am not sure what else I would have to offer now, but these are enough.
So yes. Don’t read this as a depressing post; understand it as a shift. I feel absolutely beaten down, I really do. I cannot foresee a time when anything would be different. But isn’t that rather the point? The carer, the poorly, the lost: I have been saying again and again that even then, if things won’t and can’t get better, there is still grace, there are moments of rushed beauty and always, always a story to unfurl. What is more, the past is a different country and you live somewhere else now and the future is up ahead – in a place where you can never be. All you have, we have, is this moment. I’m still figuring out a few things, as aren’t we all? Like, I want to find a way back to faith so it’s not just, you know, an occasional touch of my elbow, or something dark or radiant glimpsed from the corner of my eye: I want to be bathed in it, somehow. Do you know what the problem is with church? It’s not Jesus or whoever it is you pray to. It’s people. Broken and flawed like you; like me – with shabby egos, and desires, bad faith and backbiting because of their own hurts and perceived slights. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been running all my life. I want to stop. Calm, rest. No expectations.
So let’s sit still together. I don’t know what I have to offer and might not say much. I am a shy person forcing myself to be something different and a bigger presence in the world. It affords little, as it turns out. But then you might like the book I slide across to you. And say we are sitting together and sunlight and shadow fall in quick succession across our faces and we feel it, in complicity. That would be enough. That would be good.
Now, many people feel this: writing, not to mention actually publishing your work, feels like it’s something for folks known as OTHERS. You know; the other people, for whom this is all a breeze; the people who have their stuff together and who know so much more than you. They’re better read, more connected, more clever, more everything and OBVIOUSLY better writers.
There are deep and uncomfortable reasons why you – we! – may feel this way, but I said short and bolstering, so here we go. First it is common to feel this way. Then, I suspect it is part of the human condition to feel like an outsider and it can feel scary – get in, or you will be eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger – to be on the outside of something. So learn to accept these feelings and breathe through them. Then, know that doubt about your role, life and, to stay on topic, writing, are natural. Doubt is a function of intellect because you are examining what you are doing. I’d argue it makes you a better writer. It’s also part of self-reflection, of being self-aware and, frankly, of empathy.
DO YOU KNOW WHO CAUSES ALL THE PROBLEMS INCLUDING IN PUBLISHING AND THE WRITING COMMUNITY?
Yes, it’s the arrogant twats. The people who feel like they have it all together and know what they are doing, impervious to change, prompt from others and, frankly, worse at their work for this and frequently damaging. It’s true in all walks of life, I would argue.
Fortunately, my darling, you are not an arrogant twat. Look at you there with your impostery hotness.
Plough on, tell people you feel this way, know that it is natural and, most importantly, do not let it chew you up so you cannot write. Doubt, gone a long way, can eviscerate your sense of self, of vocation. It makes dust of your creativity, so keep an eye on it and don’t let it go so far. Write through it, talk about it, talk back to it and here is a glittering merit sticker for a job well done.
Claim your spot. Yes, there is clearly work to be done in the publishing industy, but there is room for you.
OOH. March 6th in Italy and we are on tour, Milan to Trieste, 12th to 16th April. Published by Milan’s own 8tto Edizione, the translation of 2020’s Saving Lucia
Then, March 31st, Reflex Press, my memoir
September 27th, my new novel. Renard Press, UK and Commonweralth
And finally, on October 25th, same publisher, my first book on writing
More as it happens – just thought I’d pop these side by side for you x
‘She was famous, too, as a sort of glamorous defective. Violet said it made her mad as hell, the way Violet got painted: blouse glossy and voluminous, like a gorgeous thing, but that she’d set this to rights, so we could hear her voice too. And I remembered: somewhere in Paris I saw a little copy of this painting of a fine woman. Blanche, on display – and even then, I understood the anger in myself that would be nursed by Violet. There she was, so pretty, buxom and velveteen, not all skew-eyed and jutting jaw like me. But she was not free: she was a subject and she was an object.’ (From Saving Lucia, chapter four, as all quotations.)
There is a painting of a woman called Blanche Wittmann by Brouillet. It’s called ‘A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière’ (1887) and represents an imaginary scene of a contemporary scientific demonstration, based on real life, depicting the eminent French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) delivering a clinical lecture and demonstration at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Blanche, the hysteric in question, is a woman alone in a room full of men and she is both subject and object. I am very uncomfortable looking at this painting and draw on this in Saving Lucia.
Charcot was the foremost neurologist of late nineteenth-century France and has been called, the ‘Napoleon of the neuroses.’ His work greatly influenced the developing fields of neurology and psychology; modern psychiatry owes much to the work of Charcot and his direct followers. He was in charge of the Salpêtrière, then an asylum for those who were considered mentally ill; for hysterics. For most of Blanche’s adult life, the hospital was her home. It seems that she died there too, but we do not know where she is buried. She is at once entirely known and unknown. In the late nineteenth century, there were over eight thousand women at the Salpêtrière, and many remained there for life; post-mortem, Monsieur Charcot dissected their brains looking for discernible organic causes such as lesions. He found none. He had initially believed that hysteria was a neurological disorder for which patients were predisposed by hereditary features of their nervous system, but near the end of his life he concluded that hysteria was a psychological disease and the dissections stopped.
Monsieur Brouillet came to paint me; I was quite the thing against the stygian black of the doctors, don’t you think? The tendrils of my hair escaping down my neck. I had poise and gravitas in the pictures: he did not paint the days I crawled and slavered like a dog from la grande hystérie
Let me tell you a little more about what we know. Marie ‘Blanche’ Wittmann lived between 1859 (possibly) and 1903 (possibly). I have written Marie as her birth name, but in going over what records there are, there appears to have been some doubt about her name and its spelling. Blanche was, however, the name she held during the famous sessions at the Salpêtrière, Paris. Blanche was known as the ‘Queen of the Hysterics’ and, while being treated at the hospital, Charcot used her as one of his ‘hysterics’ to demonstrate the effects of hypnosis. He would also apply magnets to her body and ovarian compression, both of which he believed would work on hysteria, operative upon the nerves. Freud was much influenced by the work of Charcot and observed his work, although he came earlier to different conclusions about the causes of hysteria, attributing them instead to psychiatric causes.
Hysteria grew and grew under his hands. Do you suppose that he had created it? I worry that I helped. Made madness into a show and circus or made hysteria more, forgive me, more hysterical. When he died, it stopped. I did not think of it anymore and, obviously, neither did he.
It is my understanding that Blanche never left the Salpêtrière, but it appears that she went on to work in a radiology laboratory there while, not far away, Marie Curie carried out her pioneering work. As I researched Saving Lucia, I saw that fictional elements invented by Per Olov Enquist in The Story of Blanche and Marie were assumed to be true, by reviewers and in factual pieces upon her. Enquist makes Blanche Charcot’s lover but also turns her into Curie’s assistant and later her confidant when Curie’s husband, Pierre, is killed; he shows Blanche as having lost both legs and an arm during their work on pitchblende, continuing her work, moving about as a torso on a purpose-made trolley and gives us Blanche’s notebooks: yellow, black and red and all three encased in a brown envelope marked ‘Book of Questions,’ fascinating insight into her life and work, with Curie and Charcot. But these are fictional things. He tells you it is fiction and going through records, articles—even a more recent riposte published by a neurologist in ‘The Lancet’—gives us a clearer picture. That a gripping fiction would so readily be assumed as fact is interesting. Some might argue shaming. Was she not already fascinating enough? This much is alluded to in Saving Lucia. But please, although I include much that is real, do not assume my historical fiction all to be true, because that desecrates the memory of a real person: a person I found captivating and sought to know and respect.
I wonder if, in years to come, ideas and imaginings will be written down as facts and what I did not intend or become will be transfigured into untruth.
At the Salpêtrière, Charcot had kept a vast number of photographs of patients; he also had a lasting visual record of Blanche, in Brouillet’s painting, with Blanche providing an arresting, even glamorous figure, under the mesmerism of Charcot. She is quite the spectacle, isn’t she? But so are the myriad other women captured in photographs (Blanche was also photographed.). When I first saw those photographs and when I think of the huge asylums of times past, it makes me tremble. Ah, I have been mad, not known what time of day it was or where my feet were; whose hands I was looking at or where my fingers ended. I have felt, again, tremors at night, flashbacks of shimmering visceral beauty that were death and horror to me. I have been a case; I have been treated abruptly and called indulgent; reduced to a cipher, a composite of only other people’s opinions of me, instilled in childhood when I was aberrant, an eldritch child. I have been picked up from the floor by brilliant and diligent hands and I have been cured as best I can be by a brilliant psychologist in our NHS, helped by an attentive and determined GP. But I will never be entirely free of the results of trauma, so it is that when I see, really try to see, the women in Saving Lucia; when I see the painting of Blanche and the photographs of her and the other hysterics in Charcot’s great collection, I do not see a case or even an oddity. I just meet the eyes of another woman and I want to sit with her and say, ‘Tell me about you. May I tell you about me?’ And, as for Blanche, Queen of the Hysterics (after Hippolyte, who escaped and that is another story and a point of delicious queer interest in the book), I would want to do the same, to ask her if she were complicit in what Charcot put on, once a week, and which is depicted in the Brouillet painting; if she said yes, I would have said, ‘Well of course. You are a survivor.’ If no, we would perhaps have talked; thought how to disapprove or abrogate her hysterical responsibilities. How I might be accomplice…
Either way, I would have cleared the room of all those men.
I was a spectacle, a fine thing, under hypnosis. I convulsed, I calmed, rattled and shook at each cue…In years to come, what will they think of this? Am I a gimcrack show; a performer? What then, will they know about the workings of our minds and bodies?
***
…Everything else is the narrative you made for me and not my own legend. The one you accepted for me, not I.
Anna Vaught Writes 