Writing

Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark*

22nd November 2018 · Leave a Comment

I have the creative process on my mind. So often I obsess about it, of how the alchemy of words takes place, as if by knowing what others do, the magic might be captured. This preoccupation applies when I have writer’s block, or feel a weight of guilt associated with not writing. Not writing is how I would characterise the last few months, until the plug was pulled and I accepted a commission with a publisher to work on a small project. Having a deadline, and an editor, and the prospect of payment suddenly made my muse show itself.

I heard the writer Olivia Sudjic interviewed on the ‘High Low‘ podcast, and so read her new essay book ‘Exposure‘, a short, snapshot memoir of her experience of anxiety following the publication of her debut novel. The essay is a stand-alone piece – a pocket-sized powerhouse of writing and social commentary – and anyone who is writing a book, or who wants to, should read it.

Sudjic, amongst other insights, offers a critique of modern publishing and of the actions required of authors, especially debut ones. At one point, she acknowledges the population of unpublished writers, as if to say: don’t be put off. I thought back to when I did my Masters, and to conversations we had about publishing, and how the industry seemed impenetrable and mysterious. ‘Exposure’ makes for a study of old and new, antiquated and progressive, of books and of the internet. Sudjic writes with searing accuracy about how the internet age has shaped our psychologies. Of how utterly watched we are. And how crazy this makes us feel. An Orwellian fog descends.

Yet, book publishing relies on deeply ingrained, old-school truths. Sudjic’s essay could be a guiding light for the unpublished writer and, had it been published at the time, could be have been a source text for my MA. Her dissection of the publishing industry, and the ratifying role it plays, makes for stark reading. Publishers remain the gatekeepers of what thou shalt read and of how books are created, promoted and consumed. To self publish (and therefore to control your own work) is to forsake the establishment. The stereotype goes that self publishing leads to poor book sales, on shitty paper, funnelled through the monolithic presence of Amazon.

Getting a book published is almost as bad, it seems, as not getting a book published.

Peninsula Press, who brought us Sudjic’s ‘Exposure’ is a kickstarter-funded publisher, and in them I wonder if there is a fresh industry model? To have published this essay in small book format strikes me as a subversion of the status quo, and one which will enable dissenting voices to be heard. Sudjic wrote her essay to give space to the anxiety she felt about writing her much-anticipated second novel. Those of us plugging away in the no man’s land of the unpublished long to be propelled forwards into the public domain. Sudjic alarmingly describes the panic of this propulsion and the stomach-churning sense that by signing with a publisher, a writer is signing a Faustian pact to participate in absolutely whatever comes. The stress-laden aftermath of debut publishing; a social media onslaught, public panels and readings, and the dissemination of your innermost thoughts for mass consumption is something of dreams and of nightmares. The need to promote one’s book is a necessary evil, but a pay-off with a hefty price. Writers are grateful for the chance to be published, but, it appears, we must swallow it down whole.

Sudjic dissects why women write, as she challenges the way women’s creative work is described as self-indulgent and inward-facing. The sentiment can be applied to almost any creative endeavour a woman might participate in. Why write this blog? Why write anything at all? She describes writers who are stunned into silence after they’ve been published, especially those who’ve shared too much. No one likes an over-sharer. Blogging is a form of self publishing but it poses no threat. I’ve heard blogging described as silly, insignificant fodder. It’s made so by the comparative enormity of the internet, and the fact that, let’s face it, hardly anyone reads this.

At the end of my Masters, I wanted to get back to my blog, to the kind of writing what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it. To be amongst the women who curated Instagram squares in cool, Scandi monochrome hues, and who wrote about fashion or lifestyle. After the pressure of academia, I wanted the dime store quality of a blog post that was neither fiction, nor essay, nor article. A stand alone set of thoughts sent out into the world. One which exists only as part of the internet, a beacon for those who want to seek it out. But there is also a wariness to the decision to write here, one which I often reference. I fear there being an old blueprint lurking, one which would, if I were to be published, be plundered as fair game. Everything I have ever written here a reflection of the ‘self’ which I might, through a book deal, agree was open for criticism to any reader.

As with all commentary of this type, I am left thinking, well, we must play the game. We might not have designed the game, but we must play it! What’s the alternative? To be silent? To not write? To not create? No, thank you.

*Lyric by Lorde, ‘Writer in the Dark’.

Quit your job. You’ll be fine.*

10th October 2018 · Leave a Comment

I have a cold. This means a self-imposed quarantine of long, quiet days, spent waiting for recovery. The kind of sick day that used to be alluring, when I was working, or before I had children. Now, it means solitude, until the collection of my children after school, then the normalcy of weekday life reverts in the evening hours, but with congestion, a headache, aches and sniffles.

I am left with my thoughts. When unwell, it’s hard to imagine being well again, which sounds ridiculous but is true. My body under viral attack, I trace back to when I last felt this way as if I can identify the rogue bug and eradicate the possibility of repeat. It was last winter; skiing, a dormant French hotel room. My efforts to stay healthy border on obsessive, I have little patience for this. My life is predicated on my being well; the cogs don’t turn unless the engine is running. My children look at me reproachfully when there’s no bread in the house.

I watch too much Netflix – end to end ‘Killing Eve’, that pink dress! – and documentaries about the environment. I feel so fretful about the environment I have to check myself. I am being brainwashed by the scaremongers. But the more knowledge I have, the worse it gets. It seems, in this instance, that the scare mongers might be right. I’ll tell you what. When global temperatures rise by 2 degrees, and the ice caps melt, and the planet is too hot to even go outside, I’ll see you on that last piece of remaining, un-flooded land, and we can watch the plastic containers float by, and wonder whether it was worth it. It’s a dog’s dinner, or, as my friend messaged me last week: ‘we are fucked’.

In a flurry of luck, in my sickened state, I got Glastonbury tickets on Sunday. I’m almost ashamed to admit this because they are so desirable, and so hard to come by, especially this year, that I remain incredulous. Early morning; multiple devices, an incentivised teenage son sitting next to me, rapid refresh, mouse clicking, abject frustration as the connection drops, we get booted out. The registration page, the payment page, the confirmation page, all flash up in a striptease, pressing forward, click, click, click. A bizarre technological dance which abruptly ends with ‘BOOKING COMPLETE’ and I feel adrenalin like I’ve scaled a mountain. Surfed a wave. Done something other than sat in my pyjamas. I wonder if I want them so much simply because they’re hard to get? Then I remember how much I love Glastonbury and how utterly freeing it is to stand in a field and experience music so loud it makes your organs vibrate, and to do it with hundreds of thousands of other humans.

I start listening to the audiobook of Deborah Levy’s ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’ and find it cripplingly, awe-inspiringly good. It’s the kind of book I want to write. This has a dual effect. Half inspiring, half terrifying. Deborah’s written it already. Deborah can write the innards of my mind, as if un-spinning a knot of wool. I’m only a smidgen in, and I know I will love it already. And hate that its been done. This is how it goes with writing. No longer do I have thoughts and allow them to pass through. Now my thoughts have become a thing I must capture, I must write down, I must turn into something that is work. Quit your job. You’ll be fine.

I observe the shit show of American politics playing out on the news and feel the bile of conflict. Everything feels off. Theres’s conflict with the process, conflict with society, conflict with the commentary. I read a lot, and liberalism seems to pervade my newsfeed as I realise I have concocted a partisan following in support of feminism and an egalitarian sensibility. I read a lot of women writers who suggest in their language that all men who are accused of sexual misbehaviour are guilty, because, well, because…men. This troubles me, and I wonder whether any of those women have teenage sons who are about to navigate the treacherous water of gender politics in coming years.

I watch old family videos, trying to locate one of my daughter, aged one, laughing, giggling uncontrollably, the baby girl she was. The DVD is no longer compatible with our machine, and I wonder how I can regather those images. Later DVDs obligingly play, leaving me questioning why the one from 2002 is considered defunct? What happened in 2002? In 2003 I look young, and brown-haired, and really, really slim, despite doing zero exercise at that time.

I feel viral, weighed down, and shuffle around my house wearing a weird, old, dowdy Alpaca cardigan that reaches my knees. The postman comes. I discard the junk mail envisaging land fill; rotting catalogues for things I never wanted. I make mushrooms on toast (I went shopping) as a comfort food, like my mum used to make me, sautéed in butter, with garlic, and scattered with chopped parsley.

I message my writing group and they put me straight; ‘just write’ they say. We console each other. The virus is making me jaded. I turn to the blog because it’s the least demanding way to write. Type. Preview. Publish! Oh so easy! So here it is.

*Craig Ward typographer.

Retrospection

28th September 2018 · Leave a Comment

I had such high hopes for September. The summer holidays over, and a stretch of uninterrupted time weaving ahead of me, a lovely long road, with all the possibility of the words I would write, and the things I’d get sorted. Getting sorted is a key preoccupation, getting ahead of every little thing. If I am ahead, then there will be time to write. If there is time to write, maybe I will make some headway with the book. During my Masters degree, when I had submission deadlines, I would take myself off to work and of course it all got done, because it had to. One of the hardest parts of post-academic life is that the deadline is one I have set myself, and it is my self-discipline which dictates the word count. All the best intentions…

My daughter and I are doing university tours. We visit on open days, speak to undergrads and talk about course structures and her suite of worries are entirely different to my suite of worries. The prospect of packing her off to university seems far-off and implausible, but of course, I know it will come. The excitement is counter-balanced with a sense of…not regret…but a bittersweet awareness that her childhood is drawing to a close. Conversely, as my son enters his teens (like a marauding rhino), I recognise the same feelings I used to have about her. The parental readjustment required to at once allow growth, but to also provide boundaries. The conversation on boundaries revisits with alarming regularity, and I find myself thinking: didn’t I explain this last week?

Last week my son was injured playing rugby. All my years of being poker-faced on the sideline came to an unceremonious end as I stood, striken and peering through the rain, waiting to see if he was going to get up from the mangled pile he had been at the bottom of. It’s a curious thing to see your child injured and to see others administer to him, and after some time, when he did get up and was clapped off by the opposition – keen to get on with the game – I felt grateful he was OK. Later, sitting in ‘Accident and Emergency’ in hospital waiting for X-ray results, the feeling persisted. Acute worry, and the love, and the incredulity of how danger and threat can come for you, unannounced. And always in the knowledge that there are other families, other mothers, whose children are more injured or more sick, and a swathe of gratefulness floods over me again, rendering me quiet and vacant. A few days later and we see a surgeon, after the swelling subsided. He’s fractured his cheek bone in three places, and I find myself wondering whether it was my fault that he was raised to love a game that is so fraught with injury. We are a rugby family and I married a rugby player, and I’ve never known any different. To us; the merits of the game far outweigh the risk.

There’s a reluctant medicalisation. Ironically, I had been reading ‘This is Going to Hurt‘ by Adam Kay, the memoir of a junior doctor, which describes the ailing NHS and what it’s like to work within it. I sit opposite medics, on the receiving end, and wonder how long they’ve been on their shift. I have an urge to be kind and polite to them, as we sit and read posters on the wall that say: ‘physical abuse against our staff will not be tolerated’ and I wonder who on earth resorts to physically abusing staff, those whose job it is to help? We observe the other punters and how everyone tries, surreptitiously, to deduce everyone else’s symptoms. It’s not always obvious.

It struck me as we waited (another waiting room, another part of the hospital) that it’s these sorts of events that inform my writing. Writing itself doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but instead is – for me at least – an after-affect of life. It was Anaïs Nin who noted: ‘we write to taste life twice.’ My children, and my observation of them has always been a source; there’s an event, a feeling, the witnessing of a moment. Then there’s my musing afterwards.

Meanwhile, there are breezy, brisk Autumn days. Crane flies cling to the outside of the windows, their spooky legs stretched wide, in contorted squats. Everything seems to be drawing inwards, homewards, ready for the winter months. Maybe I am a winter writer? Maybe the introspection of cold and darkness is what is needed? Or maybe, life just gets in the way of my words? Maybe I make too many excuses? Whichever way, I am good only for dog walks and quietness this week.

A Book in a Book

13th September 2018 · Leave a Comment

I reluctantly enjoy this time of year, despite the fact it heralds a slide into the interminable British winter. The short days and short tempers of my compatriots don’t stop it feeling like a fresh start; out with summer, in with autumn. There are still hints at lushness; green grass, ripe blackberries, crops ready to be harvested. I walk with the dog around my familiar fields, and note the soft crust of the mud, which in a few short months will be frozen. Or worse; dank, sodden and rain-soaked. It was at this time of year that I started my Masters degree three years ago, and I sat amongst other wannabe writers, wearing writerly clothes and clutching writerly notebooks, in which we intended to pen our masterpieces. I felt I blagged my way onto the course, my evidential body of work was this blog, and a stilted short story about a school girl called Cressida, who wanted to rebel against her parents. My tutor, during a Skype application interview, asked me what I did when I got really stuck with my writing. I floundered over my answer to that question, she might have seen through me, she might have known I was a novice, and ‘my writing’ consisted of blog posts that were haphazard at times, and focused too much on clothes shopping rather than searing life commentary. I’d never been really stuck with my writing, because I only ever wrote when I felt like it, about frippery. I knew more about brand development and search engine optimisation than about how to unstick a stuck paragraph.

So when I got the place, we sat, day one, in our studio and went round the table in a sweat-inducing introductory session where we were asked to outline the plot for our novels. There was some invisible peddling, resulting in various iterations of ‘I might focus on…’ and ‘I’ve always wanted to write about…’ and such like. I said I was going to write about a school setting, mothers specifically, in the privileged environment of private education. Prep school. They nodded. Moving on. I had no more a clue of what my plot was then, than I did after a year of the degree! A plot stubbornly alluded me, and any measures I took to secure it, despite intensive workshopping with my peers, left me with a flimsy structure, a plot with the strength of a wet biscuit. I knew it. My tutor knew it. But my writing was good. Thank God, my writing was good. I chased ghosts of plots, and developed questionable preoccupations with themes; women, teenagers, competitive mothers, wealth, marriage, disillusionment, until I felt I could cobble a novel together. And so I did. I wove in concepts like a houseboat location, and set the novel by the water so that when I took daily walks by the shore, I could note tree types and tidal nuances, and that felt like book research. I asked my teenage daughter’s unsuspecting new boyfriend, on his first visit to our house, how he might behave if he were attacked by a swan, all in the name of reasearch. I contacted a swan sanctuary, and became an expert of the monogamy of the birds. And although this lent depth to my work, it did not give me a plot.

I remember it fondly now, with a wry smile, and see that the Masters was the ultimate learning exercise; of course it was. The academics twinned with the realisation that although I’d written a book, there were issues with it. I spent a lot of time then (and now) pondering whether I was good enough. Why couldn’t I find a plot? Who knew plots were so damn elusive? I came to the conclusion I needed a brain the size of a planet to manage one; I had enough trouble keeping track of my real life, let alone the fictional one I might create. Thankfully, I graduated, the first draft of my novel nestled safely and mutely in a folder entitled ‘book’ on my laptop, and thought; ‘well that was that’ all the while weathering the probes of friends and enemies alike. ‘Have you finished your book yet?’ To a writer, that’s the equivalent of a mother asking at a coffee morning why your toddler isn’t walking yet.

My writer friends and I used to talk about when we would become writers. Would it be when we finished a draft? When someone else read it? When we got an agent? When we got published? When a box full of pre-sale proofs arrived? When we saw our book on the shelf in a bookshop, or on Amazon in the best seller list? When we won a literary prize? Oh, the mind boggles. When we overheard two people discussing our book? When our book was the subject of a book club evening? When we started the second book (you’re surely a keeper at this wretched pursuit if you can do it twice)? All of the above? None of the above? The ribbon unspools. I guess the point is there is no defined or accepted time. You learn how to do it, then you reflect, then you write a bit more, then you stop. Then you start. Now, I see that it was all part of the process. Or at least part of my process. There are a million writers following a million different paths, like any creative in any profession, there are highs and lows; you move forward, you move back. It’s a game of snakes and ladders with more snakes than ladders, for sure. But that’s OK. There is time. It’s the season of fresh starts, and mine will be finding the book in the book.

On Endings and Beginnings

18th July 2018 · Leave a Comment

And so, the term ended, and with it, my son’s tenure at his school of the last six years. The school that has been instrumental in shaping my view of ‘the school mother’. They (we) are a breed, a type, a demographically-defined group. As the culmination of the academic year neared, a dizzying run down of leaving events took place; plays, trips, excursions, a sentimentally-charged Prize Giving service, speeches, parties and farewells. I recall this phase with my daughter’s schooling, but back then, with the first born child, there was a deeper seam of childhood nostalgia to mine, and the future that lay ahead was unknown. Little could I have imagined that, like everything in parenthood, the future would bring new challenges and new excitements, and the past would fade into the background, rightly so. With a second child, I know what to expect, and am reassured that this rite of passage from junior to senior is necessary, and correct.

I have been a school mother to young children for over twelve years, dropping off and picking up from the school with the daily regularity of the tide. I commented to another mother, that come the time children attend a senior school, it is possible to drop them at the bus in one’s pyjamas, as there is no need to exit the car. There is no lingering at school, there is no mother’s gossip, there is no influence, meetings with teachers are rare, email communication, if any, is king. She looked horrified. The transition from one domain to the next is a brutal one to navigate. No longer defined by one’s children. The shock!

All of this plays on my mind, because it is this midlife transition that interests me the most and which, despite my best endeavours to diversify my writing, I come back to. I met with my publisher friend last week and described my enduring preoccupation with midlife mothers and she nodded sagely, and said; ‘yes, I see what you mean.’

Meanwhile, whilst not defined by my children, I remain enamoured, and exasperated with them. The love, which spills over as they mature, is constant. But now, my teenage son, who has been swimming in a small and safe pond, pushes against the every boundary. Thirteen and nearly taller than me; and I am tall. Puberty for the male gender is a long and drawn out affair, full of daily updates; voice drop, height (7 inches in 9 months), shoulders, biceps, a testosterone peak. It’s an uncanny process where the sweet, soft, gentle boy of old has gone, and instead there is a lean, young man in his place. I recall it differently with my daughter, as an understated and short-lived process from girl to woman. Childhood draining away in a trickle, rather than a torrent.

My novel meanwhile, remains in an editing file on my laptop and my feelings about it shift over time. I used to consider it a shiny new gem, whereas now it feels older; in my darker moments I consider it hackneyed, even. This is the writer’s fear, I know. The problem with spending years writing your first book is that time doesn’t wait for you, and the world shifts on to its next encounter, and your writing remains frozen in time. I note that maybe this is why writers favour historical fiction rather than the present day? The present day doesn’t stay present for long, and all too soon, references become clichéd. I learnt on my MA to avoid clichés at all costs, so this troubles me.

In parenting, and perhaps in writing, there are few project closures, no ‘lessons learned’ meetings. Instead there’s a subtle creep, almost imperceptible, and that alone marks a milestone. It’s usually when I look backwards, promoted by a photo or a memory, do I realise what’s passed. This feels like a new era, and one that comes with good feelings. Here’s to endings and beginnings…

Telling The Truth

31st May 2018 · Leave a Comment

Come sit next to me. I’ll tell you a story. When I was doing my Masters, there was a submission deadline each month of 3,000 words, plus an analysis document in which I was required to dissect my writing process. Those 3,000 words would emerge, reluctantly, from my head, and in amongst the other demands of life, there was a need to simply get them out. I never felt – and even now, continue to feel – that I had the time to devote to it. Maybe that is how writing is; always a furtive pursuit, one that I am indulging myself in. Although writing a novel, whilst immensely challenging, never felt as banal or dull as writing a project plan in my previous career, or any email I ever penned, no matter how long and involved. There was a flippancy in how it seemed to others, the fact that I’d taken two years out of life to study and write.

So, those deadlines would roll around, and I would have to draw on my own experiences to find the words. I might have known what I wanted to write about, or the scene I needed to give life to, but other than that, I made it up as I went along. I realised I was not a planner! This fact returned to me recently, when running a workshop on creative writing in which I’d added the instruction in capitals: FIND YOUR PLOT BEFORE YOU START! I didn’t, and I paid for it. In fact I wonder if I still pay, and that is why the headway in finalising my novel and submitting it to an agent is slow.

So, I would write about my own experience. I set my novel locally, as it was easier to muster up details when all I needed to do was walk by the water and notice the tides, the sheen, the flora edging the shore. But on a personal level, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t I draw on my own life to write. It’s a strange alchemy that takes place, surprising me as a much as it might anyone else who reads it. I took events and memories (I have an elephantine memory for detail) and would expand them, like a glassblower gently inflating the delicate, amorphous structure of a balloon of glass. Writing, to me, feels like a when you look at the horizon on a hot day and see that shimmer of heat. The words are in the heat! It’s just a case of capturing them; of not looking away.

I’ve thought a lot about whether the novel was indeed fiction, or whether it was just a version of my life, and I’ve felt guilt about my sources of inspiration. People’s lives – some close to me, some not – fed my imagination. On any given day, innocent school mums would say things to me, and I would store these nuggets up and use them later, as inspiration or even as direct quotes. My children would give me a glance, or make an utterance, that I would then repeat. In fact I’ve read that many children of writers, when they grow up and read their parent’s work, object when they see their childhood antics reflected back. Writers are magpies in that sense. This became a weighty responsibility for me, and has made me consider whether I am more suited to writing non-fiction, like this blog. For the simple reason: it’s the truth, within reason, and I own it. When writing fiction, I found it was possible to write deplorable things and then disown them as being ‘made up.’ When one has to present the truth, whilst it may be tempered, whilst I may be an unreliable narrator to my own life, at least we all know where we stand.

Therefore, and in conclusion: am I too young to write my memoir?!

Take only what you need from it

17th May 2018 · 1 Comment

Did I miss something? Has life moved on? Almost certainly. Have blogs become passé? As the future asserts itself and millennials take centre-stage (I am still reeling from this fact: I have a seventeen year old daughter, as of last week, wtaf?), technology delivers new methods to us, and we absorb them like thirsty sponges. But I got to thinking: does this little old blog seem out of date? In defence, there is still a certain purity to it, to the medium of blogging per se, that I can’t let go of, in fact I don’t want to. There have been a number of discussional pieces written by my contemporaries in recent months, as the shifting sand of blogging is sieved through. Change has become the norm, Instagram has morphed into the cool have-it-all twenty-something, Facebook the awkward older relative in the room, who doesn’t get the ‘in’ joke. Pinterest the quirky, young aunt who is still – at a push – down with the kids.

I remain, and always will be an advocate of good old fashioned blogging. Whatever blogs are, or have become, the creative impulse runs strong in them, and I observe those of us who define new ways to exist within this framework. To me: my blog = my voice. In Joan Didion’s essay ‘Why I Write’, back in 1976, she described how the act of writing is one of ‘imposing oneself on other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.’ Isn’t this precisely why I keep returning here to write? It’s a space to inhabit but crucially, I can freely express my view. To muse about the universe. To have a voice. And I don’t need a gatekeeper (read: publisher) to say I can, or not. Blogging is the ultimate freedom of expression. However what interests – and irks – me is how blogs have become formulaic, how they all look and feel the same, are sponsored by the same brands, proferring the same sentiments.

I accept this blog as such a fundamental part of my life. There were times in the past when I would have disguised it as a strange ‘hobby’; the posting of my thoughts to the internet. It was a shifty secret, whereas now it’s become a tool for my career, but remains a deeply personal space. The professionalisation of blogs is what we have to thank, the extent to which the medium became accepted as a legitimate business method. The proliferation of Instagram as a microblogging platform has contributed to this; in the same way as ‘to google’ has became a verb, so now has ‘to ‘gram’. Long live the new vernacular. But that professional front has taken something away from the heart of the blogging community.

The sticking point is that blogs are only interesting if they are about humans; not just the veneered surface, but the inner world. Without doubt the biggest reader response comes from sharing a truth, a vulnerability, an honesty and all done with integrity. The more vanilla and banale the post, the less people want to read it, which is why, on the whole, business blogs don’t succeed so resolutely. The best blogs, in any world, are those where the writer lays it bare and so I wonder if success in this medium now relies on a curious juxtaposition of professional presentation and personal transparency. This has long been a preoccupation of mine, as in the early days I might have been described as a ‘mummy blogger’ in that I wrote about motherhood and the lives of my children. As we navigate the technical landscape of privacy, I now have a sense of unease about what I shared about them without their knowledge or consent. I now protect their privacy and rarely mention their endeavours. The blog had to grow up.

When filing out forms which request my occupation, I say ‘writer’ and feel a frisson of excitement at that fact. And this week, as a writer, I led a workshop with Hero Stores on Creative Writing. It felt like a prophecy come true, as over a year back I attended a workshop there, and thought, simultaneously: ‘I love this!’ but moreover: ‘I can do this!’ and approached the company to see if they wanted to collaborate. What ensued was one of those rare, serendipitous and perfectly balanced days when it everything I fretted about didn’t happen (is fretting ever necessary?), and everything I wanted to, did happen. A spent the day with a group of clever, interested, vibrant women (my favourite kind) and as well as teaching them, they taught me.

My hope is that blogging continues, within its new parameters and offers those of us who write and read a place to go; a room of one’s own.

Deconstructing ‘The Breakfast Club’

7th April 2018 · Leave a Comment

I devoured Molly Ringwald’s beautifully argued essay in The New Yorker, ‘What About The Breakfast Club?’, relating to her role in the 1980’s film. That film formed a pivotal moment in my adolescence and only last week, I found myself recommending it to a teenager I know, as a film that all people absolutely must see. Part of the cinematic canon, so to speak. Such was its impact on my teenage years, that Molly Ringwald (who, for years, to the consciousness of most, had lapsed from the limelight) remains an idol and someone whom I emulated, to the extent that my peers and I performed the confessional scene from the film in our drama exam, and fought over who would play ‘Claire’. In the end, my local contemporary Julie Huggins snagged that accolade, owing to her strawberry-blonde hair, which resembled Ringwald’s ‘Cherry’. I can still recite great swathes of the dialogue from the film and considered director John Hughes, also responsible for ‘Pretty in Pink’ and ”Sixteen Candles,’ a genius, with near-perfect recall of the teenage angst that afflicted us.

Cue line from the film: ‘When you grow up, your heart dies.’ So cautionary was this sentiment to my young heart and mind, that it seared in memory. I was not going to become that kind of adult, that kind of parent. Nit-picking but distant; demanding of academic and sporting excellence, preparing packed lunches of ‘PBJ with the crusts cut off’. Yet when asked what her parents do to her, Ally Sheedy’s character replies: ‘They ignore me.’ encapsulating the awful truth; that parents of teens, when the gulf widens between us and our offspring, retreat, somewhat wounded, into our own pointless middle age. Don’t you forget about me.

Ringwald illuminates how various scenes in the film seem inappropriate, when positioned against the #MeToo movement, of how toe-curlingly awkward it is to watch this film with your own kids. I can attest to this, having watched it with mine, I found myself forming an inadvertent furrowed brow: I don’t recall it being quite this risqué I definitely did, aged 13 and circa 1986, when it would have hit VHS video to be watched and re-watched at home, gloss over the sexual overtones, the drug use and the swearing. I felt little empathy with the adult characters; Mr Vernon and his ‘Barry Manilow suit’ and Carl the janitor’s creepy, voyeristic tendencies. When holding a mirror up to my adolescence and to the culture I absorbed, I see Ringwald is right. So much of it was tinged with what would now be considered inappropriate. There’s a systematic unravelling of everything I grew up to think of as ‘normal’.

I’ve written before about generational feminism; the extent to which my 16 year old daughter and I may hold the same feminist doctrines, but how the lens from which we look will differ, according to our societal and cultural references. What is her equivalent to ‘The Breakfast Club’? Who is the John Hughes/Molly Ringwald of her generation? How will she reflect, when she is 44, on the films which shaped her consciousness? In this seismic moment of gender politics, will girls not still be drawn to the references that best reflect their own experience? ‘The Breakfast Club’, with its setting in a Chicago high school, did not so closely resemble the life I led as a teen, not least because I attended an all-girl’s school in rural Sussex. We wore bottle green school uniforms, and read about what happened in other people’s lives. But the heady prospect of girls and boys in co-education presented itself through American cinema; prom nights and the backseat of Daddy’s car. In reality, although Brits have adopted the prom night protocol, evidenced by reams of proud, sparkling photos on Facebook each June, we do not do it with the American panache that was captured in the Hughes’ films. It was teenage world for the taking.

As my generation’s cultural lynch pins are removed and examined, there’s a sense that ground shifts again and I turn inward wondering why growing up with misogyny did not affect me more negatively, or become a preoccupation until I was older. I realise it had seeped into me and was the standard, and even as I look back I conclude; well, at least I knew where I stood. My expectations were met. We survived in a man’s world and that was fine, it made us wily. I don’t even recall, as I was at University in the mid-1990’s, that my friends and I ever questioned this status quo or railed against it. It is this that makes me shame-faced now, and I suspect was part of the impetus provoking Ringwald to pen her retrospective essay. Does not knowing any different make it OK? As she says, with a resigned tone, ‘Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art…’ Although the films of my youth may now seem tawdry and misguided, they were to me the steady hand over the slippery path of teenage hood.

The craft

28th March 2018 · Leave a Comment

In my old career, I would mop up the aftermath of corporate stress. The very worst cases would land on my desk – or in my inbox, moreover – where I would consider and ‘solution’ them for the company, finding a route through the messy undergrowth that had led to corporate litigation between employee and workplace. When there was nowhere else to go but the law. The employee would say ‘I’ve consulted my lawyer’ and we would say ‘Good!’, knowing that then it would be slightly less David and Goliath; we the corporate monolith, they the small pebble. I would search the technicalities, absorb myself in the risk assessment, brief the executives and we’d stagger towards some sort of outcome. At that time, I felt distant from the complainants, it wasn’t until I left the job that I allowed myself to really think about how their lives had been, and what had compelled them to litigate against their employer. There was a strong current of blame that pushed them along; it had to be someone’s fault, someone had to be to blame, and I recall writing policy documents about how causation is not definable.

It seems a long way off now, I am out the other side. But there is a large part of me that misses that work, the completeness of it. The shade you feel under a corporate umbrella, which I suspect can only be found when the company is as large and well-known as the one I worked for. Now there is no umbrella, and instead I feel the blinding glare of reality all of the time. When you forge a (new) career you have to evaluate daily. No boss, no objectives, no appraisal. No executives, no corporate perks, no training. In writing, it’s challenging even to keep colleagues. In fact nothing of my previous life features other than the pill of experience that I swill down when I am writing; when the words come from somewhere I once went, or heard someone say, or from that attempt to express the unsaid.

I met with my MA colleagues at our college, to retrace our steps I suppose, and when speaking to the under-graduates, we all realised our time there has passed. Going back felt furtive and confusing, and we all came away wondering what strange territory we are in now, as writers. If I’d have applied a corporate plan, then my book would be finished, published, marketed and on the best seller list by now. Double digit growth. But of course, in creative endeavours it doesn’t work that way! And as I try to forge forward, it is the mental barriers I create for myself that stop progress, rather than anything external. When studying to be a writer, the concept remains an elusive nymph of a thing that you can sense in your future. I could be a professional writer. It hovers and wavers there in your mind’s eye like heat waves on the horizon. The reality is so different!

We devise ways to make ourselves work. I look at my laptop reproachfully. I schedule ‘writing time’ and feel pangs of envy when I see new books published. I assume every other writer is penning droplets of brilliance, whereas my work comes out leaden, lopsided, lumpy.

What a curious thing being an academic or a creative. So used was I to the definable objectives of the corporate world, everything thought through and cascaded, everyone working to a common goal, and the goal was financially motivated. For many that emphasis would be deplorable, but to me, back then, it made sense. There was an honesty to having blatantly expressed objectives. Maybe what I find frustrating about writing is that it’s so unclear, there is no measure of success. One person might like your work, a million others might not. Or vice versa. The enormity of this principle troubles me and I go back to the mantra that I must write to please myself. Write what I want to read. Write – in the words of Hemingway – hard and clear about what hurts.

In any craft there is the privilege of the practice. How lucky to be able to write! How fortuitous to be released from corporate toil. A chance to regain my cosmic karma after I stopped messing about with litigation defences. We didn’t do it.

I console/distract myself from these unanswerable questions with learning to cross-stitch and coveting expensive shoes. Happy days.

Painting by Vilhelm Hammershøi, ‘Interior with Woman by the Piano’ 1901.

Steady selfish

20th March 2018 · Leave a Comment

My parents divorced when I was a child, leaving me fearful of abandonment. This, compounded by my father’s profession – an airline pilot – meant that in my young mind, I worried about plane crashes too. Meanwhile, my brother, who is seven years older than me, navigated the treacherous waters of being teenage with a single mother. Despite my Mum’s best efforts, our home was not always calm. I would climb into her bed some nights, listening to her breathe and she would allow me to sleep there, safe in the knowledge that she was not going anywhere. As I write this, I sense the faint fingerprint remaining from my childhood. Divorce can be misunderstood by those who haven’t experienced it. It’s not that I didn’t understand my Dad had to go, and it’s not even that his leaving impacted us so much in the day to day; after all, pilots are away a lot. But the bedrock on which I relied was no longer sound. It remained, some semblance of its former self, but it was jagged and uneven, and there were gaps where steadfastness used to be. I wonder now if I have fabricated this perception because I have reflected on my own childhood and cross-referenced it with that of my own children? Isn’t that what being middle-aged is all about? Looking back and looking forward; stranded midway.

My children walk on steady bedrock. That is because my husband and I provide it for them, and I particularly, as I don’t ‘work’ for a living, devote myself to ensuring bedrock stability. That sounds as if we lack selfishness. I note in the media the recent preoccupation with ‘self care’ – and how we should all practice it. I wonder: is self care just selfishness, its thinly disguised cousin? I resolve to put myself first more. The happiness of everyone depends on it. But self care can feel like a little-used habit from the past. I remind myself I spent 25 years with just myself, no children to think of, how hard can it be?

I watched a documentary about Joan Didion on Netflix which was fascinating but also tragic, and I was struck by a comment she made about her ill-fated daughter, who died in her late thirties. She said her daughter found her remote. When I watched the cinematic footage of Joan in earlier years, writing prolifically, immersed in her craft, surrounded by other creatives, it’s clear that the life she strove for did not feature bedrock stability. It featured something else entirely; the pursuit of her own needs, her own compulsion to write. And as such it makes me wonder, as most people my age do, what’s it all about? I don’t write for a day or two because I do mother stuff, kid’s stuff, house stuff. The ‘pursuit of my own needs’ comes low down on the the ‘to do’ list.

When my own sixteen year old daughter sleeps in my bed, as she did so for a brief spell recently, it was for comfort, but also to draw strength. There was something in her own life that required bravery and clarity and she took that from me, her mother life-force. I didn’t see this until after it had ceased happening, and all that was left of those nights she slept next to me was the memory. This time round though, I listened to her breathing and recognised the same in-breath and out-breath of her babyhood, the same snuffles, the same sleeping sighs as she made her dream-led twists and turns. So elemental yet also incongruous, as when your child emerges in to young adulthood, you loose that sense of oneness with them. Their scent, their skin, that extension of yourself. She is me. I am her.

It’s curious but it is from these everyday inconsequential human nuances that I notice my writing gets richer. To me at least. It is there that I find words. I put off the pursuit of what I desire and aspire to because what happens in between is every day life. So these moments have to be lived and enjoyed and even, at times, endured, as from them comes the goodness.

SaveSave