Category: Writing life
Healing books # 1
I feel like I have prostituted myself today, doing this corporate work. It has left me depleted of all creative – and emotional – energy. And yes, maybe I’m lucky to be earning money writing words, rather than serving beers, but these aren’t the words I want to write to pay my rent. Words are more powerful than this surely? I want to write diamonds – alas, today it was more like fool’s gold.
I distinctly remember the first time I read a sentence on my own; I understood the picture that was above the sentence, and as I traced my finger along the words I enunciated them in my head, and I remember the thrill that gave me, the secrets of the world opening up in the space of a few short words. Even today a sentence can give me that same thrill, when my head expands wide open and my mind creates vivid pictures on the screen of the black and white page.
I gave myself a lunch hour today, something I don’t usually do as I hurriedly eat food at my desk while getting crumbs in the keyboard, but two books had arrived from Amazon in the morning, a present from me, sent with love to myself. Books have always side-tracked me from other things and I greedily ate them as a calorific treat to compensate for the dry words I had been typing all morning.
Last summer, when I was unable to work, unable to breathe, I found solace in these magical talismans. For short periods at a time I could escape the thoughts, the yearnings, the raw ache, and let myself get lost in another world. Bereavement books had been devoured and discarded – they all appeared to have been written with such detachment, years away from the blast, that I could not relate to them and they did not comfort me when I was looking for a map to guide me.
But one morning, a book arrived from my sister.
I’ve no doubt that if I’d read this book at any other time in my life it would not have had such a profound effect on me, but it was the exact book I needed at the exact moment I needed it. The book was The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.
“I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.”
The story of Clare and Henry, shifting through time and love and loss, touched me so deeply I was lost in the pages for four solid days. I’m scared to reread the book in case the magic has gone – a year ago it was the story I needed to speak to my shattered heart. I was Clare, and I knew I would wait until my eighty-second year to have one more moment of peace in my lover’s arms. I still wish that that could happen.
I’m so pleased this book has sold so well. It may not be the greatest work of literature ever to appear on the shelves, but the passion behind the words, the flight of fantasy that caught my imagination, means it will always be a book that I cherish.
The wind of change
“The journal is the ideal place of refuge for the inner self because it constitutes a counterworld: a world to balance the other” ~ Joyce Carol Oates
Yesterday was a day off, yet my ‘off’ days look remarkably like my ‘on’ days, and that is the problem with working at home. I can’t get away from the office as the office is slap bang in the middle of the living room. But it’s more insidious than that. I’m finding it so difficult to switch off, as if, were I to let go for a second, to take a break from this ever vigilant awareness I have cultivated, I would fall down and dissolve. So I sit at my desk coiled like a spring, perched on the seat, waiting… I can sense that life is beginning to change and while I’m happy with this forward movement I’m not sure I want it either. It has taken a long time to get to this quiet place, one not filled with blood and sadness and rage.
How many times last year did I wish that time would not take me further away from my painful memories yet wish for the clock to speed up so the healing would begin. And here I find myself, tentatively, outwardly healed, thinking about myself again, striving, moving, living again. How dare I! For so long I felt the wind in my face as the world and its inhabitants rushed past me, the woman sat in her own bit of time, motionless, stilled. I envied my friends as they lived and loved outside the glass box I was trapped in. The grief that has anchored me for so long has shifted – the air outside has changed, the light is different. I can smile at friends again; I can talk about what happened without the tears coming. But where does that leave me? I’m not sure I know who I am if I am not defined by grief, by loss.
Standing before the sea yesterday, my head still spinning from a successful, satisfying day in London, I felt more open; last night, for the first time in a very long time, I allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to be held in another’s arms again. I have always pushed this thought down, denied my feelings, my yearnings, but last night they came out, dancing around me, tempting me, calling to me, and now they are out I cannot squash them back inside.
Curiouser and curiouser…
A window in my heart opened a little yesterday, and I let London back in. Walking through the Soho streets, the people, squawking, talking, shouting and laughing, the scent of coffee and cigarettes and cabbage leaves in Berwick Street market, all wafted around me, smoke fingers poking me, playfully. I stopped in Foyle’s to look for poetry; I sat with my friend Louise outside Bar du Marche and watched the Hari Krishnas go jangling past, the street cleaner and his spinning wheels obliterating all chance for conversation, our steak and frites washed down with bottles of cold beer. I was back in my beloved city, back in wonderland.
Sitting in reception, waiting for my meeting, I looked up at the bookshelves displaying the latest titles from the agency’s clients. There was one book that made me smile, that made me hold up my hands inside my heart and say okay, maybe this is the right path. On the middle shelf, directly on my eye line, standing proud next to Zadie Smith’s rose-coloured cover, was Alison Lurie. The circle of coincidence was completed.
The meeting went well. Over the next two weeks I will embroider and burnish my six chapters then give them back into the safe hands of my agent, ready to be sent out to prospective publishers. The journey has really begun.
Spelling
My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue and hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells
and I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either/or.
However.
I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war.
And in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress; the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow and the word
splits and doubles and speaks
the truth and the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky and the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.
~ Margaret Atwood
For more poetic inspiration, go here.
This is how I write…
‘A certain skinlessness goes with the ability to observe and describe feelings. This does not make for blithe unconsciousness. Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.’
~ Erica Jong, Fear of Fifty
This is how I write: I shower, dry my hair and get dressed. I make breakfast and drink a mug of tea while reading emails and blogs. I have a cigarette. I go and buy the paper. I come home and realise I haven’t washed up from the night before, so I do that. I then, mysteriously, feel an urgent need to vacuum the entire flat, and dust all surfaces. I have another cigarette. It’s now lunchtime so I make food, eat it, and have another mug of tea. I stare into space for a while. I have another cigarette. I sit on the sofa and flick through a magazine. I dip into the Jeanette Winterson book that I always have close to hand. I think about what I have to write. I feel guilty that I’m not writing, so I have another cigarette… finally, at around 3 o’clock, I sit back at the computer and open the word document. I stare into space for a while…
Sometimes I like to mix it up a bit. I’ll blitz the bathroom. I’ll meet a friend for coffee and gossip. I’ll take a walk to the sea (I call this ‘research’). Occasionally I’ll write an article, but that doesn’t count as real writing – real writing hurts. When it flows out my fingertips then i’m in love with what I do – what I’m trying to do – and the staring into space, the feverish thinking, the mental gymnastics is all part of the courtship. But i have the procrastination gene. I’m a single woman with no children who lives on her own – I have acres of time to write, but still I am like a dog who has to turn around hundreds of times, shuffle and fidget, until she finds the most comfortable position to lie down in.
‘A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’ ~ Thomas Mann
I love that quote, and I know that these thoughts are coming from the knot of anxiety and excitement I have in my stomach. On Wednesday I go to London to meet my agent. I want this project to advance to the next stage but I’m terrified of this too. I worry that I’m not up to it, that I’m no good, that no one would want to read my words, that I’ve run out of steam. But most of all, I fear going back into the swamp of emotions I’ve been working so hard to clear. And I know this is the final part of the healing, whether TB is published or not, but still… I’m feeling intimidated.
I found myself in a bookshop today, and I mean this quite literally. Browsing through the poetry aisle, looking for poetry written by women (why are there so few? I don’t want to read Beowulf or Hughes or, heaven forfend, Andrew Motion! I bought Sharon Olds instead – her words make me roar) I found a book with my face on it. When the film Il Postino was released in 1994, a slim volume of Pablo Neruda’s love poems was published too. The cover features Massimo Troisi as Neruda, on his bicycle, and above him is me. My ex took the photograph – I think it was one of the first photographs he sold – so I bought the book and brought it home. I’m hoping that this strange little coincidence, this fortuitous finding, is a sign of good things to come.
