We all have these key moments, when we have to do what it is staring us in the face, or go stir crazy.
Like the time I decided, ‘Right, I have to write my memoir. I have to do this, or I’ll die. And, it might kill me in the process – from embarrassment, anxiety, exhaustion, sadness – but God dammit, I’d rather die trying, than die of boredom and depression and regret. If writing this – and going through hell – is what it takes, then fine! I’ll take that chance.
Life always gives us challenges. And the longer we ignore them, block them out, dodge them or make excuses, the harder will be the next tests we face. Similar challenges form a pattern that may be very familiar, and will tend to revisit and repeat, until we get the message that, yes, we do have to deal with this head on. The longer we prevaricate, the greater the challenge grows, just to test our resolve. We have to take our courage in both hands and clamber aboard. The longer we leave it….
But such challenges are offered for a reason: perhaps to allow us to recognise and rework a defeatist pattern, to teach self worth; even, sometimes, to resolve issues have haunted us forever, such as a pattern of failure or settling for painful compromises, never allowing our true colours to shine bright.
In my next non-fiction book, Making Miracles, which is set for release in 2018, I share my dream diary, in the writing and re-reading of which, I recognised repeating patterns that have persisted over lifetimes. These I had to take on board if I wanted to make progress in this life. Luckily, I did, in the nick of time.
So let’s follow our dreams, people! The world needs folks with courage and faith to do what they know they have to. Let’s live like today is our best day.
Rest assured, it is very useful to write a book – to write anything – even if we don’t get round to finishing it. We learn a lot in the process, and we figure out stuff which perhaps isn’t suitable for anyone else to read anyway, so that’s all good. In any case, as any writer will tell you, ‘finishing’ has a rather subjective aspect to it: is a book we are writing ever ‘finished’?
But writing memoir can feel peculiarly, individually self-obsessed, so it feels almost easier than in most creative endeavours, to say, ‘What am I doing this for? I should give up now, before I get carried away … before I end up being swallowed up in this idiotic undertaking. What do I know, anyway?’
It is so easy then, to shut the book and never go back to it. It lies around on the shelf, while we feel uncomfortable and slightly ashamed. I know all about that.
Self belief is fundamental for doing anything as intangible as writing.
There are those who will, when you tell them snippets from your life, nod encouragingly and say, ‘Hey, you have had a really interesting life, I’d love to read about it!’ But by and large, writing memoir is a private undertaking, best understood alone and fashioned in private into something that may, eventually, end up being something more.
It takes years, though. Unlike all the rags to riches stories favoured of Hollywood and Bollywood of starlets immediately getting that sign-up, or winning a national talent contest, ‘instant success’ for authors is usually the result of about ten years of hard graft. So, be prepared to work hard for nothing, for a long time.
Doesn’t sound promising, does it? But when the chips are down, we rarely write memoir because of the tangible, commercial rewards. We write because challenges have to be met sometime, so we might as well meet them while we can, head on.
I have written a memoir. The process was long, surprisingly painful and full of the steepest learning curves imaginable.
But through a period of about seven years, I did realise that, though writing memoir is not necessarily straightforward, there are things to bear in mind. We might start by deciding, first, what we do not need, when embarking on writing our memoir.
We do not need:-
Any qualification in literature, creative writing or equivalent.
A law degree or formal adult education to fend off critics or lawsuits.
To conduct embarrassing interviews with friends and family.
For now, here is a glimpse of what you might find helpful to write memoir
A work ethic or method to get you started
A willingness to make time
An desire to continue, bordering on the obsessive
Willingness to listen
Patience to undertake literally hundreds of rewrites
The willingness to change your understanding when casual conversations with family reveal that you may have got something wrong
A willingness to come clean and be honest
Playful optimism and the ability to laugh when it all gets too much and you feel like throwing in the towel.
This is a light-hearted list, incomplete and perhaps even a bit contentious. We each have our own list of what we need. What’s missing? Ah yes, of course.
The desire to write our story
Something to write about.
If we start writing, and realise that our work is, well, boring, we can do several things we can do with
We can
throw out what we have written and start again. Given that, after a million re-writes, nothing in your original MS will remain, this is a perfectly feasible option.
Go out and live an interesting life, and then come back and write about it. We might be twenty years too early.
I’ve never seriously considered writing for teens, though my daughter has asked me often, if I would consider it. So it comes as a bit of a revelation to me – not for the first time, I realise – that young adults, teens from all over the world enjoy reading my memoir, Trapped. In exploring my life as it was, I never set out to consciously write a book for young adults, though my prose style tries to avoid over-sophistication. (Even as I write that, I worry: my daughter asked me recently if I swallowed a dictionary…do I still use three long words, where one short one would do?)
Last year, I was delighted to hear of a class of seventh graders, twelve year olds in the USA, who were set Trapped as a reading text by their class teacher. And recently, Sam Keane sent me a review, which I have included as a recent blog post.
I have always assumed that Trapped, being about a depressed, angry and sexually frustrated woman who only wants to be happy – to be allowed to be herself – would place it firmly in the ‘adult’ category. So how do I feel, knowing that youngsters read about my sexual frustration?
It may be that teachers, using the text as a study tool for young adults, delicately sensor the text; or more probably, since I was at school, there has been a revolution in attitudes around sexual experience. My daughter, I know, benefits from a full and candid exploration of attitude to sex at school, which contrasts markedly with the tiptoeing and cringeworthy explorations that we endured in late primary education in the late 1970s, and which left us with more questions than answers.
Perhaps my attitudes are well out of date, and what I consider cringeworthy and embarrassing is merely part of life, these days. It could just be that young adults are less phased, that they listen, decide and make up their own minds more readily about what they experience. If that is so, then I am pleased, and I applaud the sophistication of young people. They, so much more than my generation, tell the truth and expect to hear it, so are unlikely to be phased by a few truthful, passing references to the sexual experiences of one woman who, if she’d had her way, would have loved to find more ways of enjoying love.
Reading Joanna Trollope’s The Soldier’s Wife I come across this passage early on, which had me leaping out of bed
‘….Dan had said that deployment on active service made you long for extremes, either the supreme domesticity of home when you were away from it or the violence of action and danger when you were back. You couldn’t halt the pendulum, he said, you couldn’t stop it crashing from side to side, often out of control. Even if it sometimes hit her – or the children – as it swung….’
Something about this passage resonates with me.
I habitually spend time waiting around – still waiting – for others to come back, for life to tell me what to do, for the push that I need to venture forth. And I have always blamed that particular passivity – shyness, failure, fear – on disability.
But perhaps it has more to do with an abiding sense that my life, the patterns of it and the way the weave and weft wraps itself around me, has been defined by what other people need and decide: the parent who works abroad; the partner who cannot make up their mind whether to leave or stay; the children who have to fit in with patterns set up by others – the need for continuity which boils down to a choice of boarding school, where patterns are set in stone…. but which haemorrhages a domesticity that my husband, for example, can take more for granted.
I suspect that one of hubby’s templates says to him, ‘Parents are here and will always be here, so you may venture – go!’ but my templates tend to suggest to me that I should wait and see what happens, what others decide, because their choices will define what I can do.
But none of us can live our lives like that, not really, not always. We have to jump, and hope that we have a good landing. We have to dive in and see what happens, experiment and hope for the best. Otherwise, what happens to the quality of our lives?
When I was a beneficiary of its expertise, Remploy was still owned by the Department of Work and Pensions. Following extensive factory closures, it is now in private hands, owned by Maximus and an employee trust. Since the reorganisation, what has happened to its disabled employees? They have not just gone away, and there will be hopeful for suitable openings, as anxious as the next person that their last job will not become a distant memory.
I was in and out of work as a solicitor over a period of twelve years. At one time – how embarrassing to admit this – so poor was my bargaining position that I desperately needed help to regularise my pay and paperwork. My well-intentioned boss was a single practitioner too busy to deal with it. Remploy agreed to accept me onto their books and was able to set my pay to rights, provide me with pay slips, sort out my national insurance contributions and offer a pension, as well as day-to-day advice and support. During periodic visits, my Remploy supervisor saw me working and asked why I didn’t find myself a proper job: funding limits meant that I was at the top of my pay bracket and likely to stay there. He obviously felt I deserved better.
Taking his words to heart, I did find another job quite easily. Because my new pay increased substantially, Remploy could not continue to support me and I bid them a fond farewell as I prepared to take my chances on the open market. But pay was only one part of their remit. They provided understanding, a position of bargaining strength and expertise, all of which I lost when we parted company.
Aware of my limitations, I took another post advertised as part-time, thirty hours a week. But as always, the devil is in the detail. To do the job, I was expected to accept unrealistic deadlines set by other people, and was forced to work after hours. The pay was great, but nothing was added for overtime, which stretched uncomfortably until I was easily putting in forty hours a week. For an able-bodied colleague that might be a nuisance. For someone with a disability, the effect is more insidious. After six months, I had to rest, but when I asked for a day off each week – planning to fit thirty hours into four days – twice my request was refused without any discussion. Exhausted and faced with targets I struggled to meet, I had to leave. These days I work from home, aware that when I put in a forty hour week, at least I can do so from the comfort of my armchair and take frequent breaks. How many employers can afford to be so relaxed?
For those of us who might wish to work independently in the job market, the truth about Remploy is that their continuing support has been vital for longer-term success, though this is not always obvious at the outset. Remploy helped me to stay in work because they understood my practical dilemma, which no other employer would take account of in the normal course of business: I needed to be able to pace myself. Remploy were able to find a formula that worked. In so doing, they enabled me to take a longer-term view. Once their support was removed, I soon found myself unable to manage in an environment unapologetically geared to an able-bodied workforce.
According to the Sayce review which recommended the closure of Remploy factories, funds available to make finding a job easier are better targeted at disabled employees directly. In the same way that disabled consumers have the right to visit shops unimpeded, employment seems increasingly to be treated as a matter of access. The disability alliance website notes that “Access to Work helps disabled people and employers with adjustments to premises, transport costs and other in-work support” all of which certainly help. But what happens once an employee with impairments has a foot in the door?
Overwhelmingly, employers consider one aspect of work: their financial costs and gains. While disability discrimination legislation has made great strides forward, there remain many aspects in which the market driven-economy can skip neatly around its obligations to disabled employees. In hidden and insidious ways, a disabled employee often remains at a disadvantage, no matter how many hours are devoted to employee relations or however many policies exist to allow flexible working. Unfavourable comparisons around productivity, punctuality, sociability, public image and teamwork remain.
A friend of mine who is disabled and writes plays about disability wrote to me, “(we) should be judged according to others in your circumstances”. But how many disabled people can keep their place securely in mainstream employment? It is a difficult conundrum. In the Remploy factories, impairment has always been the norm, which was at least useful when it came to making meaningful comparisons.
So long as each former employee of a Remploy factory has found work and access to the same levels of continuing support, the changes in workplace structure and ethos may not impact too badly. But somehow, I doubt that the necessary levels of support will remain available over the long term.
Remploy has efficiently and quietly gone about its business over many years. If it had been making a lot of noise and grabbing the headlines, its contribution to the lives of disabled adults might not have been so easily refashioned to suit an ideology which assumes, on scant evidence, that for a disabled person the difficulties of finding and keeping a job are easily sorted with a bit of remodelling. The architects of the changes will not be waiting around to pick up the pieces if their optimism turns out to be misplaced. Yet, as news reports of the time indicate, barely one third of the employees made redundant during the privatisation processes have found re-employment. Old-style supported employment has its place in the scheme of things, after all.
I hear that Labour are planning to re-nationalise. Will they re-nationalise Remploy?
Sixtyfive Roses by Heather Summerhayes Cariou tells the story of her sister, Pammy, born with cystic fibrosis, and the effects this has on their family: two parents, four children and grandparents.
Heather, older sister of Pamela, is naturally protective towards her younger sister who is diagnosed with CF in infancy because of ‘failure to thrive’. Pamela, it is clear, is lucky to survive her birth, and lives to the grand age of 26, at that time a most astonishing testament to the power of life to endure despite chronic, progressive and seriously debilitating terminal illness, in which at the time, children were considered lucky to survive into adolescence.
Daily treatments, the constant risk and actuality of hospital admission and the unpredictable trajectories of an illness that can flare up at a moment’s notice, produced a constant underlying anxiety within the immediate family, who were unable to plan ahead, have ordinary expectations, or to grieve fully – Not knowing what would happen or when, they endured a medicalised existence as best they could.
I so empathised with their struggle for normality in the face of incredulity and some latent hostility and incomprehension among members of the wider family, a feeling that the challenges for Pammy and her immediate family were overstated – she lived a long time, didn’t she?! Strenuous efforts were made at home to preserve a veneer or normality at all costs, but it became clearer as I read this often harrowing account, that in fact, the family adapted by absorbing an enormous amount of medical detail into their daily routines, which became second nature, while isolating them from ‘ordinary’ families and spontaneous enjoyment.
Heather is an articulate and expressive author, deftly managing the tide of sweeping emotions that threaten all the time, to undermine precious time spared from the grim reaper.
Hers is an intimate and balanced account of the trauma that everyone endures, when a child of the family is born with a life-threatening impairment. It seems a miracle to me, that any kind of normality was achieved, but in that, there was also the risk that the compromises hewn from the rock of unfairness – medical costs leading to bankruptcy, why me?, the strain that told on their parents – the heroism that procured the illusion of an everyday existence worked against the family too, as they were routinely misunderstood and accused of overstating their difficulties.
The echoes of the challenges that my own family faced, when I made my appearance in the world, are not lost on me. It is a common dilemma that disabled persons face. They do all in their power to achieve the appearance of normality, and because they are successful so much of the time, they are accused of overstating the difficulties they juggle with. Yet, ‘normality’ perches on a knife edge. One fall, one bad crash leads not to minor inconvenience and aches here and there, but to a month of housebound agony, an inability to walk or move quickly…. Having had two bad falls recently, I can recognise the challenge that is the thin line between success and utter catastrophe.
This is a remarkable book, and one which deserves to be widely read.
I am delighted to read a recent blog post “Two inspiring memoirs about suffering” by Jerry Waxler, an American author, teacher and advocate for the personal value of memoir to transform our lives.
As well as Trapped Jerry reviewed Sixtyfive Roses, an account of the life and death of a dearly loved younger sister from cystic fibrosis. (Who knew all about her ailments from an early age: in her infancy Sixtyfive Roses was the closest she could get to pronouncing cystic fibrosis.)
As Jerry recommends Sixtyfive Roses so highly, I am reading this memoir on my kindle at the moment, and find it a clear and compassionate exploration of the life of a whole family faced with the challenges of life-long illness and the loss of a beloved family member. (I shall review it again when I have finished reading it.)
In his review, Jerry writes ‘ each author climbs to the best parts of themselves by enduring the hardship they encounter along the way.‘ Though I am naturally inclined to resist the conclusion that I am ‘lucky’ to have had my ‘disability’ experiences, he very neatly sums up why any of us might endure annoyance, pain and sorrow, and then be able to look back on our less wonderful experiences in a spirit of resignation and acceptance.
Perhaps I can say, I am very pleased to have come this far, and inexpressibly grateful that I shall never have to go back again. So often, ‘luck’ is more obvious in retrospect, if we manage to keep body and soul together in the meantime. I know I am very, very lucky to be where I am now, and I believe that writing my memoir has helped me to reach a peaceful place. The love and support of my friends, family, readers and colleagues is a precious part of that achievement.
Jerry teaches memoir writing, and is passionate about his craft, so I am delighted that he has not only read and enjoyed my story, but is able to review it so favourably. Thank you so much, Jerry. I am delighted and touched by your article, and all your positive comments, which I hope will help Trapped to reach an even wider audience.
If anyone was to ask me, ‘How many drafts did you write of Trapped before you were happy with it, before you knew it was finished?’ I might, borrowing a phrase of my grandfather’s, reply reflectively, ‘Thoosands and thoosands….’ Which, over the course of a three year period of trial, error and reconsideration, is not such an exaggeration. At least fifty drafts, then.
The lesson I can draw from this, is that for me, it takes time for the right tone, the right angles and the comfortable, conversational colour to emerge. It takes time to shed the reserve that at first, I hardly notice, and get down to a more immediate and conversational style that I really do prefer, and that I know helps me to enjoy what I write. Perhaps it is the writer’s equivalent of shyness, or a need to come closer gradually, but this process of casting and recasting simply cannot be rushed.
I’ve tried rushing, and this is what happens:-
The tone of my book flattens out into business-like precision, (which has its uses)
I start to worry about timing, timetables, word-counts, daily disciplines
My work flattens out even more
I assume this is the best I can do and become disheartened.
Now if I assume that I can always please myself, I can always write exactly what I want, whenever I want – and last night, that happened to be from eleven pm ‘til one am – if I assume that I am free to be me not just sometimes, but all times, in all places and in the midst of all my work, this is what happens:-
I smile and feel liberated again
A sense of fun and assertive joy invades my work
My characters are let loose and can speak to me in much fresher, clearer voices
My plots twist and turn nicely, because I am intrigued, instead of scared, or bored.
I enjoy my work, and my life
If it takes me three dozen drafts to get my books right, whether they are memoir, MBS or fiction, I better just accept that and start having fun. No more timetables, no more strategies for writing ‘a book a year’, no more ‘must get this finished today’ – because all these …anxieties…. result in work that is not my best.
This is the second part of an introduction I gave to a seminar at the Scottish Association of Writers Annual Conference at Cumbernauald on Saturday, 18th March.
‘….The first 25 or 30 drafts of any memoir that we are writing can, and often will be as sentimental, overblown, subjective, unfair, emotionally exhausting and entirely self-obsessed as we need them to be. But as we write, and once we get to draft 35 or 40, as part of the process, we gain distance and a different perspective, and we have an amazing chance to learn real empathy with the story of others.
Despite the fact that readers may consider memoir writers self-obsessed, the real value of the process is that, though a process of self-reflection, we gain empathy with others, and with ourselves.
As part of the process of writing our memoir (which we hope to see published one day) we:-
approach the task with trepidation, on tiptoe.
Are subjective, emotional and sometimes very unfair when in the early stages of writing. But no-one else is going to read our first thirty-five drafts, so we can write what we want!
Get through all the emotional work and come out the other side feeling different, better and more aware.
If and when we finally reach our goal of publication – which can take ten years – as part of this process, we have to accept that:-
Our work is no longer ours. It becomes public property.
Other people will expect to have a view about what we have written, so it helps to let go of our darlings.
Having spent years getting to this point, what have we to show for it? Not a lot, on the face of it.
But we do come away from the process with more empathy; so empathy is our ultimate reward for a long, hard process of reflection.
Increased awareness may be all we get, but this in itself is extremely valuable and worthwhile. Empathy for others, and for ourselves; and a much clearer, and calmer appreciation of our value in the world.
September 1, 2017
The longer we leave it
Fran Macilvey 'Trapped: My Life with Cerebral Palsy', cerebral palsy, Fran Macilvey, Happiness Matters, Memoir, Path To Publication, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing 2 Comments
The longer we leave it…
We all have these key moments, when we have to do what it is staring us in the face, or go stir crazy.
Like the time I decided, ‘Right, I have to write my memoir. I have to do this, or I’ll die. And, it might kill me in the process – from embarrassment, anxiety, exhaustion, sadness – but God dammit, I’d rather die trying, than die of boredom and depression and regret. If writing this – and going through hell – is what it takes, then fine! I’ll take that chance.
Life always gives us challenges. And the longer we ignore them, block them out, dodge them or make excuses, the harder will be the next tests we face. Similar challenges form a pattern that may be very familiar, and will tend to revisit and repeat, until we get the message that, yes, we do have to deal with this head on. The longer we prevaricate, the greater the challenge grows, just to test our resolve. We have to take our courage in both hands and clamber aboard. The longer we leave it….
But such challenges are offered for a reason: perhaps to allow us to recognise and rework a defeatist pattern, to teach self worth; even, sometimes, to resolve issues have haunted us forever, such as a pattern of failure or settling for painful compromises, never allowing our true colours to shine bright.
In my next non-fiction book, Making Miracles, which is set for release in 2018, I share my dream diary, in the writing and re-reading of which, I recognised repeating patterns that have persisted over lifetimes. These I had to take on board if I wanted to make progress in this life. Luckily, I did, in the nick of time.
So let’s follow our dreams, people! The world needs folks with courage and faith to do what they know they have to. Let’s live like today is our best day.
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