Whilst sorting through drawers of paperwork, I find some ancient stories that I wrote at university as an undergraduate. I don’t remember writing them and, on reading them, I have no memory of sitting at my brick-like laptop or of going to the 24-hour computer room and typing out the specific words. But I vaguely recognise my own memories – a teenage friendship, a funeral I really went to – though am taken aback at the vitriol, at the specificity with which I render them. Every detail merciless. Was I so hurt, by that betrayal? Then I realise how much closer I would have been to the events, back then.
I barely ever write poems these days, but I find pages and pages of them from the same time, excruciatingly personal, and am retrospectively mortified that I not just wrote them, but handed them in to my tutors; that I gave them dossiers of my heartbreaks, my depressions, my agonies, in ways not even thinly-described. I write sad love poems about someone who is clearly, identifiably, another student in the cohort. Now, I can barely remember how it felt to yearn for them. Yearning is still my default state, or has been, but perhaps I am getting further away from it. (I write poems barely ever, but not never. Maybe the end of yearning lives in never.)
Summer of colour’s re-saturation, of having the motivation to carry out small, sometimes impulsive, tasks. I paint my walls and floors with rough squares – shades of butter yellow, deep red, the pale green you see on window shutters in houses in the south of France. I am reluctantly influenced by the names: baked cherry, custard, three different variations of aquamarine. Outside the house there are flowers flourishing in unloved patches of dirt. Fruit weighs down the trees overhanging the river now as I walk along it in the early morning, the pale blue heatwave sky burning off its clouds. I carelessly plant seeds in my own garden, not to the specifications of the instructions. Carelessly is the only way I know and they sprout, anyway, though I don’t know what’s growing. Being about to leave, I’ll miss the whole window of their blossoming. But I check every day, regardless, to see if any miracle happened overnight.
Among five hundred redundant letters from my bank I find a copy of the 10,000 word novella that would become my first novel, unpublished, carefully illustrated by me with a map and a drawing of a monster. There’s a notebook full of thoughts I had for subsequent drafts when it had grown into a novel, more than a decade ago. I was 22 when I finished a full novel draft for the first time, and I still remember feeling that I was already behind on my own overambitious scheduling. But during that first drafting I discovered that I loved the process of a long project – how ideas would evolve into other ideas, how at times I would be so absorbed that the novel’s world would be overlaid over the real one. Days, weeks, where the problem wasn’t finding motivation to write, but having to leave my laptop in order to resentfully exist.
22 when I finished that first draft, but I didn’t sell a book until I was 28, a different book, which was The Water Cure. During those six years I learned much more about writing, and about my own voice. Trial and error and instinct and time. I learned how to sustain a narrative, how following a tangent might reveal the book’s actual heart. I also learned how to start again when the project that took up so much of my twenties was, devastatingly, over. I realised how much I loved writing, truly, because beyond the failure I wanted more than anything to return to that place of absorption, to have a new idea on the horizon. I still feel like that now.
After the first unpublished novel I wrote three novels from start to finish in five years. Looking back it feels like the ideas for them came effortlessly, but looking at the notebooks in the h sorted drawers it appears I am misremembering, the same way I’ve forgotten the intensity of that teenage friendship, of the funeral. I had to work for the ideas; they changed, slippery, reiterated and embellished and simplified again until they were unrecognisable from the original.
There are also newspaper clippings and magazines with reviews of my novels, including a copy of the New York Times from 2019, which already seems like an artefact. It pleases me to see them side by side with a copy of that first tiny novella that would cause me such happiness, and such pain.
At Hollybush Gardens I see a Rosemary Mayer exhibition, and though her draped sculptures of fabric and fibreglass are beautiful I find myself most drawn to her notes, where she listed Currently on my mind:
Limits of approximation in shapes... Could it also be form seen as itself?... angels, The Isenheim Altarpiece, the way Grunewald makes fabric float, which I would like to do in pieces; how in the drawings the fabric does float, denies its weight.
Being at the end of one creative project and thinking about what comes next, there’s a simplicity and playfulness in her list that reassures me. Maybe it is that easy, and I’m just overthinking it: you think about what you’d like to do, and then you do it. Though the world still cracks me open, I worry that age has made me sadder, stupider, less receptive to whatever magic is out there.
What’s on my mind? I think after, making my own list, self-conscious. Shame / asceticism / painterly quality of sentence / visitations, coincidences, mystics / end of the world
How it’s possible to feel such disillusionment and grief at the world, and still be struck by the immediate beauty of so much of it. How it’s possible to feel happy, to enjoy life, even as people are slaughtered in real time elsewhere. How it’s possible to look forward to the future without really understanding that the future, as we picture it, may already be gone.
Summer of dawn waking, bright light, clear-headed on the nightbus, prone to gentle mania, buoyant, amazed at the dragonflies as they circle the river’s water, crying at the news, worse at talking to strangers, better at talking to my friends, less fun, I worry sometimes when I leave something early, not missing obliteration so much as the possibility that the lead up to obliteration was filled with.
Feeling calm, going away. Leaving with two recent documents in my laptop with titles and the grand caveat A Novel, as if to try and give them legitimacy, but neither are further along than scraps. Still, it’s a start. This is how a novel begins, though it’s easy to panic, easy to forget.
I finish my edits at the desk I barely wrote any of my latest novel at. Life sent me elsewhere! But I wrote mainly the very start at it, four years ago. And now, finally, I write the very end.
gorgeous <3
Perhaps still yearning, but differently.