writing as therapy
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.
Vulnerability and creativity
Every now and then I give you a round up of snippets from writing journals. Time for the next one, methinks, but on this occasion with a slight twist, because in three Mslexia issues one theme jumped out at me – vulnerability; so my post centres around that theme.
American writer, researcher, storyteller, Brené Brown, who spent twenty years studying courage, vulnerability, shame and empathy, believes that sharing one’s experiences and intimate fears and feelings is a healthy way to build resilience in the face of adversity. Assorted Mslexia writers have certainly shared their susceptibilities and frailties in these journals, and I commend them all for exposing themselves in this way. Sometimes writing has helped them find a meaning and way through difficulties; sometimes simply sharing their emotions in a safe place has been therapeutic. Whatever their motive, it’s helpful for us readers – and perhaps especially fellow-writers – to learn from their experiences.
I’ll simply catalogue the hurdles these brave women are leaping or facing (no links because most don’t have an online presence).
Spring issue
Angelina Nizzardi – is parenting a child with ‘autism, ADHD, anxiety, developmental delay, cocooned in a blanket of rare chromosomal complexity’ and finding cracks of time to write.
Sarah Jane Potter – is living with chronic severe pain and unable to sit following a stroke in her 40s, but writing is sufficiently important to her that she often writes standing up.
Katherine Rundell – it was the death of her sister when Katherine was ten that started her career of writing children’s fiction featuring characters who suffer hardships in early life, sharing deep seated emotions in a clever way.
Jennie Agg – had four miscarriages and has written about her personal experience, but using her research as a health journalist to illuminate the issues.
Summer issue
Amélie Padfield – found creative writing helped her recover from grief overload when a dear friend and her sister died within 3 months of each other.
Yvonne Reddick – the loss of her father inspired much of her poetry, mapping out a geography of grief for both her father and the planet.
Anna Vaught – concluded her series expressly for vulnerable writers, whether they’re dealing with mental health issues, thwarted expectation, or negativity in some shape. As she says: As a vulnerable author you are not alone! Indeed.
Helen McClements – had to find a way through a terrible accident on a mountain on the other side of the world which left her badly injured and her boyfriend dead. Her moving prose makes the reader wonder how much of the prying journalist is in us too.
Autumn
Lynsey Patterson – suffered brain injury after falling out of a high 4-wheel drive in Australia. She suffered from severe pain, headaches, dizziness and sickness. Writing was part of her life from childhood; now she has to retrain her brain to do what came so naturally before the accident.
Sian Meades Williams – as a freelance writer, she worked absurdly hard, postponed relaxation and rescheduled fun until she burned out. She learned the hard way to prioritise her own wellbeing and bring excitement and confidence and real creativity back into her life.
Academic and cultural commentator Celia Brayfield tells us that it’s well known that writers have more mental health challenges than other artists … hmm, I wasn’t aware of that fact. But reading all these submissions I recognise that authors have a unique opportunity to work at resolving their own traumas as well as comforting and encouraging others dealing with big issues in their live, and I salute all of the above for doing just that.
Festival time again
It’s that time of year again: the Edinburgh International Book Festival is in full swing. My happy place!
On Saturday I had the pure delight of listening to three excellent speakers all dealing with topics very dear to my heart, all having just published or just written new books.
Retired neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh, talked about the lessons he learned from admitting his mistakes as a surgeon, and how vulnerable he’s been facing up to his own diagnosis of advanced cancer and his impending death. The transition from one side of the consultation table to the other has proved surprisingly difficult, he admits. Given his stature and experience, his honesty and humility are compelling, and somehow give us all permission to feel vulnerable and afraid. I’ve read his earlier books and listened to him several times, but with his latest one called And Finally, I fear he might just have laid down his pen.
Abi Morgan
, is an award winning screenwriter, with brilliant TV series like The Split, and films like The Iron Lady, to her credit. She’s also dealing with treatment for cancer, but the main message she was sharing at the Festival was the experience of her husband, Jacob, developing a condition known as brain on fire, a form of encephalitis, which caused him to believe she was some kind of imposter. It has taken eighteen months and a long stay in hospital for him to recognise her. She too talked with such frankness and insight. The film rights to this most unusual love story have been sold, with Morgan herself writing the screenplay, and already thinking of POVs and actors – I’m already eagerly anticipating it.
Nihal Arthanayake
, an Asian BBC radio presenter, used his wealth of experience interviewing celebrities and interesting people to talk about the art of making conversation. In this digital age where social media is cultivating an increasing sense of narcissism, he feels, we need to learn to take a real interest in people, engage in meaningful empathetic dialogue, and ‘listen to understand’ rather than ‘listening to talk’, as he put it. I totally agree. He’d be just the kind of person you’d want beside you at a long dinner party!
Then, on Monday, this was followed by Amy Bloom talking about her husband Brian’s Alzheimer’s and taking him from the USA to Dignitas in Switzerland to end his life. She’s an author, screenwriter, teacher, therapist, social worker, and spoke so eloquently of the slow realisation of what was going wrong with him, and his passionate wish for autonomy and agency in death as in life, which she respected. In her State of California there is no right-to-die provision, and she vividly captured the hoops they needed to go through to establish his capacity to make this choice even when dementia was taking away so much of his true potential. I loved her robust no-nonsense approach.
Medical ethics is alive and very well in the world of books! What a fabulous opportunity to listen, without interruption or distraction, to these fascinating super-articulate people, for whom writing has been therapeutic and cathartic, to travel with them into some most intimate and troubling places, and to do so from my own home, at an affordable price, choosing just those topics that really float my boat. A brilliant facility which has come out of the pandemic – thank you EIBF.