Louise Beech
Eighteen Seconds
Storyteller Louise Beech, or more formally Louise Jane Lady M Puffbrains Beech, endured a traumatic childhood and chaotic life until she was fifty, at which point she severed all connections with her mother. Her memoir, eighteen seconds, tells her painful story.
Why eighteen seconds? It’s a phrase her mother used:
I wish you could feel the way depression does for eighteen seconds. Just eighteen seconds, so you’d know how awful it is.
Writing is Louise’s safe place, her creative outlet. After years of not being heard and hiding the horrors of home, writing about the bad times, giving voice to her emotions, has proved cathartic.
I still turn to my stories to escape reality. Fiction has been like a filter. A way to let in difficult feelings, gently, bit by bit, in small paragraph-sized lumps so they are easier for me to digest.
And because her writing is the mechanism by which she shares her deepest self, initial rejection of her novels feels personal. Later publication at the age of 44, selection for shortlists and prizes, positive reviews – all these things confirm her private dreams, and give her the acceptance she always craved.
Hers is a story of sexual, psychological, physical and narcissistic abuse – abuse which was largely ignored or overlooked.
We were the masters of silence, of doing as we were told and staying quiet, of putting up and shutting up, so how could anyone have known?
Her mother, Patricia/Trish, was beautiful but troubled and not the caring nurturing person the children wanted and needed. An alcoholic, depressive narcissist, she constantly belittled and insulted her four children, and tried to foist them onto others, so that she could ‘have a life‘. But despite manipulating situations to get her own way, depression haunted her, and she made several attempts to end her life, including a spectacular fall from the Humber Bridge which she survived, but with catastrophic injuries.
It was as a consequence of these suicide attempts, and prolonged stays in psychiatric institutions, that Louise and her siblings knew the value of being secure with someone reliable and safe and nurturing who wasn’t drunk or depressed: their maternal grandmother. For much of their childhood too, Louise was also mother to her twin sisters and her brother. She herself suffered on and off from eating disorders, and began to bury things too traumatic or painful to understand or to face.
Their father was an engineer and musician, a remote figure, probably autistic, who beat his wife and took little interest in his children. When Louise was eight, without consulting him, Trish left, taking the children with her. He vanished eight years later and didn’t reappear for 26 years. Left alone Trish simply found a string of other unsuitable men and lurched from one to the next, caring nothing for the impact on her children or their safety. The girls have largely blocked out the sexual abuse they suffered.
It’s a shocking tale courageously told. A tale of a mother who drank and jumped, but whose children paid the price.
She stood on the grenade, but the shrapnel hit her offspring.