Hazel McHaffie

psychiatric illness

From the Edge of the Couch

When I was a student I made a conscious decision not to do a stint in psychiatry. Why? I was acutely conscious of the fine dividing line between what’s ‘normal’ and what’s ‘abnormal’, and had a sneaking suspicion I was too close to the edge for comfort myself at times. Decades on, I’m more sanguine about my own mental resilience, and more sympathetic to others’ strengths and weaknesses, and I guess, more curious about how the mind works.

Why am I re-living this decision now? Let me explain.

I was at a bit of a loss as to what book to take for eight hours sitting on a train with weighty matters on my mind. I needed something that I could dip in and out of, but something sufficiently absorbing to hold my interest. Ahah! Time maybe to tackle From the Edge of the Couch: Bizarre psychiatric cases and what they teach us about ourselves. The author: Dr Raj Persaud, a consultant psychiatrist, writer and TV personality.

It’s disturbing (as expected) and raises all sorts of questions about the way the mind functions, the variety of delusions and distorted beliefs that can lurk in its hinterland, and the cracks and flaws that can derail the psyche. More than that, it shows how delusions are far more common than we might imagine, and probing them can reveal much more understanding of how the ‘normal’ mind works.

From werewolves and vampires, to phantom lovers and stalkers, to Munchausens and gender issues, to various distorted perceptions relating to parts of the body, Dr Persaud unravels the problems, the possible causes, and the treatments, through the lives of real people amassed from reported cases over many countries, many years, and from many clinicians. It’s detailed, it’s research based, and it corroborates my remembered feeling that the line between the healthy and the disordered can indeed be thin.

Which of us doesn’t feel unworthy at times?
But most of us don’t resort to eating animal faeces as penitence, or slicing off a hand with a chain saw.

Which of us has not at times disliked a part of our appearance, or experienced anxiety about something untoward happening to cause us acute embarrassment or public humiliation?
But most of us don’t shut ourselves away from society altogether, or deliberately inflict injuries to ourselves and then infect them in order to get a limb amputated.

Which of us has not at some stage tried to alter their body image by something like dieting or exercise?
But most of us don’t eat industrial quantities of toilet paper or our own hair.

Which of us does not have some an experience in our childhood that was fairly traumatic?
But most of us don’t deliberately mutilate our face, amputate limbs, castrate ourselves or enucleate our eyes.

Which of us has not worried about body odour of some kind?
But most of us don’t opt our of work/school to obsessively wash our clothes, and avoid all social and domestic excursions out of the house.

Which of us has not known someone who had a stroke?
But most of us don’t react by becoming pathologically obsessed with eating fine haute cuisine food ourselves.

The list goes on and on. Puts our normal little anxieties into perspective, doesn’t it?

Dr Persaud takes delusions very seriously – sometimes indeed more seriously that the disturbed patient! Furthermore, for him, anything we can learn from them is valuable, as he points out in the postscript:
… dialogue with the delusional has much to offer us. It will not only assist in the specialized scientific enterprise of understanding the brain and mind, but such people’s experience should inform our personal understanding of what it is to be human … If we can grope towards some understanding of the most bizarre and incomprehensible ideas of all, then surely there is more hope for us to understand what each other thinks.
Many have said the most complex entity in the known universe is the human brain, but in fact there is something much more intricate and elaborate: human society – or groups of brains interacting. What is produced when minds try to understand and manipulate each other is where the real mystery and excitement of the human sciences lie.

From the Edge of the Couch is a lengthy tome, and holds a wealth of information – 59 pages of footnotes alone! All made viable by the bringing together of cases from so many sources, enabling deductions to be generated which would not be possible from the occasional single example that comes the way of any specific clinician. It’s perhaps small comfort that, as Dr Persaud admits, psychiatry is far from being an exact science, and relies heavily on objective interpretation of symptoms. That’s part of my worry!

Yep, I’ve no regrets at bypassing psychiatry! But after finishing this book, I’ve got the gratitude-for-what-life-has-dealt-me T-shirt and the mug.

 

 

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Stress busting!

I’ve been reminded all over again this week of the importance of books in the nation’s health; never, I suspect, has that need been greater than now when a pandemic is threatening our very foundations and security.

It’s been an uncharacteristically stressful week in my own little world, most of it stemming from the vagaries of technology. Frightening how much we depend on the internet and all things electronic in our everyday lives, isn’t it? Being without connections feels like working with one and a half broken arms.

But I know that my personal stresses are as nothing compared with those of countless others during this time of Covid. The BBC wheeled out some big guns in the world of psychiatry during the past few days, who all tell us about the abnormally high incidence of worrying symptoms for mental illness, symptoms sufficiently serious to warrant medical intervention under normal circumstances.

Well, I’ve always been acutely aware of the fine dividing line between normal and abnormal when it comes to mental health. I rapidly but determinedly side-stepped psychiatry in my training, even though the way the mind works and its link with physical health fascinate me. And I’ve never forgotten the patient who first alerted his family to pathological disease when he started cutting his sausages lengthwise … but that’s another story. This week, when things started unravelling for me, it was time to segue into active stress-management mode.

Aromatherapy, mental puzzles and games, exercise, relaxation techniques, helping others less fortunate … the whole gamut came into play. And breathe … And relax …

But of course, books remain one of my main go-to resources. There’s nothing to beat losing yourself in another world. And in this context all I need is something unexacting but gripping. Time to turn to a tried and tested author: Harlan Coben.

I have a stack of his books on my shelves for exactly this kind of situation; these are just a selection, collected over many years. First off the shelf was Run Away.

First page, opening paragraph  …
Simon sat on a bench in Central Park – in Strawberry Fields to be more precise – and felt his heart shatter … he stared straight ahead, blinking, devastated …

and I’m already asking who, what, why, when?

His once lovely daughter Paige – who ran away from her comfortable, professional, stable, ordered family life, to shack up with a criminal and wallow in addiction, has been seen busking in that very park where Simon sits with his heart splintering into fragments. Watching her. He’s appalled by what he sees: a malodorous, strung out bag of bones with matted hair and yellow teeth and a cracked voice. Trickster, manipulator, thief. And that encounter leads him deep into the dark and dangerous underworld that swallowed her up – guns, violence, murder, drugs …
because if someone hurts your daughter, a father has an obligation to stop him, no matter what.
But when the man who took her to this hellish place is murdered, Paige vanishes. He’s lost her again.

A second plot line shows a series of young men being targeted and killed. Why? What’s the connection? I twigged the ‘what’ by P167, and the ‘who’ by P194, but not the ultimate ‘why’… P319. Kept me turning the pages. Better still, it crept close to my own field of interest – genetic inheritance, infertility, adoption, ethics … now you’re talking my language!

And all the threads don’t fully come together until the epilogue. The work of a devilishly clever mind. And balm to my troubled one.

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Lost in Translation

One of the bonuses of this time out due to Covid-19 has been reading books quite outside my usual milieu, and taking the time to appreciate different skills and talents. This week it’s the amazing skill of translators.

Jo Nesbo is a Norwegian writer and his work has been translated into English by Don Bartlett, a freelance translator who lives in Norfolk. And boy, the result is so impressive I just had to consume two Nesbo novels consecutively – meaty tomes though they be. 

Both feature Harry Hole – a detective inspector in the Crime Squad in Oslo, loner, obsessive, recovering alcoholic, always seemingly a whisker away from being thrown out of the police force.

The Redeemer  is full of subtle moral and religious analogies and paradoxes, which I found intriguing. The plot is tortuous, the unravelling complex and detailed. Picture the scene. Shortly before Christmas, the Salvation Army, resplendent in their distinctive uniforms, are playing traditional music outside in one of Oslo’s most famous streets. Without warning, a man in a black raincoat and black woollen hat with a red neckerchief, takes aim at short range and kills one of the players with a single bullet through the head, before vanishing from sight. But it’s the wrong target. And thus begins a trail of devastation and horror.

The assassin – given the name The little redeemer – is cold, ruthless, fearless and driven. As writers, we’re always told to utilise all the senses in writing, so I was particularly taken by one particular characteristic of this man. His mother had told him that ‘the human brain can reproduce detailed images of everything you have seen or heard, but not even the most basic smell.’  He has grown up, since, unusually alert to smells. ‘His nostrils flared and drew in the faint smell of damp cement, human perspiration, hot metal, eau de cologne, tobacco, sodden wool and bile, a smell they never managed to wash out of the train seats, or to ventilate.’
He had learned to shut out noises – screams and artillery – but not smells, and he was acutely aware of this feature in the hospital where he was a teenage errand boy. One smell above all others haunted him – the smell of burnt flesh and blood from the operating theatre. It was ‘like nothing else’. Can’t you just feel the elements assembling that will drive this budding killer to hunt down and take life?

And it’s this amazing facility with language in a translated work which caught my attention. Nesbo’s background is as a singer/songwriter, and I wonder if this contributed to his ear for the lyrical in language. It’s not just the choice of words, but he uses uniquely clever and ingenious transitions between sections, beautiful linkages which serve to add to the intrigue. A couple of examples to illustrate … At the end of one section the detective presses his thumb against a cold metal button; at the beginning of the next section a different person altogether takes his finger off the button, puts down his heavy bags and gazes up at the block of flats above him. Then later, one of the Salvation Army officers says, ‘You’re lying.‘ The next section begins with the detective saying, ‘No I’m afraid I’m not’, but in answer to a completely different conversation. Brilliant. I loved it!

In The Snowman, a young boy wakes to find his mother has vanished, but her favourite pink scarf – the one he’d given her for Christmas – has been wrapped around the neck of a snowman in the garden. By the time Inspector Harry Hole arrives, everything is starting to drip and sigh in the thaw, and the snowman has ‘a slight list and poor future prospects‘. When a second woman goes missing, Hole fears he has a serial killer operating on his patch. And this conviction is strengthened when one of his colleagues traces back a whole series of women who have mysteriously disappeared. What kind of monster emerges on the day of the first snowfall, creates snowmen, and abducts women – married women with children? The Snowman. But who is he … or she?

It’s a devilishly plotted tale, with false trails, deception and suspects aplenty. Just when you think we’re about to see the monster unmasked, another set of wet slushy footprints lead off at a tangent. In this one, the plotting is the main attraction, but again the language in places is lyrical. How about this for the police inspector’s job?: he stared ‘into others’ faces to find their pain, the Achilles heels, their nightmares, motives and reasons for self-deception, listening to their fatiguing lies and trying to find a meaning in what he did: imprisoning people who were already imprisoned inside themselves. Prisons of hatred and self-contempt he recognised all too well.’

Brutal murders and serial killers aren’t my usual bag, but this is one author and one translator who have inspired my admiration. And I was taken by surprise by an unexpected phenomenon: both feature medical syndromes and inherited diseases … Now, I’m listening, even if the detail isn’t strictly accurate in one place! It’s close enough for purpose, and I never was a reader on the hunt for mistakes or anachronisms; I have too much respect for the hard work that goes into writing a book or a drama to nit pick.

Psychiatrically disturbed personalities unnerve me somewhat too: and as one such character says in The Snowman: ‘My psychiatrist says I’m just a few notches more extreme than most people’. Just what I was always afraid of!

Jo Nesbo’s novels are published in 48 languages. That’s a lot of translators. I salute them all.

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A Place Called Winter

All except one of my trusted readers/critics have now given me their feedback on my latest book, Listen. Exciting times. But before I sit down for a serious edit, I’m immersing myself in some exquisite writing, beautiful language from the pen of a master, that will be a incentive to me to raise my own game – I hope!

The author? Patrick Gale. The book? A Place Called Winter. A sad, tender, compelling tale of Harry Cane’s battle with his own demons, the taboos of his day, and the wild wastelands of a new country. It’s an intensely personal novel inspired by a true story from Gale’s own family history: one gay man reaching out with sympathy and deep feeling to another (his mother’s grandfather) across a century of social change.

Harry Cane is born into privilege, raised to ‘believe that what mattered was to be unmistakably a gentleman’. He rides horses; others muck out their stables. His soft hands remain idle while callouses build up on the palms of his social inferiors. But his childhood is emotionally impoverished, with his mother dead and his father absent, schooldays punctuated by all the trials upper class boys can inflict on those they see as weaker prettier mortals. Consequently his life is centred on his younger brother Jack. It’s Jack who drags his shy insecure brother into society after their father’s death and introduces him to Winifred Wells, his future wife. Theirs is a gentle undemanding relationship which reluctantly produces one daughter before it settles into platonic coexistence.

The time is the early 1900s; apartheid is unchallenged; class distinctions rule; abortion and homosexuality are unlawful, the latter punishable by hard labour and utter disgrace; ‘treatment’ for psychiatric illness and ‘deviance’ is draconian. When his brother-in-law discovers Harry’s guilty secret, Harry – now an exiled ‘unmentionable‘ – signs up for a new start in a new country, Canada, one of 511 passengers on a ship sailing to the unknown.

The vast impossible prairies are simply waiting to be tamed, and after serving his year-and-a-day apprenticeship to a Danish farmer, Harry commits himself to converting 160 acres of wild wasteland into a self-sufficient thriving homestead within three years. Setting out with simply the map coordinates SW 23-43-25-W3, and directions to a place called Winter scribbled on the brown paper the cheese was wrapped in. An English innocent in a harsh unbroken landscape where there is ‘not much call for cash‘, and ‘neighbour is a relative term‘.

His closest neighbours are a brother and sister, Paul and Petra Slaymaker, whose lives become intimately entwined with his own. Beautiful relationships are established which are tested in the cauldron of  gossip, violence, war and illness. But their peace is threatened much more by the reappearance of a common enemy whose actions and knowledge cast a long shadow over their lives.

Gale’s writing is superb. His characters are beautifully realised, their emotions are captured with tenderness and palpable truth, and the abiding fear of loss, disgrace and exile haunts every hour of reading. Much as I revelled in the writing, though, I had a powerful feeling of desolation at times. Harry’s apologetic personality, his sad acceptance of the degrading things that happen to him, his gentle resilience, his innate decency even in the face of extreme provocation, stand in sharp contrast to the militance and ferocity of modern day campaigners for individual and collective rights. I wanted to reach out to him with compassion, understanding and reassurance.

But it’s a novel. I must instead give you a flavour of the lyrical prose:

… hot breakfast rolls as soft and pale as infancy.

… torn rags of sentences.

… they gave the impression of having emerged, fully formed, from eggs, as brittle as the waxy shells they had discarded.

There’s the heir and the spare and the heiress-beware.

A horse is ‘like a sofa with hooves‘.

‘Vaccinated by this cruel loss of his first daughter, he approached fatherhood the second time round with a certain reserve. He did not consciously harden his heart, but he loved with hands metaphorically behind his back.’

… war was declared in August, when harvest preparations were at their height. The news was sown swiftly, shaken from pulpits and scattered by posters and threshing gangs.’

I rarely give a book 5*s – this novel reminds me why. It wholeheartedly merits them. Highly recommended.

*****

 

 

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Human experimentation

Sledgehammer drugs, induced comas, repeated electric shocks, brain washing, extreme forms of psychological torture, lobotomies … we’re into the stuff of nightmares, thrillers, and scary films. The Monkey-Puzzle TreeIn The Monkey-Puzzle Tree these are ‘treatments’ meted out by respected psychiatrists to vulnerable patients. But with sinister intent, for these scientists are actually testing techniques capable of turning innocent people into automatons who would do the CIA’s bidding even against their own will or moral scruples. Would even kill to order.

Pure fiction, huh? Not a bit of it. These torturous practices were actually practised … in my lifetime. During the 1950s and 60s the CIA instituted a series of experimental programmes in mind-control involving 144 universities, 15 research facilities/private companies, 12 hospitals and 3 prisons. Almost all of the subjects were unsuspecting American or Canadian citizens, ‘educated, productive, caring members of their community who for a brief time had ceased to function efficiently’; ordinary individuals who sought help for their problem (depression or chronic anxiety or drinking) from one of the top names in the country. None of them had irreversible mental problems or psychosis or schizophrenia when they presented, but after ‘treatment’ their sanity was permanently weakened. They were never the same again.

Author Elizabeth Nickson‘s mother was one of them. Simple postnatal depression brought her into the care of one of the psychiatrists leading these experiments, and he became a constant and malign influence in the Nickson’s family life.

Hard to believe that very few people were aware of these infamous regimes, even those snared at the heart of the web, but that was the case. Elizabeth, however, resolved to bring the reality to public attention in a novel way. She could have exposed the unvarnished truth as it actually happened to her family; instead she tells the bigger story in a way that’s intended to touch people more closely, more roundly – through fiction. In The Monkey-Puzzle Tree she is the narrator, Catherine, unwrapping the horror layer by layer ‘as warily as if it were a timebomb’, and then fighting to expose the injustice and barbarity. She stays close to her mother’s lived experience, retains the principal characters as they really were, but uses the literary device of fictionalisation to make the abuse even more gripping and immediate, if that’s possible.

WARNING: This post contains spoilers

The story begins with the attempted suicide of a young man of 31, Brian, and we’re instantly thrust deep into the psychiatric problems which beset the narrator’s family. Brian is her brother. Then, gradually, revelation by revelation, document by document, we learn of the ‘treatments’ inflicted on Catherine’s mother, ‘sweet innocent beautiful‘ Victoria Ramsey, following the birth of her children; ‘treatments’ which violate not just the Nuremberg Code but every decent code of behaviour. She and her co-victims were accorded no more moral worth than lab rats by the scientists in charge of the programmes. Moreover the things that were done to Victoria affected the whole family at a very profound level. Returning home after months of treatment the once lively vibrant mother is limp and grey, confused, darkly brooding, unreasonably fearful at times, absurdly hysterical at others. Her children ‘catch her moods like the flu’, they become resentful, needy, uncontrollable. The emotional and physical toll on them all is enormous and cumulative.

What’s more, the evil influences are still pervading the lives of Catherine’s family decades later. Phones are bugged. Nuisance calls happen at all hours. Parcels are tampered with. Cars are pranged. Viruses are blown into the face of Catherine herself in a supermarket. A bogus workman calls. Catherine’s father meets with a terrible accident. The threat becomes increasingly sinister.

Any attempt at bringing these cases to court has been thwarted at every turn by unseen forces, dragging them out till the plaintiffs are old and unnaturally infirm. And then Catherine herself gets involved in the fight; her life is again turned upside down.

Sunset Silhouette © kiwinz https://www.flickr.com/people/kiwinz/ Used under Creative Commons Licence 2.0

Monkey-puzzle tree. Sunset Silhouette © kiwinz https://www.flickr.com/people/kiwinz/
Used under Creative Commons Licence 2.0

In the midst of such terrifying horror it seems facetious to talk of writing styles, and yet, as a writer, I couldn’t help but admire the occasional flashes of literary delight.

‘He was pencil-thin, with a face God forgot to punctuate.’

‘… a small stiff, wiry hairdo of a woman ..’. 

‘A coven of black umbrellas hung furled on the railing on the steps down to the plane …’

‘Emotion was an embarrassing luxury, a fur coat worn on a sightseeing trip to the slums.’

This book is a sobering read because we know all along these nightmarish things really happened in the name of medicine.

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Giving up the Ghost

Knitting and bookMay, chez nous, is a month of concerted efforts to raise money for several charities close to my heart. I’m hoping to keep the new novel simmering gently, but plans are in hand for assorted foodie events and sales and door-to-door collecting and creating goods to sell, as well. The knitting needles are already clacking ten to the dozen, at the same time as I reduce the size of my tbr pile of books. Happy days!

I won’t bore you with the domestic saga but all you bookworms and thinkers might well be interested in the reading. First up was an autobiography which proved fascinating.

Hilary Mantell has become a household name: the only woman to win the Man Booker prize twice, a prolific writer, reputedly one of the greatest living literary authors. But she’s arrived at this reputation, this successful place, through much tribulation. Giving up the Ghost: a Memoir is her own story, written back in 2003, not ‘to solicit any special sympathy’, she says, after all, many other people have survived far worse and never committed anything to paper. Rather it was an attempt ‘to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness’; to lay a few ghosts to rest – the ghosts of past relations, past mistakes, the ghosts of her own unborn children. It was never intended to tell her whole story, and it doesn’t.

As a youngster ‘Ilary’ was weighed down by the burdens of her Catholic indoctrination: ‘You grow up believing that you’re wrong and bad. And for me, because I took what I was told really seriously, it bred a very intense habit of introspection and self-examination and a terrible severity with myself. So that nothing was ever good enough. It’s like installing a policeman, and one moreover who keeps changing the law.’  Her whole world was distorted through the lens of a perpetual guilt that started within five minutes of each confession. However, she lost her belief in God at the age of 12, a circumstance which had it’s own repercussions, although to the dispassionate observer some of her adult hauntings seem uncannily like the metamorphoses of her childhood superstitions, simply in a different guise.

There was little money and few luxuries when she was growing up but her situation resonated for me: it wasn’t unusual in the post-war years. I too remember looking on with wonder and not a little fear at the early vacuum cleaner – a Hoover Constellation which I was led to believe would gobble me whole if I allowed the nozzle anywhere near my long hair. I too vividly recall the flexes and tubing on appliances more sticky tape than original casing, coaxing each appliance to survive way beyond its sell-by date.

Secondary education for Hilary at a ‘rather posh‘ convent school was perceived through a more cynical eye, nevertheless, tales of humiliating punishments for unknown crimes, physical and psychological abuse inflicted by teachers, make sobering reading in these days where teachers are chary of even comforting a distressed child lest their contact be misinterpreted and reported.

For a long time ‘Protestantism’ carried much baggage in her mind, but it’s clear she harboured a great number of other misapprehensions and misunderstandings too, not all related to religious indoctrination and mystery, and perhaps more a consequence of the prevalent practice of simply not explaining things to children, coupled with her vivid imagination. Once again I identify with all of this. For her as well as for me ‘council housing’ carried sinister undertones. Aged three, Hilary was ‘waiting to change into a boy. When I am four this will occur‘, and she was nine before life disabused her of this notion, at which time she plummeted from ‘hero to zero‘. Neither, she discovered, was she actually destined to form a band of knights errant, nor become a parish priest, nor be gassed if she didn’t attend school.  She listened and overheard the adults but was forced to put her own construction on the meagre facts she gleaned.

Life was further complicated by the irregular arrangements within their household with her mother’s paramour, Jack, living under the same roof with the family. Hilary’s ‘childhood ended‘ (aged 11) in the autumn of 1963 when they moved to a semi-detached house in a different county, leaving her father behind, Jack now posing as her stepfather (although the relationship was not regularised through marriage), ‘the past and the future equally obscured by the smoke from my mother’s burning boats’. They now had a lawn, a rockery, an apple tree, new carpets … but another name. Nevertheless, their relocation didn’t stop new neighbours and school children taking a prurient interest in their private living arrangements, which Hilary resented greatly.

Even though her autobiography reveals a curious child with her fair share of scepticism, in many ways she remained a young woman of her time, and looking back she is amazed that she wasn’t more challenging; perhaps nowhere more so than in respect of her health. Even as a pre-teen she was never robust, but as time passed she was plagued with chronic and severe pain in many parts of her anatomy: ‘Miss Neverwell’ as she puts it. For years she was treated as psychiatrically ill, with devastating consequences. By the time she eventually diagnosed her own illness as endometriosis it was already so widespread and invasive that she was robbed of any chance of having children or ever recovering fully. Now she wonders why she didn’t insist doctors paid more attention to her complaints; back then ‘The proper attitude to doctors was humble gratitude; you cleaned the house before they arrived’. But the humiliation and shame of not being believed had a profound effect on her.

In spite of her frequent absences from school, she was clearly a very bright and able student, becoming head girl and entering law school. Once there, though, constant ill-health and an all-consuming passion for a young man changed the course of her life. They married while both still students, living in a hovel and close to the breadline. The marriage fell apart at one stage but some years later they re-married, and today she declares her worst fear is ‘losing my husband’, although curiously in the book she never gives him a name. His work as a geologist took them abroad for years – to Africa and Saudi Arabia – all rich fuel for Hilary’s active imagination and growing portfolio of writings.

Her body image was another ongoing issue for her. Following her diagnosis, a combination of medication and an underactive thyroid made her weight balloon. She went from being frail and skinny to being so large she had to move into ‘loose covers rather than frocks’. This affected not only her own behaviour – ‘When you get fat, you get a new personality’ – but also that of others – ‘When I was thin and quick on my feet, a girl with a head of blonde hair, I went for weeks without a kind word. But why would I need one? When I grew fat, I was assumed to be placid. I was the same strung-out fired-up person I’d always been, but to the outward eye I had acquired serenity. A whole range of maternal virtues were ascribed to me.’

Like many before her, Mantell was not always the hugely successful writer she is today. Publishers rejected her manuscripts – how sick they must be in hindsight! But perhaps the most surprising thing for me, reading her autobiographical account, is that she is addicted to colons and semi-colons, using them with an extravagance and abandon I have never seen elsewhere; I counted ten within two paragraphs early on in the book! A tutor on a creative writing course would make short shrift of that kind of obsession, but when you’re a writer of Mantell’s stature it seems it can become part of your signature.

On with the next ball of mohair!Charity knitting And the next book.

Knitting and latest book

 

 

 

 

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