Memoir as Self Sabotage

or maybe I should get more sleep

I woke early this morning with the certainty I’d solved a problem. All week I’ve been dreaming of fabric, of searching for lost clothes, of threads weaving around buildings, of spiders - the great weavers - too; during the week a friend writes to me ‘I may have lost the thread of something larger’. Sleep reflecting waking, a way of both sorting and expanding ideas. I am finally writing about textiles, which brings me back to a thing I had lost. I didn’t want to write The Last Days, but in avoiding writing it, I was unable to write anything else, this recent pursuit of thread and artists who understood and understand it, feels similar. Nathan Englander said there comes a point when everything points to the book, he’s right. Everywhere, so much thread, in the dream even more, but it was not a breakthrough, rather a decoy. I realise that already even in its early stage this next project is taking its toll; I wish I could make things without becoming obsessed by them, I wish the process was less consuming. I used to read advice from other writers about sitting down to write for 30 minutes or in snatched moments, but when I try, it’s suddenly two hours later and I’ve been elsewhere; when I write, time makes no sense, so much so that I am not always even sure where or when I am.

Last year, after I submitted The Last Days, I felt as if I’d returned to my life. It was an uncomfortable sensation, to know I’d both been there and not been there was puzzling. Despite seeing them every day, my children suddenly seemed to have grown; the house needed painted, urgently, in ways I’d not noticed the day before; everything seemed to be back in focus, in a way I felt like I’d been absent for three years of my life. The other curious thing was as soon as the book was submitted it felt like it failed to exist, I couldn’t work out quite what I’d doing while I’d been away. The same thing happened when I submitted my debut novel at the end of the year, I was back without knowing where I’d been.

While writing the memoir, I’d been transported so far back into the past that some mornings I’d wake and my bedroom would look alien, expecting instead to wake in my childhood room. I wouldn’t know what stairs from what period of my life I’d walk down, I’d hear music from the past and I’d be back in rooms I wanted to forget, I showered often to wash away the past after I’d worked, I threw up regularly as if to purge it. If this sounds like trauma, it’s because it was, and recently, is present tense again. I spoke to a friend at a party earlier in the week about the effects of memoir - and I’ll caveat here, not all memoir, some aren’t dealing with the traumatic events - how writing it and then promoting it can re-traumatise the writer. Writing memoir is often seen as a healing act, and for some writers, it works that way, but for a lot of writers dealing with unresolved trauma, the act of re-membering, where to do it effectively you have to dismember and then give flesh, reason and narrative logic to the past, takes its toll. Recently I’ve been working on a project connected to The Last Days and was shocked when I was offered therapy. Shocked because at no point in the last three years has therapy been mentioned as part of the memoir writing/promotion process, despite spending a lot of the last six months being asked very personal questions about my past. I know this is part of the deal; I know it’s work, I expected it, and I know I’m privileged to be in this position, but I also think there needs to be a wider understanding of the effects of writing memoir, and that begins with acknowledging that writing isn’t an act of self help or quick fix catharsis, but very often a damaging and awkward dance with the devil.

In The Curtain, Milan Kundera writes ‘the writing of a novel takes up the whole era of a writer’s life, and when the labour is done he is no longer the person he was at the start.’ I feel like this now, I am not who I was at the beginning of The Last Days, nor is my relationship with the past the same either, maybe this explains the obsession with thread, littered as our vernacular is with it; hanging by a thread; loose thread; coming undone; new threads. Maybe I am thinking of the act of repair too, of fixing the past back together, again. Or maybe I just woke from a nonsensical dream where I’d amalgamated Louise Bourgeois’s work with Yayoi Kusama’s, giant textile mushrooms suspended from the ceiling. Maybe I should have gone back to sleep.