This is the second half of the Ask Me Anything questions - I've just broken them down into two halves so it's not too long of a deal… I've also changed my cardigan!
Jane says, was it a gradual thing where you just had enough of living apart from Pete that made you decide to move? Or did you wake up one day and say enough?
No, it was a long process. Although I wake up every day and say ‘enough’, right? ‘Enough! That's it! I absolutely cannot tolerate any more of this any longer!’
And then you also find yourself tolerating tons more of it, ad infinitum. That was one of the things I wrote about in My Wild and Sleepless Nights was as a mother, how you say you’re at the end of my tether - but you always find there's like a lot more of your tether to be thrown out there. It's never really final, is it?
We definitely did get to a point where we said, ‘Something has to change, this amount of time apart is too difficult.’ But of course, it was a gradual process. We'd been talking about it for a few years, back when my sister was alive. I remember being in a queue to a post office in Stanford in the Vale near where we live and talking to Pete about it, standing in this post office queue and crying and just saying, ‘I can't go and live away because Nell's here and she's very ill - I can't, I don't want to leave.’ And then she died and then the pandemic happened, and then grief overwhelmed me, and there were lots of other things going on; it was a long process.
And I write about that process in The Giant on The Skyline and what it took to make that decision. Because for me, leaving this landscape, you can see the landscape of my home behind me, it's so different from the pavements of DC and the landscapes of America. I didn't want to leave the community that I love and the people that I love.The animals and the landscapes that I love, but I DID want to be with the person that I love, so here I am.
I don’t think any kind of decision like that can be a snap decision. Once you've made the decision, then you can move forward to it, but you have to make the decision first. And for me, that was a big organic process of many, many conversations and words shared and emotions shared.
says, ‘Having been through so much trauma in your life, I'd love to know what has helped you to navigate it all with such apparent resilience. How have you borne the pain and loss and not ended up a complete mess? And how did you find the strength to navigate really dangerous times in your life?’Well, I think it's debatable whether I am a complete mess, because I often feel like a complete mess! What you read of my words is my heavily, heavily, heavily processed work, and there are many times when I feel a complete mess. And I have no answers to any of this, I think that's really, really important to say. We all want answers from other people, whether it's like writers or parents or people in authority or gurus or spiritual leaders.
I really don't think any of us have any answers. We're just trying to figure it all out. And I know I don't have any answers at all, but you can watch me figuring it out, I suppose! I guess that's kind of what I'm doing in my writing.
But resilience isn't something that you're just born with, I think. You gather it; you gather it. Life threw a lot of challenges at me as a young woman in my teens, which was mainly a terrible accident my mum had when I was in my teens, which is the basis for my first book, which is called The Wild Other. She had a massive brain injury when I was 16, and I had to learn how to live without her, which wasn't something that I could comprehend. You know, I used to say to her, ‘I just love you so much - if you die, I'll die.’ And I really believed that to be true.
But also when we were kids, she encouraged us, me and Nell, to really believe in ourselves. I hope I'm doing the same with my kids. She encouraged us but I don't think she spoiled us. Our childhood was quite tough in some ways and emotionally - she could be quite tough with us. We were very much told to get up and get on with things. But she also really, really loved us. And I think that that love that you give your children is like the basis of resilience, I suppose.
My mum died in 2013 after being profoundly ill for 22 years. We had a string of other catastrophes; my aunt, her sister was killed in a terrible accident. Pete had an awful accident, which he survived, but he had terrible injuries. Nell had secondary cancer.And then when Nell died, it was like, it was like, this is too much. This is like a tsunami of loss that's kind of engulfing us.
But having lived through that, I do feel now a gratitude to being alive. I'm 48 years old and I'm alive and I'm grateful for that. And I also know that things will be okay. I think that's fundamentally the thing that helps me is the knowledge that everything will be okay.
The worst thing that can happen or something really profoundly awful can happen and yet we go on. That's partly what my podcast, Tiny Acts of Bravery is about - how do we find the strength to go on? There are great people that I've interviewed on there who talk about this and the different massive challenges they've they've faced, but there’s that sense that life does go on revealing itself as a beautiful and strange and surprising place is, for me, at the heart of resilience. You can be in the pits of despair and the knowledge that it changes is the most important thing that you can hold onto.
A hard thing to find when you're in a really, really dark place, but look around you, look around at other people; for me, I think that's really, really key.
says ‘Your writing about your sister has made me appreciate mine all the more. I have three and I'd love to know if you have boundaries about your private life, whether you simply feel comfortable sharing everything.
No, I don't share everything at all. I will share stuff about my own life, but there are relationships I don't talk about and there are things that I don't talk about.
Of course I have some boundaries, but I judge those boundaries. I work out creatively, emotionally and spiritually what it is that I personally want to express. And honestly, you don't want to hear everything, believe me!
My work is here to hopefully to guide you, to entertain you, to inspire you. And I really, really hope that I am also creating art. I do think of myself as an artist and I'm really interested by when we can say “I’m an artist.” Maybe it's something that I will write about!
With The Red of My Blood, I felt like I was moving towards it, and even more so with my new book. I know that the way that I'm processing and expressing things is art.
But ultimately yes, there are definitely 100% boundaries around things.
Theresa asks whether I feel that sobriety has affected my writing process in any way.
Yes! I wrote about this actually at length last week (you can read that post here).It was about how I see sobriety as a kind of liquid creative space, which I couldn't have accessed if I had stayed in a space of drinking, and I'm really excited by that.
I know that what alcohol for me does; it creates a barrier between me and the world by my lived experience, my lived relationships, my lived processing of the sky or the blossom or the cup of coffee I just had. It changes everything.
And when I stopped drinking, I took that barrier away, and that's been a good feeling. I would definitely say read that post, and also this post on when I stopped drinking.
has asked: if you could travel in time, where would you go? Who would you meet and what would you say?
If I could travel in time, I'd go and see my mum and I would go and see my sister and I would just say to them that I love them. That's all.
has said: are you looking forward to Guernsey Literary Festival?
I am most certainly looking forward to Guernsey Literary Festival! I will be talking with Emma Gannon on the 4th of May in England. So do please come along to that if you can (tickets are available here) and I'll post up here at some point about the events I’ll be doing around my new book The Giant on the Skyline.
asks: I'd love to know if you feel you'll always write memoir.
I kind of answered this in a previous question, but I am really fascinated by memoir - I love it. I'm embarking on my fifth at the moment although I don't really think this is memoir, I think it's writing about life and all of life is fascinating.
At the moment, I also think there are so many really... bad novels, and I don't want to add to the pile of bad novels! I don't feel like I've got to write a novel, and I know very well from experience that writing is incredibly difficult, and you've got to want that really, really badly. You've got to want to write that book really, really badly in order to do it.
So for me at the moment, memoir is a place I love to be, but I'm using new forms. The Giant on the Skyline has got new ways of expressing myself in it that I'm really proud of, and I really hope that you will read it.
asks ‘what does your husband do in Washington? And are your children learning to express themselves as beautifully as you? I teach primary grades and wonder how to encourage this creativity.’
My husband is a spy (that's what everyone thinks he is!) but he isn't. I'm not going to talk about his work though because that's his work. He works in Washington and in London in the environmental sector, and he's doing really important, brilliant work.
In terms of creativity with the kids, I mean, I wish you could see my kitchen table now. It's a mess of... musical instruments, art, books, flowers, candles and I'm hoping that this kind of lyrical environment that they're in will encourage them, encourage their creativity. I also try and read to them although I find it pretty wearing at the end of a long day reading to three children.
But I do, and I talk to them about poetry. I talk to them about the way that I process things. But children are not very interested in work - that's my experience. They're really not very interested in what I do at all; as long as I'm there for them, that's what they like. I think reading poetry is probably the best thing you can do to enable and encourage children to express themselves - and paint and not be exhausted by the mess of it.
I think you've said that you're a teacher so I'm sure that you're really brilliant at that, but sometimes there's that feeling at home, like, Oh God, can't get the paints out. It's just so much mess. Yes, it is, but mess doesn't really matter. Does your head in, but it's really important for the kids!
So do it, but reading poetry… reading poetry for everybody, basically.
says: ‘It's evident that you faced many challenges and came out stronger. Is there anything specific you'd like to discuss or highlight from your experience?
I think what my experiences of loss and trauma are, is that I would do anything to have my mother and my sister back, but life doesn't work like that. This is the life that I've been given.
And after the... really considerable loss, and sense of grief of the loss of my sister, there is the brutal knowledge, that I am still alive. I will be dead soon, but right now I'm still alive, and I need to go on working and creating and being and enjoying and loving and laughing. And I know that sounds, like those naff Live, Laugh, Love signs, but honestly just laugh, laugh, laugh, try and live as much as possible.
Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day asks Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life? Life is brief. The time we have here and Nell's death, my sister's death really, really reminded me of that. So just enjoy it, and also when you're going through a time, which isn't really tough, there might be normal little frustrations, but enjoy those bits.
It's very easy to get frustrated and upset and stressed out by the small things; I had tons of trouble with my car and had to spend two days sitting in a mechanic's office trying to work in his office while he was working on my car. I got really stressed out about it but you know - fuck it, it doesn't matter, it really fucking doesn't matter. So try to brush that stuff aside, and when you're going through a good period, when the wind is in your sails and you're moving forward, to acknowledge it and enjoy it - enjoy life.
And sobriety definitely helps me do that. I just went into the kitchen and ate a piece of dry toast with a bit of butter on it. It was actually surprisingly delicious for a piece of dry toast with butter on it. You know, I've got a kitchen to walk into and a piece of dry toast to eat with butter. And I'm lucky. I don't mean gratitude exactly, but just inhabiting the moment in some way or another, even if it is just a piece of dry toast.
says ‘I've seen on Instagram some of the trips you've made with the children exploring the countryside in your new home with the ever present tea flask, of course. I'd love to know if the new landscape is speaking to you in your writing yet when the place you lived in before had such a deep personal connection for you.
It's that is so interesting because I love it here in many ways. I love the landscape. I love going out into Virginia. I love it, I find it really, really beautiful. I find Virginia really appealing, but it's almost as though something inside you doesn't want to attach yourself to it because I won't live here forever.
I’d attached myself to England, in South Oxfordshire, where I lived; I'd fully attached myself to that place and in a way, I was taken away from it.
I know that I will go back to it, but one of the things I find strange of living the life of an expat is the impermanence of it. In England, I felt like the area of the Ridgeway and the Hills where we lived knew me, and I knew it, and I had absorbed it, and it had absorbed me because I'd spent so much of the good parts of my life there.
And this is something I write about really at length in The Giant on The Skyline is that feeling , and what IS that feeling? But I do like the landscape here and it is speaking to me.
What I'm finding interesting is that when I left England, I was a bit worried if I was going to be able to write another book? I wrote four books in quick succession when we moved to South Oxfordshire, and I'm sure that that landscape encouraged and nurtured and fed my creativity, and helped me to find my voice.
When we got here to the pavements and the White House and the city, was that going to go? I felt quite nervous about that. But I feel very excited because something has changed, it’s come up and shown itself to me, because I was attending to it as a way of expressing something that I want to write about and a new way of expressing something I want to write about.
So I feel pretty excited and pretty challenged by that. It's a difficult thing to do. I don't know if I can pull it off but I'm going to do my best to try and that's an exciting feeling.
And I enjoy that sense that the boundary between myself and the world that I'm in kind of dissolving in some way. I think for me, my creativity, the place where I find it most satisfying, most interesting, where I can push it further, where I can get out of the shallow water into the deeps, is that dissolution of self. The dissolution of self into... something else. For me in The Giant on The Skyline, it was in the hills, these hills in one of Anna Dylan's wonderful pictures.
But now it's in the dissolution of myself into a different place and space. It excites me a lot, that feeling, and that has to do with sobriety as well.
said ‘I'm interested to know more about your sobriety journey, and if you don't drink wine over meals.’
I definitely don't drink anything at all. If I drank wine over meals, I'd want to drink wine after the meals and before the meals. I'm a very all or nothing person, and for me, it has been much easier to just completely get rid of it.
And I've enjoyed that feeling a lot. I like the extremities of it - the extremity is almost addictive in itself. You can take it really far by being really, really sober.
When you go into a really, really sober place, how much more extreme is your feeling? I like that.
Ellie says, do you think at some point you have to stop or pause writing memoir in order to experience more things to write about them, otherwise it becomes a bit meta and becomes a memoir about writing memoir, if you see what I mean, or maybe that would be an interesting in itself. Also, do you think being a memoirist now affects how you live your life and respond to things because you do so through a frame of ‘how will I write about this?’
That's such an interesting question. And in the last three memoirs I've written, there are no major life events.
I would say that The Wild Other is full of big dramatic life events, like my mum's accident and my reaction to that and the pretty wild stuff that I did after her accident, and in the processing of trauma throughout my twenties and thirties.
In My Wild and Sleepless Nights, in The Red of My Blood, in The Giant on the Skyline, things happen, life stuff happens. Lester is born, Jimmy is expelled. It covers a period when my sister died. We moved to the states, but also none of those things are like particularly remarkable in themselves. They are the stuff of life and death.
So what I'm writing about is not the drama of these incidents, but the drama of the feeling of this stuff. That is what I'm really fascinated by; we're all feeling a ton of stuff all the time. Who isn't? It's 11 o'clock in the morning here in DC and I've felt a fuck of a lot of stuff already. Just getting the children to school!
I see my internal landscape as really extraordinary hills and plains and ravines that I must cross and I must get through. I think if you can write, if you can express yourself, then the decision of whether we should move from Oxfordshire to DC in itself becomes interesting. That question fundamentally is not actually that interesting.
Which location geographically you're going to be living in. If you put it on a spreadsheet, it'd be really fucking boring. But if you then use that as a trigger to understand home, and belonging, and childhood, and memory, and time, and nostalgia, and what you make in a home and kids leaving home - it all becomes interesting. I hope it does anyway! I really, really hope that you'll read the book.
I don't think that life is like a finite resource of topics that can be written about. It feels infinite. Again, I think this is linked to sobriety and the feeling everything opening up. I've had really, really great feedback from the book, The Giant on The Skyline, which people are saying it's my best book I've written so far which I'm really excited about, how I can explore this internal landscape.
And I came to that idea when I wrote My Wild and Sleepless Nights. I'd written The Wild Other, which was very full of drama and action and plot and locations and different countries. And then My Wild and Sleepless Nights is about being a mother. In that book, Lester is born, Jimmy is expelled, nothing else really happens. But you see my internal life and you see all the stuff that I go through as a parent, as a mum so it feels like a very adventurous book and a very brave book, which I know because of the reaction I have had from people.
So no, I don't think there is a finite quantity of stuff that you can write about. I do wonder whether I process my life differently thinking, well, I'll write about this.
When I'm going through the my day, I don't usually think, ‘oh, I'll write about that little exchange, I'll write about that.’ There's a scene in The Red in My Blood where three horses walked into our yard. In the morning before school, these three black horses walked into our yard, and at the time it was just a bit dramatic. These three horses were in the yard; the children were all shrieking and running around so I went outside and shut the gate to our yard and the horses were there. At the time I was just living it and feeling it. Later on, months on I would say, I thought, ‘wow, that was full of metaphorical significance - that was vast. I can turn that into art.’
And so there has to be a period of processing. Otherwise it would become very contrived and you would start going and doing things in order to write about it, which I don't want to. It has to feel and be real. It has to be my real life.
I've got a question from ‘I worry about my kids reading my writing ... sometimes I blitz the place and burn rants - do you? I LOVE your work ... sometimes I think you are me (weird) ... are you??’
I actually love that question, Cherry, because the fact that you have seen yourself so much in my writing is incredibly flattering and exciting and wonderful, because I write to connect with other people.
And for me, when I'm going all the paranoia, all the anxiety, all the depression, all the... rage, the lust, the excitement, the boredom. I write about it and then my thoughts go into your head. Then I feel that by a process of osmosis, your thoughts go into my head.
They particularly do if you send me a message on Instagram, or on here, or we meet at a book event or in real life. I believe that your thoughts connect with my thoughts, even if we never communicate about it.
This is a new idea that I've come up with and I really, really love this feeling. I'm really convinced by it and it's why life writing, memoir writing makes you feel less lonely - and why the reader is so important. For me, people reading my work is incredibly important.
I've become really obsessed by the work of Mark Rothko, the great, great artist recently, and I've read a lot about the fact that he wanted people to see his work and he really wanted people to react to it - I found that really moving and really beautiful, that it was other people's reactions to the emotion of his work which was really important to him. It's really important to me too; I'm not comparing myself to Rothko but I do feel affected by him.
Also, asked ‘how have you found the transition of living with Pete full time? Have you found anything difficult about it that you weren't expecting?
I'd love to say that I'm living with Pete full time, but since moving to DC, I am reminded that he's a very busy person and he travels a lot.
I wish that I was. Actually, you know, the time that we spend together is wonderful and the parenting that we do together is wonderful and I love being with him more than anybody else alive, but sometimes I feel like I'm always running after Pete, trying to hold on; you know, falling on the ground and catching his ankles as he just leaves the door. That's what it's like being in relationship with Pete.
Anyway, thank you so much for these questions - if you've stayed with me through this all, then I'm really delighted and I hope that you're doing something nice like having a cup of coffee or making some nice food. I like the idea that you might be listening to this while I'm just chatting away in the corner and then we're actually talking.
But if you want more, please send me any other questions. If you’d like me to do another one of these, then I would love that, if you've enjoyed it. Let me know!
Anyway, I'm going to do some writing now, and that's all.
xx
You Asked Me Anything! And I Answered: Part Two