#1: On writing for pleasure

I haven’t written anything for a long time. That’s not entirely true; I’ve written short pieces for journals and magazines, but I haven’t written anything in private, the kind of work that makes the world feel expansive, stepping into that limitless space that belongs only to me.

I finished my second novel to a tight deadline, during the coronavirus pandemic, moving between Spain and the UK. The book is densely interior, and the writing process was very intense; I scrapped a whole draft of the novel and re-wrote it in six months. I did the deepest work during those sickly post-lockdown days, when the world began to open up and we stepped shakily into it, unfamiliar to ourselves, our skin stretched too tightly across our faces.

I was living in a new city and I didn’t know many people. Unimaginable things kept happening to people around me; breakdowns, suicide, debilitating illness with no cure. The outside world was very uncertain, so I threw myself into the work and let it consume me, blocking out the fear and loss by turning inwards, which is how I have always coped. I ignored invitations to parties, the pub and dinners with new friends.  I sat at my desk, which was also the dining table, in the living room, which was also the kitchen. I turned writing into a kind of self-punishment, and I wore some essential part of myself out.

I tried to understand my shifting relationship to my work, after publishing my debut. I wrote Saltwater living alone in Donegal, on the north-west coast of Ireland. I had the sensation that the world had been spinning very fast, for most of my life, and suddenly, it began to slow down, allowing me to see clearly. I wasn’t thinking about potential publication. I was truly alone with the work and it was private, personal and unselfconscious. I didn’t know my strengths or weaknesses as a writer, didn’t truly understand my position. I just wrote every day and cycled along the mountain roads on my rusty bike. The days were bright and gleaming and the words came easily, hot and living.

Publishing Saltwater changed my life in many positive ways, but it changed my relationship to my writing too. It gave me (some) access to an elite world, where people began to listen to what I had to say. It gave me (some) money, confidence, new friends, time and cultural capital that generations of my family (none of whom went to university) could not have possibly dreamed of. Some people said generous things about my writing, but others told me it was navel-gazing and self-absorbed, while pushing me to write about my family and my personal experiences, with little regard for my emotional well-being.

I admire writers who don’t read their own reviews, but I find myself unable to resist, partly because my value is dictated by an establishment that, historically, did not allow people like myself or many of my peers to participate. Of course I care what other people think of me; my livelihood and the precarious cultural capital that I have accrued quite literally depend on it. The part of me that chases survival wants to assimilate into this world that has deemed me worthy of access, and another part of me feels deeply uneasy, wondering whether I am compromising the place I came from and the things I believe in to do so.

Yet, I did learn how to become a better writer. I worked with highly skilled editors and developed my own editorial eye. I began to articulate elements of craft that previously felt intuitive. I spotted some of the holes in my own work and understood how to make them better. But writing also became a means to an end; to meet a deadline, earn money, add another publication to my portfolio, to promote a novel, to get a job, taking me further away from what drew me to it in the first place.

My novels are loosely semi-autobiographical, which further complicated my relationship to writing. My fictional worlds blurred with reality and it became difficult to make distinctions between them. People close to me, who shared some of the experiences I had written about, grew confused too. Did your dad really drive through the streets in a wig looking for me? my mother asked. I didn’t know you had a twin who died, said a friend. I felt like I was reading your diary and you captured something true and no, you didn’t get it right, that isn’t how it was at all. There were things I felt you couldn’t possibly know about. And do you want to go outside for a cigarette? You’re always smoking in your books.

 I worked on a stage adaptation of Saltwater and spent two days in a rehearsal room with an actor who spoke my fictionalised mother’s words. As I left the theatre, my real mother called to tell me that my real nan was dying, and I went into a real pub in Newcastle and felt like an actor myself. My hands shook theatrically as I charged my phone through a USB slot in the Guinness pump, standing at the bar. Grief stained the dark wood and floral carpets and I felt both inside and outside of my life, detached from reality.

I was searching for a framework to understand my circumstances. I spent years turning pain and anger in on myself, and my words became a rope with which to pull it out. I learned a vocabulary for the discomfort I had always felt in my own skin; in my hometown, family, friendship groups and the countless cities I moved between in my twenties, dragging a broken suitcase stuffed with second-hand clothes, desperate to outrun myself. I began to view everything through the lens of class and gender, which is real and true; these systems have shaped my life irrevocably and are present within everything I say and do. Yet, life isn’t a novel, or a memoir piece, or an academic thesis, and viewing my own experiences this way narrowed my world, reducing my capacity for nuance. I was living with a strange intensity, archiving images and sensations, truly believing that I could think my way out of my problems, that I could find the root of my sadness, if only I dug deep enough.

Understandably, my relationship to writing became very fraught. What had once been a private pleasure became a form of self-punishment, emotional avoidance, the answer to my problems, a means of accruing capital, a stake in a competitive world. I worried about the effect of my work on my personal relationships and I worried about what other writers thought of it. I woke up in the night, sweating, wishing I could take it all back.

Publishing a book requires a great deal of self-awareness. I learned to see my work from many different angles and consider all the possible ways in which my intentions might be misconstrued. In my early twenties, I lived on action and impulse. I moved restlessly from place to place, chasing sensation, running in present tense, with little regard for my safety or well-being, desperate to see my actions make ripples on the surface of the world, in order to prove my existence. By the end of that decade, after writing two novels and living through a pandemic, I had grown incredibly cautious. I began to look back on those fierce years with fear. I couldn’t imagine how I ever threw myself into cities with such abandon, forcing my way through doors that were truthfully closed to me, my bare legs mottled with bruises, hungry, determined and wild.

I developed a heightened self-consciousness, thinking carefully before I spoke, second and third-guessing my own opinions. In the past, I had always felt open to the world, but writing had become hermetic. I was caught beneath bones of memory and language, bound too tightly to past versions of myself, those desperate girls in damp house-shares, who were brave and immeasurably cruel to themselves, which is to say they were cruel to me.

I decided to push questions of, what are you working on next? away and tried to let life wash over me again, relinquishing control. I moved between houses, re-potting plants and putting up pictures, re-arranging my books on shelves. I watched trees turn red and gold beneath the window of my temporary room in London, and on the tall, wealthy streets by the university, and in my neighbour’s garden, as their cat climbed through our window. I threw myself into teaching, putting all my energy into other people’s writing, to avoid examining my relationship to my own.

I ate late-night dumplings with old friends in Chinatown and we laughed so loudly that a couple at the next table left without finishing their food. I ended up at a folk festival in Bavaria on my own, where a barman welcomed me into a lock-in and fed me vegan sausage with mustard. I got drunk in Manchester with an ex-boyfriend and we climbed on top of an electricity box in the middle of the street, smoking menthol cigarettes and suddenly I was both seventeen and thirty simultaneously. We swung our bare feet above the dirty tarmac, as the years rotted beneath us in the heat.

I went to an outdoor restaurant in Greece beneath the moon, where the wind lifted gingham tablecloths, and a band played, and people danced, and someone proposed, and everyone cheered. I jumped from the top of a boat into the green Aegean with my brother. My mother was scared to put on a snorkel for the first time, but she did it. When she resurfaced, she said, I can’t believe it. It’s amazing down there and I had no idea. I’ve gone sixty whole years without knowing.

I cleaned the flat, cleared out some books, bought tins of chickpeas at the supermarket, scrubbed stains from my favourite white blouse, took out the recycling, repaired bike punctures, ran for trains in the dark. I was careless and lost things and I felt lonely and sad and briefly beautiful; I allowed myself to live. I didn’t write about it and tried not to worry about what any of it meant, to accept that perhaps it didn’t mean anything at all. I had to learn how to be in the world again, even though it was often difficult and uncertain.

Gradually, writing has started to come back to me, in flashes of light and bursts of feeling. And so this newsletter is a space for that; a place to try out new things, push back against self-criticism, articulate this new way of living.

Much of the past few years has been about understanding the flawed belief system I developed during my teenage years and early twenties as a mode of survival, which was absolutely informed by my class and gender position. I had to understand that belief system was no longer working for me and allow myself to consider that things could be different. I have also been trying to work out how to sustain a life where I have enough money and stability to meet my needs, and still have time and space to write.

One of the big questions in my tentative new belief system is to do with pleasure and balancing a creative life under capitalism. I am often wary of the concepts pleasure, luxury and wasting time for a variety of reasons. I grew up in a working-class community and my family were not poor but understood scarcity. I also grew up Catholic, which is predicated on self-suffering and I grew into a woman during the early 2000s, when we were taught to fear and loathe our bodies. The word pleasure feels luxurious to me, and luxury is something I fear, despite believing that everyone should be allowed access to it.

I must navigate these contradictions within the literary world, which is still rooted in affluence, no matter how forcefully we might like to signal otherwise. That history runs deep, just as my own lineage, of men who built dark tunnels beneath the sea and women who gutted fish across generations, who put up with drunk husbands, who never had any money and were afraid to ask for anything for themselves, runs deep inside me.

Within the commercial publishing world, writing is a marker of status, talent, intellect, glamour; it is a measure of a person’s worth. I was not worth anything, in class status or economic terms, until I published a novel, and that worthlessness is still inside of me, and it is in my writing, which I have tried to unravel and offer back to the world. And there are readers who recognise that worthlessness within themselves and write to me to tell me that I helped them understand it better. And there is a literary culture that is bent on assessing, ranking, judging, that creates an industry of exceptionalism in which we must compete for review space in newspapers and journals, or space on a panel at literary festivals or on prize lists, pitting young writers against each other. Our accolades might win us prestige but they don’t necessarily lead to financial renumeration, or provide a way to make a sustainable living. I wrote about my life and so the sum of my experiences became a measure of my worth too. Has my life been difficult enough? Interesting enough? Working-class enough? Have I worked hard enough? Have I been humble enough? Have I earned my pleasure?

So the title of this newsletter is a provocation, to myself as much as anyone else. What exactly does it mean to write and live for pleasure? Am I still capable of that? I’m reaching towards it, because it is my best thing, the only place that has ever felt like mine.