Hello! I am going to be answering your questions for Ask Me Anything today; I'm going to do it in two parts as there were quite a lot of them, but it's so lovely having your questions. I have filmed this, but also have the questions and responses below if it’s easier for you to read than to watch.
I had a question from
, who has asked me about how to discuss death with children she specifically said that following the death of her mum that her six-year-old is struggling with death and she's running out of things to make it okay for him. She says, “you seem to have a healthy way of processing these things within your family. We've been open and honest with my son, but I'm also getting my head around our mortality and it's a struggle to explain to him how he might cope with or think of death at his age. Any thoughts would be wonderful.”For me, talking to my children about death is as important as talking to them about life. I discuss it with them a lot - and this helps me as well.
And it's not like we sit down and have a discussion about death, but we talk about it, perhaps when we're talking about the life of flowers for example, or the life of animals; there's ways of softening it slightly - like when we had some rabbits in England that died. I think creating a sense that perhaps the barriers between life and death are quite fluid is really, really useful. I really like talking to them about the idea that our bodies are a vessel for our souls and our souls go on. My mum read Watership Down to us when we were kids. It's a book about rabbits, and at the end of it, you see Hazel's thinking about the fact that the soul is gonna leave the body. And I think that that's really, really helpful.
I've had really lively discussions with children about what happens to your soul when it leaves your body. Dash once said to me, “Well, what happens if you're a soul who leaves your body and then you want to go back into your body?”, which I thought was a very interesting point! It created a lively sort of dialogue around what death is, so that it's not too heavy - it can it could even be funny; you could ask ‘do you believe in reincarnation, and what are you going to be reincarnated as?’ and that makes children come up with really funny ideas (‘I'm going to be reincarnated as a tarantula’ or maybe ‘I'm going to be reincarnated as Pablo’ which is what Dash wants to do most of the time!)
I’d also advise reading poetry around death, so that death is kind of on the table, I suppose. At Halloween, we do our death table, where I decorate this table that I’m sitting at right now, with leaves and bones and sticks and pebbles and anything that I can find to create a sense of decay. The certainty that we will all die is something we all have to get our children around. That feeling of it being an ever present thing, not a terrifying thing, but an ever present thing. I talk about my own death; what will they say about me and how annoying I was.
I ask ‘So when, when I've died, will you visit places we love in England, like on the Ridgeway and have a picnic?’ - that kind of stuff, which might seem a bit morbid and heavy, but personally think is really, really helpful. I wish you so much luck with that.
has talked about how much she loved My Wild and Sleepless Nights, which I'm really, really pleased about. And she says, ‘what I'm often struck by is how you discuss working through the many feelings of motherhood. My four year old son has recently started school in the UK and is not enamoured with it, often causing upset and tension about how we work through this as a family. I seem to feel it more than ever everybody else. And it leaves me feeling lonely. At times like this I often turn to your writing and this passage always gets me. ‘The sense of entrapment I feel is not Pete's fault but I want to blame someone and he is the only person I can apart from myself.’ Are you still working through feelings like this in the US and any fresh insights?
100% I'm working through these feelings. I've moved to DC to be with Pete and it might not come as a surprise that he works very, very hard and is away a lot of the time. I'm currently on my fourth week of him being away, and that's really, really hard. And yes, that leads to massive feelings of exhaustion - I'm not going to use the word burnout because mothers aren't allowed to burn out, are they? They just have to keep going. It's interesting that you can't burn out.
So what do you do? You have to keep going - but it does lead to feelings of exhaustion and resentment, and the only way to work through that is to keep bloody well talking about it, and to be able to voice your frustration and your upset and your resentment; to have a row about it and to continue talking. Me and Pete have been having a row about it in the last few days. He was in Texas and I'm here in DC, but we're still arguing about it on the many different forms of communication that we have with one another. It's not nice. I'm sure that many of us have experienced a kind of WhatsApp row where you just fire off really horrible messages at each other. That is not a nice thing to experience and be part of and partake in, but I absolutely do that, knowing that this is the sort of status quo of parenting. It is really draining.
One of the things that I look to is my elder children who are 20 and 23. They don't drain me; they just bring me complete and utter joy. And I often think when I'm driving to yet another karate lesson, throwing yet another plate of uneaten food in the bin, dealing with meltdowns and freak outs about homework and not eating food (that is one of the worst things; when you've cooked food and they won't eat it!) fighting, everything we have to deal with as parents, you have to be able to vent your frustrations, I think is really really important. But also to realise that when your children are older, there are these golden beings; the feelings I have for my elder children make me feel incredibly blessed and lucky to have them in my life. To be their mother is the most profoundly inspiring and exciting and fun and moving experience. So sometimes when the kind of domestic grind of day-to-day life now is really, really getting me down, I think, ‘well, these small beings will become these big beings and then I won't be driving them to karate forever!’
Another thing I also once saw was somebody talking about when your kids are older, you think, “Oh, I'd do anything to have a single day back when those little people were around.” This is really, really useful when you're just thinking, I can't do the school run yet again. I cannot cook supper again. I cannot have a fight over homework again. Imagine THIS is that day (for me it would be in my late 50s because I'm in my late 40s now and I've still got small children), this is the one day that you're being given back. Imagine yourself 10 or 15 years on from now thinking, ‘Oh, I'd do anything for a special day back with the children’. This is the day. Here it is! Do the school run. Make the packed lunch.
And that helps me process that frustration. But it's not easy. All of us mums are in the same boat, I think, is helpful. And let's face it, that boat is full of mums - I don't think it's full of dads!!
Next, says “I have a husband who also works away for long periods of time it's affected our relationship badly to the point I don't know how we can ever get back. I can't bear the thought of being away from my children, the only thing that's helping me live in what feels like a loveless marriage. elp when do i know it's done how do you rekindle connection when someone has been absent for so long that it feels easier without them.”
I also know that. This is something that I write about in my new book, The Giant on the Skyline, which is coming out in May; the sense of independence that you have to create when you're doing a lot of life or parenting on your own. I described it as being like a capsule; you cannot dissolve into the place of relief and support that you're in when that other person is there. I do feel that from Pete when he's here. I love being with him, but in order to survive the periods of him being away, I have to make myself quite independent and it is really really hard.
I just think the most important thing that you can do is to talk to that person. I know when me and Pete are fighting it's because we're spending too much time apart. One evening together and straight away we feel connected again. Also helps to know that this is a phase, and that we will get through this phase.
This came up in my podcast interview, which I did with Rob Delaney, on Tiny Acts of Bravery, who is really, really good on relationships. He's really good on grief, but he's also really good on relationships. He talked about the frustrations of marriage and the temptation of looking towards somebody else, and thinking that somebody else is this exciting source of relief and pleasure. And I've had this conversation with a couple of friends who've been in relationships where they feel like they're pushed into a place which feels a bit loveless by circumstance, rather than because they’ve fallen out of love with each other.
You know, it's to do with working too hard or being too stretched. Pushing through this place, pushing through this place where things have become really ragged and exhausted and unromantic and unloving seems to me where commitment also gets really interesting. That if you can push through this place, if you can try and connect, if you can try and connect beyond the resentment, maybe there's a really, really interesting place that you get to there.
And actually, this is what I'm exploring in my new writing. Commitment means not just for the times that you're together and everything's fun and it's easy, but through the hard times as well. I don't think that you should have to endure a loveless marriage. Life is really fucking short and it's here to be lived.
I left a marriage in my 20s because of addiction issues, and I knew that that marriage couldn't work because of those addiction issues. And I don't regret that, because it wouldn't have worked, but if you fundamentally like each other, get on with each other, support each other, fancy each other and have respect for each other, fundamentally those are really really valuable things to hold on to. I'm not a relationship guru but the value in finding someone that you love and being with them is massive, isn't it?
This life is lonely and hard and me and Pete spend a ton of time apart and I don't like that, but I really, really, really profoundly value my relationship with him. And even when I'm very angry with him and he's very angry with me (which happens all the time!) we are, you know, start adopting quite American phrases. We got each other's back. He is my person. He's got me and I've got him. Even when you're just texting messages, you're like, fuck off, I hate you. You know, we're normal people, that happens. So trying to see each other through the mist of resentment feels really, really important. I hope that helps.
has said that she loves the generous, intimate, heartfelt honesty of my writing, which I love to hear, and that's why I do it. She asked; ”I wonder how you feel when it's been born from that deep interiority and then offered to the world to be read by thousands, maybe millions. I find this an awesome thought and try to imagine what that contrast must be like, perhaps cathartic, perhaps deeply exposing, but connecting. It feels incredibly brave.”
She's asking me how I feel about exposing myself, and the heartfelt honesty of my writing. I feel, and when it's been born from a sense of interiority, I think that when we write in a really, really open-hearted way and you show the parts of yourself that you keep hidden from other people - you may even keep hidden from yourself - I don't find it scary because I know that I'm human, and what I feel is what you feel as well.
I don't feel shame about it because I know that in a sense, the more vulnerable I am, the more human I am. And the more human I am, in a way, the more beautiful I am. I wrote about this in The Red of My Blood, actually, when I was lying in bed, feeling devastated and broken after Nell had died and my face was just puffy with crying and crying for days and covered in snot.
And I remember having a feeling when I wrote about it later, (I didn't have the feeling at the time, but later when I wrote about it) that I am incredibly human now and I'm incredibly vulnerable and I'm in incredible pain. And that makes me incredibly beautiful, and that's what I'm trying to find in my writing.
And that's what I try to find in interesting art is not perfection, it's humanity - that is really, really profoundly important to me. So that's a really, really lovely question.Thank you very much for that.
That's made me think further about something - to expose ourselves as human is perceived as a brave thing to do, but maybe isn't a brave thing to do. It's a massively humane thing to do. I hope that's helpful.
And has asked ‘how has poetry helped you to see grief as a jewel and helps you heal? Does the act of reading poems help or that you find lines of poems resonate or both?’
Poetry is essential for me to understand myself, to understand my writing, to understand the way that I work, think, be, feel. Poetry is very fast; it's not like wading through a massively long novel.
I see poetry as little darts of emotion and darts of understanding that hit me, and are incredibly beautiful to live with as well. Poetry changes my writing; I teach a really interesting poetry exercise on my memoir writing course about how to use poetry to instantly change the way that you write and improve the quality of your writing.
No time spent reading poetry is wasted is my belief - you'll learn so much about yourself, about creativity, about how to be human and it's like a shortcut isn't it? There are there are some poems I particularly love; especially Philip Larkin's High Windows, and Snow by Louis Moniz; those are four verses of poetry which just explain, and question, and help you understand what it means to be a human. I love the fact that in the time you’re cooking some pasta or, standing around waiting for the children put their fucking shoes on in the morning (why do you have to ask them to put their shoes on every morning??) you can read a poem in that time. I have to say don't always read a poem in that time though - I often stand there with like smoke coming out of my ears!
But if you CAN read a poem in that time, something will shift inside you. It's like internal yoga. I've never thought of that before, but poetry IS like internal yoga. Read poetry and it will slide into your writing. When I was writing The Red of My Blood, I read a lot of Middle English poetry like Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf and Pearl, and that all definitely, definitely fed into my understanding of death and love and life and has helped me so much.
I personally like anthologies because you can just read a ton of different poets in one space; you don't kind of get stuck in one voice, but I hope that's useful.
has said “I'm so curious about any of your takeaways about the US after living there for several months. Has your time here shifted preconceived ideas? Has anything surprised you about the place, the culture, but also yourself? I'm American but spent a chunk of my schooling in the UK and have felt my heart tugged between the two throughout my life. I'd love to hear how you continue to navigate this path.”
So interesting. Moving to America is much bigger than I thought it would be, much harder, much more of a culture shock.
I thought that when I ripped the plaster off of leaving Oxfordshire, (which as many of you know, I didn't want to do), I thought, ‘Well, how hard can it be to set up a bank account and get kids into school and kind of create a new life? And surely it'll just be endlessly exciting!’ But it's been really, really, really hard.
The culture shock of learning how people communicate and communication is a key thing for me. Not being understood when we're speaking the same language, not understanding sensibilities, behaviour around friendships and relationships, the kind of things that matter to people are all really, really different.
I find it really fascinating being here, and generally I enjoy it, but I have also found it very, very difficult, and I felt very lonely, very confused.
I live in DC where the bureaucracy is just insane - to do anything, to get to park a car, to get a child into a school, to file homework, to sign a kid up for a basketball class requires massive amounts of bureaucracy, and I am not very good at bureaucracy at all! I'm not very good at filling in forms. So that's been really difficult. I've also just missed my home. I've missed my community. I've missed being able to have like little quick jokes with people that I see around about the place.
Trying to fathom and understand this vast place is; it's such an interesting place, America, because it is so full of so many different people and races and nationalities and religions and creeds and genders, and it's mind-boggling.
It's so unlike England, and it does make England seem very small, and kind of confusingly small. And now when I look at the thought of going back to England, I sometimes think, ‘My God, is it really claustrophobic?’
Actually, I think people in England are really brilliant at communication, and really brilliantly emotionally connected to one another, and I do miss that a bit here. I also feel that really strange thing of being an expat - I never thought I'd be one.
But I feel really tugged. I once said to Dolly, my older daughter who is living in England, ‘how do you feel?’ And she said ‘I'm pulled between the two places.’ And I feel like that as well. I go back to England quite a lot because of my children; my elder children are there and also a lot of my work is there. I've been back to England three times since we've lived here, and I'm going back twice in May, and that's actually quite difficult, the moving around.
But I'm fascinated by America; by the vastness of it. I love the emphasis on people want you to succeed, whereas in England, people do not want you to succeed. They want you to cut you down if you succeed.
And sometimes in the US it becomes very exhausting because the kind of transactional nature of some relationships, but I like the fact that you have an idea, you want to go for it, then fucking go for it and we're going to help you. That's really, really cool. In England, it's like, who do you think you are?
I miss the way people dress in England; people in DC wear a lot of like sports gear, and I ended up wearing sports gear. When I see somebody walking down the street wearing print, I was like, ‘oh, love it!’
I miss the emotional connections of my female friendships. I miss the countryside. But there's a lot about England I really like, a lot about America that I really, really like, and I feel incredibly grateful for the opportunity to immerse myself fully in both cultures.
I know England really, really well. And it's exciting to kind of not just be here for a holiday or even three months, but a protracted period of time. It's a privilege; I feel lucky. Seven months in, we are beginning to feel a bit more acclimatised; to start with you feel disassociated from things, and you walk around this beautiful city just feeling ‘What does this all mean? Who am I? Why am I here? How did I get from a little tiny muddy village in Oxfordshire to being outside the Whitehouse? It's really confusing but it's good to stretch your mind.
asks: ‘Would you ever, spin the bottle vibe she says, change to fiction? And what are your thoughts on Nom de Plume?
My life feels like wild and weird and interesting enough that why do I need to fictionalise it?
Just more and more, I want to read non-fiction. I pick up novels, and there's something that frustrates me about the fact that this isn't real, that the author hasn't put their actual name to this as their experience. So I really, really want to read nonfiction. I think that the parameters and the edges of memoir are so interesting, and I'm interested in pushing those out as far as I can, which I have done in The Giant on the Skyline as well, which I hope lots of you will read.
So at the moment, non-fiction all the way! But I'd be interested to know whether anybody thinks I should write fiction. What do you think?
says ‘I'm a fifth generation Washingtonian, so I'd like to know which neighborhood you choose to live in, what you're enjoying most about D.C. living, and of course, what is most bothersome and annoying?
I think I covered that a little bit in a previous answer, but I'm in Northwest D.C.
We chose it for the school -the kids are all at state school which is really important to me, and that they're at local American schools.
Anybody who's followed me for a while from Instagram will know that I am incredibly pro state school, or as you call it here in America, public school system.
I like DC. I don't like the mosquitoes in the summer, and I'm obviously dreading them, although I do like the cicadas and the crickets. I love the cherry blossom, which is all happening at the moment. I like the sense of the presidential cavalcades that you see whipping around. I don't like the fact that people can be quite unfriendly though.
I like the metro. I like the fact you can get out of DC really fast into the countryside. There's a lot that I like about it; I think it's beautiful. I like the sense of nature all around you. It's surprising that there's huge trees everywhere -I wasn't expecting that. I think the kids were expecting that we were moving to like Manhattan and DC does not look like Manhattan! I like Rock Creek Park and Great Falls. So yes, there's much that I love.
asked me four questions, so I'm going to just choose one of them.’Is there anything you miss from your years as a single parent? If you could sum up that period of your time, what one word would it be?’
My word for describing my life as a single parent was joyful. I felt so much joy. I went from a marriage that was very… chaotic let's say, to being on my own with the two children and having to support them on my own - and honestly I absolutely loved that feeling. I was working very, very hard, and I found it very exciting; the sense that I could totally support these kids on my own - I really enjoyed my closeness to them the fact that it was me and the kids there was no kind of generational barrier between us.
I am exceptionally close to my elder two children, and I'm sure that's partly because of being a single mother. They used to sometimes go and spend time with their grandparents on their dad's side, who are absolutely lovely and who I'm very close to, and I'm close to their dad as well.
So they had time with him, and then I had some time on my own; it's quite lovely, that as a single parent - that you can work really, really hard, have this really close time as a mother, and then you get a weekend on your own.
I wouldn't mind a weekend on my own now, but I'm not going to get divorced for it - but it's quite valuable!
More than anything, it was just this complete love and joy that I felt for those children. And weirdly, there's something about single parenting which I personally found quite liberating, because I was totally on my own. I don't really feel any resentment towards my ex-husband because it was just me - I was just dealing with it.
In a way, when you're doing a lot of parenting on your own, it can be harder within a relationship because there's an expectation. Having said that, I'm very happy in my marriage now. I love my marriage now; anybody who reads my work will know how much I love Pete, but being a single mother was really, a joyful and really beautiful time.
A big part of that is because Jimmy and Dolly are amazing people. They're funny, they're wild, they're empathetic, they're creative, they're brilliant, brilliant people.And I think they made it fun for me.
I'll answer a couple more of your questions, Isabel.
What are your current thoughts on the afterlife and how has that changed over time?
Oh, I think there's something out there, isn't there? I can't believe that all of this energy just goes and is over; I think there's something there. I do believe that when you die, you go, ‘oh yes, this is what it was like. This is what it's all about.’
There's a realisation. And then you go from that place of like deep realisation and relief into a state where you become a white flickering light.
The only way that I can describe this is you know those strip lights - we've actually got one in the barn at home -they always flicker, don't they? People used to have them in their kitchens in the 80s, or butchers - I think that you become a bit of a flickering strip light of ecstasy. That's what I hope anyway.
What do I think about soulmates?
I do think Pete is my soulmate. I was thinking about this the other day; I was walking around thinking, you know, is there just one person for you? I think it's too rigid to say like there is one soulmate and that, and you've got to find that one person, and if you don't find that person, there's nobody. Actually, I think that's complete bullshit. We change, what we want changes, who we are changes.
There could be a life where you have multiple soulmates - I don't know. In my first marriage, I think I felt like I had my soulmate. I've been out with other people who I felt like were my soulmate . I feel like in my marriage now, he is my soulmate - definitely. But I don't think there's only one, one person for you.
Thank you very much for these questions - I'm going to answer the rest of them next time, because I think more than half an hour might be a bit long! But I've really, really enjoyed answering and I hope that you've enjoyed this too.
Let me know whether you like these videos here on Substack, because it's quite fun doing it! And I’d love to hear your reaction to any of my answers in the comments here.
You Asked Me Anything! And I answered: Part One