Woman's Hour - Putting your life on the page with Ann Patchett, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Julia Samuel and Arifa Akbar

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

Today, Emma and guests explore why so many of us want to put our lives on the page. What stops us, what gets in the way and is it always a good idea? Is getting published the answer or are there are other ways to tell your stories. How different is writing personal essays or a memoir to creating a fictional world? Can writing stand in for therapy? What are the ethical and moral considerations of such sharing? To discuss these and many other questions Emma is joined by prize-winning author Ann Patchett, Sunday Times bestseller Cathy Rentzenbrink, psychotherapist and writer, Julia Samuel and journalist and author Arifa Akbar.Presenter: Emma Barnett Producer: Lucinda Montefiore

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Emma Barnett and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Hello and welcome to the first Woman's Hour of 2022. Happy New Year to you. Here we go, eh? Looking back over 2021, some of the most memorable interviews I conducted on the programme were with women who had chosen to put some of the most intimate details about their lives on the page and into books. I found myself grasping for language and for words to try and give voice to what I'm feeling. And increasingly, I feel that I'm at a loss.

I feel that I still haven't quite been able to articulate what the emotions are. That, for example, there is something more hollow than sorrow, but I don't know the name for it, but I can tell you that I felt it. It's one of the many reasons why I did choose to share my story, because I want to reclaim what that history was, how I felt. I feel unburdening, frankly. I really do. And I have to live with it. I know I have to live with this the rest of my life. When I was writing, I was thinking, who the hell is going to be interested in what you were eating in 1942? But my editor would say, your history, so it's history. She would encourage me to write another chapter, but I love doing it.

You just heard the voices, starting of the writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writing about grief. Huma Abedin, the political strategist and long-term Hillary Clinton aide on the destruction of her marriage to a former senator. And the actor Dame Eileen Atkins on the experience of penning her autobiography, aged 86, in bed using a biro. Now, all of these wonderful books, all of these dynamic women putting their lives on the page, no holds barred, it made us think about writing and what it is about so many of us nowadays, it seems that we want to share our stories. And a lot of people seem to think writing a book may be the answer. What is it? Is getting published the answer? Does it help you? Does it help others?

Or are there other ways to tell your stories? How different is writing personal essays or a memoir to creating a fictional world? Can writing stand in for therapy? Or should you just get therapy? Or do nothing at all and just sit on it and brood? I'm sure you'll have some views on this. And to discuss these and many other questions, I'm joined by three writers today, Anne Patchett, Cathy Rensenbrink, Arefa Akbar, and the psychoanalyst and writer, Julia Samuel. And I'll come to all of you shortly, but I want to start with you, Anne Patchett, if I may, because Anne, of course, is the author of seven novels, three works of nonfiction. Her most recent novel, The Dutch House, was a New York Times and Sunday

Times bestseller. She's been shortlisted for the Women's Prize three times and won the prize in 2002 with her novel, Bel Canto. She also co-owns a bookshop in Nashville, Tennessee. And Anne's latest book is called These Precious Days, which is a collection of essays and highly personal memoir. Anne, hello. Hello. Thank you for being with us. And I know, of course, as I've just mentioned, as your fans will know, you write both fiction and nonfiction. And you do address why a writer might do both in this book.

You talk about, especially in the introduction, which is entitled Essays Don't Die. Tell us what you mean by that. Well, when I'm working on a novel, I find that it's the only time that I really think a lot about my own death. And it's because I have the whole thing put together in my head. I haven't taken any notes. And from the time I start thinking about it to when it's almost finished, I really do realize that if I step off a curb and get hit by a car while I'm writing a novel, then I take the whole novel with me. All of those people that I have imagined, that entire world goes out. And it was interesting. I was talking to somebody about this the other day,

and we got on the subject of Toni Morrison. We were both huge Toni Morrison fans. And to think about a book like Beloved, that really puts it in great context. What if Toni Morrison had been hit by a car in the middle of writing Beloved? No one could have told that story but Toni Morrison had been hit by a car in the middle of writing Beloved? No one could have told that story but Toni Morrison. And all of those characters that have become so iconic would have been lost. Whereas if you're writing nonfiction, there's always someone else who was there. I mean, maybe they have a different perspective.

But all of the essays in this book someone else could have finished if not writing them but they would have told the story the story would have lived regardless of whether or not I live and so during the pandemic especially when I think we were all thinking about our own death and the death of people that we love it seemed that essays were a better choice than jumping in on a new novel. The opening essay is called Three Fathers, and it's accompanied by the only picture in the book. And it's very striking. It's you standing with your three dads, your biological father and your two stepdads at your sister's wedding. And it's the first and only time that they're all together.

And you ask them in advance whether you could have a picture of them all together. And it's a great line in the book where it says, we were all standing waiting for the photographer. My father told me later on the phone, and Mike said, one of the men, you know what she's doing, don't you? She's going to wait until the three of us are dead, and then she's going to write about us.

This is the picture that will run with the piece. You say, my father said the idea hadn't occurred to him, and it wouldn't have occurred to Daryl, but as soon as Mike said it, they knew he was right. They got your number, didn't they? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, none of them were upset about it, but they they know me. They knew where I was going with this. And the picture was great. And I didn't do it right away. I waited a long time after they were all dead. But I did have that idea before my sister's wedding when I heard they were all coming.

Yes. Well, what was it for you that made you eventually write it? Because, as you say, you did write it. You did wait a while. My friend Kate's father died and we were talking a lot around the death of her father. And she said to me one day, I've got to write about him. I'm going to sit down and I'm going to write about Lou. And I said, oh, good, good, good. I'll go with you. I've been meaning to write this essay about my father's for years. So let's do this as a project. And somehow it was such an overwhelming thing to take on. The fact that the two of us took it on together made it much easier. I have to say the essay I turned to straight away in the book, and that's the great thing about essays, you don't have to read them in the order that they're there, even if you've intended that. I'm sorry if that's not what you wanted,

but I did go straight to an essay. I really actually do want you to read them in order. Okay. I thought of the order so carefully. So I've done the wrong thing. They build. You have. Okay. I did read it, the whole thing. But I did go first.

Listen, I'm somebody who reads a lot, but I wanted to be honest, to there are no children here, to that particular chapter. Oh, interesting. I was interested to see, because we've spoken about it quite a lot on the programme recently as well, about when women choose for all sorts of reasons not to have children. And I wonder, because you actually, much of that chapter is about how and in some ways the most extraordinary ways you've been asked about this and asked to justify yourself. Why did you feel you had to address it because you don't obviously think it should be a question. Well, it's funny, because throughout my professional life, people have asked me to write a piece about not having children. And I always said, Oh, I'm not interested. I mean, you have children, you don't, it's not worth writing about. But at the very last minute, one of the essays was taken out of this book. So I had this big hole and I thought, well, what is it that I've never written about that I could write an essay about and make it work in this book? And were shooting out of my fingers. I had so much to say. It was such an easy, kind of thrilling piece to write because I did realize that people have

been haranguing me about having children for all the years that I was biologically capable. That was one of the many fabulous things about menopause. The conversation just stopped. No one asked me anymore. It was great. But now that people are reading the essay, I've heard from a woman who has six children who says this is exactly what people do to her. She walks into the grocery store with her children and people say to her, how dare you? You're killing the planet. You've had too many children. Or I have a friend who has one child and people come up to her all the time and say, that's so selfish. Your child will be all alone. You can't just have one child. So I think that when we think about choice, we think about abortion. But in fact, choice is not having children or

having six children or having one child or having an abortion. It's a choice. Now, well, I am upset I've got our relationship off to a bad foot here because, you know, I went to that chapter. I feel like it's a conversation now with Adele. Did you see that? She gets very upset if you change the order of how you listen to her album and ask Spotify to remove the shuffle. Exactly. Right. You've put me on shuffle. I put you on shuffle. I went back though. And I started at the beginning and I carried on. I wonder, you do talk, as I say, right at the beginning about essays not dying. Should they? Having this stuff about you out there for forever, potentially,

or however long your publishers survive, how do you feel about that? I feel fine about it. I mean, if I didn't feel fine about it, I wouldn't do it. Also, there's nothing in the book that's actually revealing. I mean, when people say, oh gosh, this is so personal. And I think I would tell you any of these things if I met you. Also, I'm not on any form of social media. And what people post about themselves, I think far exceeds anything I've written in this book. I didn't know what you were going to say then. OK, do stay with us and I will return. I've got more questions for you. But let me now bring in Cathy Rensenbrink, who's the author, of course, of the Sunday Times bestseller, The Last Act of Love, a memoir about how Cathy and her family

came to terms with her brother's devastating and ultimately fatal accident. Since then, Cathy's written four more books, including a novel, Everyone Is Still Alive. Cathy has taught writing at Falmouth University, at festivals, in prisons, and she draws on all of this experience in her latest book, Write It All Down, How To Put Your Life On The Page. Cathy, welcome. It's very nice to be here.

Well, it's very important to kind of hear about your writing, I suppose, but also what you tell others. hear about your writing, I suppose, but also what you tell others. Just about the last act of love, I wondered if you wouldn't mind telling us all what happened to your brother and actually why you felt writing it was important. So he was a year younger than me and I adored him. And when he was 16 and I was 17, he was knocked over by a car. And I wasn't there when it happened. I was there very shortly afterwards. I was kneeling next to him in the road,

kneeling next to his unconscious body in the road. I was with him when the ambulance arrived. He had emergency surgery and all the time. And I did that thing that people do in extremists, even when they don't think they believe. You know, the only time I wasn't with him, I was in the hospital chapel praying for him not to die um and then as it turned out he didn't die but nor did he ever um nor did he ever regain consciousness and he was alive then for several

years in what's called a persistent vegetative state I still find those profoundly ugly and unpleasant words to say and eventually my parents with me we had to go to the family court and get permission to withdraw his nutrition and hydration he died obviously a huge difficult terrible experience to have to endure and I was enduring it at that age as well you know I was I was 17. I'd been blessed, actually, with a fortunate childhood with loving parents. And it did take me years before I wrote about it. I did keep trying. I was a massive writer before he was knocked over. And then I remember really soon after the accident, just looking at all my notebooks and diaries and feeling so sick at how innocent and pathetic I'd been and I threw them all in that we lived in this pub in Yorkshire I threw them all in a skip

outside the back of the pub I just battered them down beneath the crisp boxes and the fag ends and the beer bottle tops and I didn't I didn't write or I just had no words to this I just couldn't even begin to describe what had happened. But very, very eventually my words did come back and I kept trying to write about what had happened to Matty and just feel so inadequate. And also that it was too difficult that I might go mad. Almost like, you know, it just explodes sort of spontaneously combust with it. And I just found it too difficult so I tried to write novels which I always really wanted to write novels I think from as soon as I knew what one was I wanted to write one so I tried to write happy jolly novels about people I don't know you know sort of like

social comedies um but I never got further than chapter seven before my brother sort of would storm into the pages kind of demanding to be heard so the first bit of the novel would all be like, you know, I don't know, Bob and Sarah thinking about whether they should have an affair with each other. And suddenly, chapter seven, like, you know, someone would have some horrible accident. All roads led back. Eventually, exactly.

Eventually, eventually, I managed to finish it. So I finished a book about him when I was 42 um so again that's quite a long yes a long road trying giving up trying giving up trying giving up and I do feel um I think somebody in earlier on in the clips talked about unburdening um so I mean it wasn't unburdening it was a communing with the page it was really working out almost like working out what I thought about it and it was again I think one of the of course I can now see that what happened to my brother was one of the if not the most profound experiences of my life but then I also think writing about

what happened again became one of the profound experiences of my life and that hasn't stopped the relationship that I have with people that read it that's now one of an element of the profoundness of life um and the connections that they find through that as well and and through to you as well because I suppose the the thing when you share something like that is you know it is the unburdening but it is also how it will speak to others. Yes. I mean, part of the reason I kept getting stuck was I was very preoccupied about other people. Can't write it because of other people. What would other people think? No. And I used to I mean, I would never have written it as a commercial project because I just well, nobody would ever want to read this story.

It's just too awful and gloomy, which isn't how people it people often tell me they find it very life-affirming and hopeful I mean I still find that a bit surprising to be honest but still I had to kind of forget about what people would think so that I could write it and then paradoxically the reason I was able to finish it was I just decided to not care about what anyone else would think not care about it being good writing. That was another thing, because I was such a big reader. I was slightly overwhelmed by almost kind of like the, oh, I don't know, the giants that had gone before, if you like. So, you know, who am I to make a record of anything? I forgot about all of that. And it was all just about trying to make

sense of it for myself on the page. We're going to come to, you know, the sort of help of that and writing as therapy shortly. But I wanted to ask with your students, what makes them want to put their lives on the page? What are the themes you see there? Well, I mean, it often is because something very difficult has happened, you know. And again, I'm never quite sure whether this is memoir in general

or whether I attract people who have known tragedy. Because when I teach residential courses, you know, looking around the room, there is a lot of suffering. And I kind of think, well, maybe that's just because there is a lot of suffering in life. I mean, one of the things I really like about getting older, actually, is that when I was 17 and this happened to me, I felt really marked. You know, my friends were going on gap years and worried about what their boyfriends were doing. And I felt very marked out. Whereas life progresses, everybody suffers. We all cross from innocence to experience. It all sort of changes. So often people are moved to write about something big. And one of the things I really liked about people that wrote to me sometimes they're writing

about things we have in common like it's a sibling death or it's a long death but often it's just the things we have in common that we feel a lot of guilt we feel a lot of shame that gets like horrendously mixed up in a in a bereavement and so so often I think it's a kind of an urge really to to work out what to do with what's inside. I mean, Anne mentioned social media. I definitely fit with no judgment to sort of social media confession. I don't mean to judge it,

but there's something about the privacy, I think, of the page, that privacy of not trying to be performative, that privacy of not, certainly for quite a long time, not having any kind of audience, just like being able to commune with the self. And I mean, I'm definitely in that category of writers who write to find out what they think about things rather than who sit down to share their great wisdom with the world.

I mean, have you also become very disciplined about your writing? I mean, you've actually produced a number of books in quick succession, haven't you? Which is incredible, to be honest, because most of the time I don't feel like it at all. So I've had to become really disciplined. And I think that's, it's like my only option, because if I wait to feel like it, it just basically sort of never really happens. But again, I'm one of those writers who likes having written. So the way I see writing now at the moment is it functions, I would say pretty clearly for me, as anti-anxiety medicine. So if I take my two-hour writing pill in the morning, then I have a really pleasant experience of life for the rest of that day.

And then sleep resets me and then I need to do it again. Anne, do you find writing a slog or is it easy? How do you find it for those listening who are trying to do this? I agree with Kathy completely. I always say I hate to write and I love to have written. And I do. I just feel better. It's like exercise, you know.

You do it and you feel better. It doesn't mean that you get up and want to do it necessarily. Well, Kathy, to come back to you, just because you are thinking about how to help people on this and you've been teaching people in your latest book is about helping people. You're very encouraging in the book. Some may say too encouraging. Should everybody do this? Should everybody unburden onto the page? I'm not saying that's the only type of book you're advising on.

But, you know, I know that you were worried about people being interested or not, but not everybody can write and not everybody has a story that perhaps does need to be on the page. To be honest, I just really hate that attitude because, yes, I want to. Now, I do want to encourage people. I just do people the honour that if they found their way to my book or to my teaching or to my class, I'm not going to be the one to deliver them a lecture that they don't deserve to be there. And also it's kind of pointless anyway, because most people who are really good writers are full of self-doubt, full of self-loathing, think they're boring. So they're precisely the sort of people that would just not do it.

I loathe the idea that it's a closed club and that you have to have a certain level of education or qualification to get in it I feel I've gone all so I've got to march on somewhere right now and kind of live right this woman's gone hooray I mean I think people should do it if they want to do it I mean if you don't want to do it don't do it I'm absolutely not saying like this terrible thing has happened to you pat pat on the head here's a notebook off you go it's like but it's like if you want to then you should and I think that whatever your aspiration is like and I don't want to blunt anyone's ambition but you know be want to be rich and famous if you like but like even if that's what you want you want to start off just from the purity of trying to communicate what it is you want to say or what it is you want to find out about yourself.

And absolutely don't pay any attention to that idea that you might not be good enough. It's sort of a really it's almost as though we gather children together and then start saying to them what they can't do, rather than encouraging them to think about what they what they can do, what they could do, what they might be able to do. Let me tell you, I think it's a good moment to talk to the psychotherapist amongst us, Julia Samuel, who of course also manages to fit in some writing between her psychotherapy sessions. She's written three books, Grief Works, This Too Shall Pass and coming out next year, Every Family Has a Story. Welcome, Julia. Hello, very pleased to be here. Well, we must now ask you, just because you

can, or just as Cathy's saying, you know, you want to, so you should. What about if it is actually going to help you? Especially I'm reminded of my conversation with Chimamanda, who's talking about the grief of losing two parents. You know, can it replace therapy? therapy i mean there's very good evidence james penny baker from harvard showed that journaling which is a kind of more informal way of memoir writing is as beneficial as therapy and actually the research also showed they had less colds and they were kind of physically healthier and i think where that comes from and i, and I could hear it very much from Anne and Cathy and from your clips, is that feelings, emotions are transmitters of information

that are in us to alert us to something that's going on. And when we allow those emotions to come in to our brain through the words on the page, we know what we're feeling. So because emotion and cognition are reciprocal. So you don't know what you think until you've been able to name what you feel, or that you've put it down. So by writing, you begin to know what your own story is, and what the story you're telling yourself. And I would add add once you kind of get in within yourself and find your own narrative the story you tell yourself is the person you become so if in Kathy's frame

a person who's going to a writing class is told well you know you're too boring you haven't got anything interesting to say they will take that as that as a kind of external judgment on them. They will then tell themselves, I'm someone who can't write a good book. And that will block them from being able to get the words on the page. I mean, they could also write a terrible book because they're a terrible writer. Oh, absolutely. Just pointing out that in the middle of it. But I don't think from a therapeutic processing memoir perspective,

it isn't the quality of the writing that is therapeutic. It is finding, you know, like Virginia Woolf said, like Anne said, most people don't really know, and Cathy said, don't know what they feel and think until they get it on the page. Yes. I mean, and also, I mean, I've noticed just in these conversations, but it does seem to be a trend with writers, and we should probably distinguish between those who are professional writers

and those who are also trying to be, or in the background, writing to help themselves. There are differences there, as you say, to be published or not, or with the intention of public view. But it does seem to be a trend to do it in the morning and to find that almost like the cream that's risen to the top or whatever's been in your mind from the night before. And what can you say about that, Julia? The whole habit now called morning pages, and you can get it as an app on your phone, or you can just buy a notebook and a pen. And people just literally put down, as you say,

you know, the thing that is at the top of their brain and just get it down on the page and a lot of people say that that clears their head and it can it so what people talk about for sort of well-being is the intention that you set for your day can predict how good or bad your day is so So if you put down, say, your anxiety and what you're worried about, and then on your page you say, well, I'm going to write for two hours today, and that's what you set yourself up to do, that can give you a better day. So what you tell yourself on the page can mean that you do it and you feel satisfied. So it's a positive cycle rather than a negative one. Anne, do you do morning pages as well as the writing or do the two come together?

I don't do morning pages. I mean, when I am working on a project, I write. And when I'm not working on a project, I don't write. But I want to say, I think it is so important for everyone to know that they're allowed to write. It's such a private thing to do. And a lot of why we do it is because we love to do it, because we can't not do it. And if somebody was practicing the cello and you said, well, you know, unless you're going to play at Carnegie Hall, there's really no point in you playing the cello. People understand we make music, we paint pictures, we write stories primarily for our own enjoyment and our own self-expression. Having a professional life publication is a byproduct of doing that work much, much farther down the road. But I think it's the era we live in, though, that it's very performative and people often

confuse needing to share with actually the art or the ability, rather, to have that privacy of the page and perhaps confide in it. We do live in a world where you see something, you think, right, how am I going to share that a lot of the time? Perhaps not you, Anne, if you're not on social media. But I think that's an important thing to stress to people, that they have that right and they have that ability. And as Julia's saying, it might make them feel better. Julia, just to come back to the idea of writing as therapy, certainly about your personal life, whether it's for sharing or not. Do you think it should

supplement that, be a part of that, or should you just book a therapy session or should you just sit with it? I mean, we are not likeica yet in quite the same way of having therapists no i mean though of course through the pandemic people's levels of anxiety and demands on therapists has risen by like 40 percent yeah so i think if you can't find a therapist which is often the case you're on a GP's waiting list journaling would be a very good way to kind of keep yourself keep your yourself balanced um and kind of regulated so that you don't kind of uh feel like you're blowing up and I think that's one of the things that helps is that by writing your pressure cooker brain it just goes down two or three gears. So it can be an add-on to therapy. It can be instead of therapy.

It can be for the pleasure of it. But I think, and actually one of the things I saw the other day is that there's research that pen and paper is more therapeutic than a laptop or writing on a screen. Interesting. Which I'm surprised about. But I think the thing that, you know, I notice when I write is you start with an empty page. And when you have the words on the page and you can shape them and move them around, there's something concrete you are dealing with.

And when you're grieving or you know suffering for whatever reason it's invisible it's below the waterline nobody can see it once you get it out and put it on a page you can see it and you can begin to make sense of it and you can show it to your family or your partner or your best friend so that you have a way of taking this incredibly intense chaotic messy inchoate sense of yourself internally and releasing it out of the world and in doing that it definitely changes something happens where it changes and it becomes less intense well my next guest i'm sure is going to have something to say about this because the ethical and moral considerations of such sharing, the other people involved, wittingly or unwittingly, the collateral damage, as they may feel they are. Will you, if you do spill your story, be accused of perhaps betraying family secrets?

And what about the fact that you are encroaching on the privacy of others when talking about what's happened to you a lot of the time. Arefa Akbar joins me now. And her memoir, Consumed, A Sister's Story, was published last year. It's Arefa's first book, though writing is what Arefa does for a living, I should say. She's been a journalist for over 20 years, former literary editor of The Independent,

and has also worked as arts correspondent and a news reporter. And she's currently the Guardian's chief theatre critic. Aretha, welcome. Hello. Thank you for being with us, and congratulations on a very powerful book indeed, and Consumed is a very apt title for it. But for our listeners, can you give us a precie of what it's about? Yeah, it's about more than one thing. It hinges on my sister's death,

a death that occurred in 2016. She was shuttling in and out of hospital, a leading North London hospital. She had terrible chest pains and other symptoms, you know, bed sweats, all sorts of things. They couldn't find what was wrong with her. she was taken to A&E you know early spring 2016 breathless you know very very seriously ill she stayed at a you know an intensive care for days they didn't find out what was wrong with her but they pumped her with steroids and she she appeared to get better they They sent her off home. Very quickly, she was seriously ill again. She was then taken to A&E, and we received a phone call during that second admission to say, you know, Fauzi Akbar has had a fatal brain hemorrhage. There's no way back from this.

Shockingly, they didn't know why. On the day we were told she had a fatal brain haemorrhage, she was kept on life support for 24 hours, which is what they do. But she was essentially dead, stroke dying. But we were taken to a little back room to say, well, we don't know. We don't know the underlying cause of this. And we were taken to a little back room to say, well, we don't know. You know, we don't know the underlying cause of this. And we were shocked and staggered. And I thought, is this some new illness on the fringes, on the frontiers of some new, terrible, unnamed illness? The following day we came in, she was in a separate room. She'd been isolated.

Remember, this is 2016, we, you know, isolation and all the rest is not, is not a thing then. And, you know, I happened to ask a nurse, you know, I happened to have a conversation, casual exchange saying, I can't believe that, you know, my sister's been in hospital all this time, very much part of the system. We don't know what it is. And he looked on the notes and he said, well, actually, we do as casually as that. And he said it's TB. She died of TB. She's dying. She's, you know, hemorrhage came as a result of tuberculosis. Imagine that an illness, an ancient illness and an ancient infectious disease that is curable with the

course of antibiotics, if it's diagnosed in time. And I just, we were, outraged, speechless, really. And in those following days and weeks, we tried to understand how this could possibly have happened in a leading North London hospital. And, you know, I suppose as part of me naively thought that this was an illness that was in our past. I knew it was globally there, but I hadn't realised that it makes massive returns. And it had done. And, you know, it's never gone away. The West might have pushed it out of visibility, but it's there. You know, as I began my research, I began researching to the illness because I just didn't receive the closure or the answers that I really desperately wanted and needed from the hospital. You know, they spent months even getting a basic report to us, which then said there were missed opportunities of diagnosing her. her it was a it was a diagnosis in way too late after she'd had the hemorrhage um there was enormous insensitivities around delivering you know explanations and news and defensiveness

my sister had suffered from depression eating disorder for almost all of her life and there were I felt real judgments and and you know unpleasant judgments around that there was she had always felt silenced or misunderstood in her life by by the systems out there and and I just felt even in death she'd been misunderstood so you you wanted to try and and write that story and write those wrongs in a different way as well I think it's partly that I was so left with so many unanswered questions medically that that's what set me off. I have to say, I consider myself first and foremost a journalist. And even though I've, you know, for 25 years thought on the page and words of the system of thought, really, I didn't think my first thought of my first thought wasn't well this has to be

written this is this is a book in the making of course it wasn't partly because as you say I have been a literary editor I've seen what profound and beautiful memoirs around grief and illness are out there I didn't feel like I could mine my grief at that point and you know make it into a meaningful or profound book it left me essentially inarticulate and it silenced me actually that grief I didn't want to write it on the page at all I was led by this absolute medical confusion but as an outrage and disappointment and anger, actually. But then that sort of segued into curiosity, curiosity about an infectious disease that is,

you know, believe it or not, in 2018 or 19, the Lancet paper had this big report called a pandemic. You know, this was called a pandemic before our... Before the one we know now uh all too well and phrases like isolation and had become the norm i mean it's it's very important and interesting to hear your road to writing it and and putting it down like that and what kathy was saying earlier about worrying what others would think and about how people would react i imagine for you uh thinking about what your family would say

and feel was also a big consideration. It absolutely was. And I feel that I need, I needed permission to do it. So, so to write, so I decided to write a book about the medical side of things, about the history of the disease, but also but also about art this is my sister was an artist and we thought we're incredibly close as teenagers so we and we expressed ourselves through you know art and culture and saw the world through it saw ourself through it I wanted to write about sisterhood and spiky sisterhood that I don't think often gets written about um I wanted to write about depression and eating disorder, compulsive eating disorder, which isn't something I don't think we read about very much. I think there are taboos around some of those things that I've mentioned, and I wanted to see them in a sort of unsugared

honesty, including our periods of fighting and estrangement, all of that. To get to that, I had to absolutely go through the family story, which is full of sadness, dysfunction. You know, a father who treated his two daughters, there were three of us, two daughters, very differently. We were positioned very distinctly. I was the favourite. She was sort of cast out. It's a very complicated story that relates to my father's first marriage, his second marriage to my mother. All of that requires immense exposure, as well as talking about my father,

who can now have no right of reprieve because he's had dementia, frontal lobe dementia, for over a decade. I couldn't go and ask for permission for him, but I was making judgments. Or I was certainly describing, you know, I was certainly telling a story about him. I did go to my mother and say, this is what I want to do. What do you think? And we had a conversation. What did she say? What was her reaction?

At first, she said, God, what does that mean? You know, because this is about her marriage and her child and her family too and we had a chat and I was quite surprised when she she quite quickly at first she was scared by it the intimacy and the revelation exposure level of exposure that what I reveal and then she came round because I think out of love for that you know her my sister because my sister had felt silenced and misunderstood and this was something in that was going to give her it was an embodiment of some kind um so and I my brother's incredibly private, but I sent them a full version of this draft before I sent it to my editor.

And listen, you know, I would have defended my reasons for saying something, but I gave them that opportunity to say, well, actually, that's not right. That's not right. But the other thing that I do here, and it was useful to me, I'm very aware of the fact that this is my version of the family story and you know we all have versions this is where we fight and we say to our brother or sister actually this is what happened you did this to me and your brother or sister will say no it's not that's not how it happened it's been a memory projection, all those complications. And I write that into the narrative. I actually write my own unreliability, the questions over memory, the questions over how I'm perhaps choosing to remember something

and forget other things. They're built into that. There are texts that my sister sent me that I utterly misread, that I feel full of regret now. But they're in there. And, of course, the versions of my father, the loving father, the unloving hard father, they're both in there. So I think it's a way of avoiding it. First of all, declaring the fact openly that this is a version of my family life.

What is truth and it's movable and it's perspective, isn't it? So there was all of that. But the other thing that I'll say is that I thought it was going to be one thing and then it took on its own power and momentum. I thought this was going to be about art and grief and sisterhood. And I thought it was going to be dark and incredibly gloomy and filled with the guilt of the well sister, the younger, more loved sister, you know, me. And actually, it led me to lots of journeys and curiosity and discoveries of artworks and a way to see grief

and sisterhood and all the rest of it very differently. But it wasn't, what it wasn't was therapy. So I've been listening, you know, with great interest when you've all been talking about, you know, the therapeutic aspects of morning papers and all the rest of it. But not for a minute did I see these as morning papers. I've had bereavement therapy. I've had other kinds of therapy. I've written a diary since the age of 13 or 14. This isn't journaling. This isn't my diary. And this isn't therapy. I'm completely clear about that. And I set off not to feel better afterwards. It a sort of investigation it was quite journalistic I thought let's investigate what that my my sister's life and death her depression us as sisters let's understand but in a formal you know in a formal way if this was if this was journaling it would

just be a splurge of rubbish for me. That's what I do when I journal. But it's a very cathartic or perhaps even not uncathartic, but it comes out in a bleu, you know, blancmange, whereas this has formal shape, drama, tension. You know, it's a piece of work that I'm putting out there for lots of reasons, partly because I want to understand um but partly because I want to push these subjects out there for for a reason as I've said you know how do you think your sister would feel about it well this is what I thought lots of times and um I think you know I think the dead have right just because somebody's died doesn't

mean that they don't have rights about how much uh foes about their life um I was really aware of what my sister would think about it I write that into the book too I think she'd be surprised um I think I was surprised by um lots of things uh I was surprised by how the the loving side of our sisterhood, because I was determined to write this utterly unvarnished and at times hard and perhaps even ugly side of me as a sister, her as a sister, what it means to have a mentally ill sister, what it means to share an eating disorder, really, really difficult things that I decided I wasn't going to veer away from. But what also emerges is just the power of her as my big sister, the extent to which I adored her and looked up to her, the extent of her talent as an artist, the way in which we were more similar than I would like to have admitted, you know, this deadly perfectionism she had,

these elements of depression that I thought was her. She was the depressed one and I wasn't. And I sort of, I saw the affinities much more clearly having written them down. I think she'd be surprised and I think she'd be happy with her artwork features, her gorgeous embroidery features in these plates that we've put in. And I, as far, who knows what my sister would think. I can't speak for her. But I know that I sort of see this as our book and your story as a family from your perspective um but that is lovely that you do view it in that way Kathy just just to come back

to you uh on this kind of ethics and moral and uh question about how other people feel who were drawn into your story how did your parents feel about you writing the act of love I mean they're very proud of it. They were just worried about me because they'd seen me try to do it before and it didn't end well, you know. I mean, I don't even know what language now I'd use to describe what happened to me, whether I'd call it a breakdown or whatever. But every other time I tried to write it, it just didn't end well.

So they were just very worried about me and whether or not it was a good thing. Now that it exists, they're very proud of it people write to them when um I was doing events they would sometimes come and they'd get their own little cue and that was very sweet um they my mum really helped read bits for it she's quite often my first reader she'll proofread things for me I mean not always again because if I'm writing Anne covers this a bit in the essays if I'm writing other things like to do with sex and misbehavior I don't want my mum to be my first reader because my novel's not going to be good if my mum's going to be my first just too weird you know just too strange so but for a lot of and again journal you know if I have to

write pieces I'm not a trained journalist I often send it to her first and just say like does that make sense and you know so my mum did quite a lot of that with me my dad of course you know he only learned to read and write as an adult and he does read but it's less easy for him so he more like we sort of talked about it but he loves you know he really loves um he's really proud well again as only someone who learned to read and write as an adult could be I think he's incredibly proud of me as a writer you know he says things like look your name is in really big letters in the paper which is so sweet isn't it um so he's very proud of it I did as Aretha says I did the same thing I gave them a veto a complete veto which they never used and the only thing that my mum always said was she kept saying to me you're being too hard on yourself. I'd said something like, I said about how guilty I felt

because I found looking after my brother to be boring and upsetting, which is true. And she pointed out that I got to that stage like after like a few years, but there were actually plenty of years of fairly selfless service in there as well. So I don't, I'm not sure if I did change anything but I kind of took the point and again it's interesting you often I mean I find reading memoirs so

fascinating because I notice in memoirs I think it's in writers there is this sort of edge often of perfectionism of the writer being very hard on themselves in my experience most memoirists aren't trying to make themselves sound better than they were it's more often that you do I do often want to I often read a memoir and sometimes if I meet them I do say like are you having some nice therapy because you could do to be a bit kinder to yourself so I mean for me certainly writing and therapy are distinct things and I like to do both I like to get my fill of both um let me come back to you Anne because, because in your first collection of essays, this is the story of a happy marriage. The idea of whose feelings you may hurt did feature or was a concern.

Tell us about that. Well, I am following along with everyone else, which is if I write something that I think that anyone could be upset about, I always have them read it first. And I'm very open to changing things. And the fact is, when you write something that's autobiographical, that's a reflection of your family or your friends, you're not ever telling the whole story. And that, I find, is how I deal with things. You tell something, and someone reading it who doesn't know any of these people might say, my gosh, that's a lot of information. And you think, oh man, I am telling you 2% of what's going on. And the people that you're writing about, in my experience, have a sense of relief when they read what I'm writing because they know that I am

not getting anywhere close to telling everything that happened. No one can. It's impossible. Oddly, the most autobiographical thing I think that I ever wrote was a novel called Commonwealth. And I let my siblings all read it before I published it. And I said, if you've got any problems, because the characters were really based on us, if you've got any problems, tell me. And my stepsister said, I wish you would use the word pyromaniac less often. I did a word search. I was like, boy, you're right. That's really true. I need to tone that down. But it was the only time I've ever given things to someone and had any kind of a response.

I think actually everyone who writes things that are autobiographical, we all think that we're going to destroy people, that we're going to really rock the world, that it's going to be way too hard, exposed, painful. But actually, I find for myself, that's kind of a lie that I tell myself because I don't want to deal with the hard things. I don't want to go deep. And so I say, I can't go deep because I could hurt someone else. In fact, the thing to do is just to go all in, write it, go all the way to the bottom, and then make a decision about the piece of writing. Don't make a decision about the thought that you have about the writing. Because a lot of times, the really painful thing that happens is that no one cares at all.

Although, I mean, just to come back to you, if I can on this, Aretha, I'm thinking back to my interview with Huma Abedin. And I should say those clips that we played at the beginning, you know, people can go and listen to those interviews in full. But Huma Abedin had a situation where her personal life, a lot of the time not with any of her consent, she said it had been taken from her, was splashed across the newspapers. And she was doing this. She was writing a book to try and reclaim her narrative, as she put it, and to make herself feel better. But I know we've discussed at length now whether therapy should replace writing or vice versa, and you've all got slightly different takes on that.

But, you know, in the future, she's very aware, her son will read it. And it's all out there. And I wonder, just to Anne's point, really, if nobody is going to care, why have it out there for the few who do, perhaps, who might not want it all out there? And I just wonder what you make of that, Arifa, having been writing so much about your family. brother and my mother and said, look, I'm planning on doing it, and got trodden really softly, and they'd come down with a hard no, I would have an enormous problem on my hands. As much as I'd want to write that story, I would have to think around it. Even if I say this is my version of the story, I think I value, you know, the love and consent of my brother and my mother above needing to get this story out there. I would have to think around. I'd have to give it a whole different shape. Doesn't

mean I wouldn't do it. So these are questions that need to be negotiated within the family. If it's a hard no, you can't, or you absolutely know that your family would be devastated. I reckon you have to think really carefully and write another kind of book. Well, just to bring our conversation to a close and thinking about other kinds of books, I wanted to ask each of you for a recommendation of a memoir that has stayed with you for whatever the reason. I thought maybe I'll start with you, Julia, Julia Samuel. What's yours and why? So mine is Mohsin Zaydi, he's a beautiful boy. And I think memoir for me takes me into different worlds

that maybe I don't know. And with Mohsin, he is the son of devout Muslims who came to this country and he was gay. And his homosexuality was something that wasn't accepted within the community. And it was an estrangement within himself because he didn't want to shame or upset his parents. But really, it's a story of love, of how in the end he found and allowed himself to be who he was and the love his parents had for him overcame any of the kind of beliefs that they carried with them. And for me, for someone who's a heterosexual,

who's kind of Protestant living in the UK all my life, going into a completely different world, but somehow the most personal being the most universal, I felt I knew him, I felt I knew his world. And I came away with a much deeper understanding of that world with more compassion and affection, not something that was sort of out there apart from me. Thank you for that. Let me go to you, Cathy Renton-Brink next. Yes. So, I mean, I must say all the books of the people on the program today I think are unreservedly wonderful um and I would highly I would highly urge them on

on all the listeners but the one I'm going to mention and I'm afraid everyone has to wait until the summer for it but um Kit Duvall is a novelist and she's written a memoir called Without Warning and Only Sometimes, which one of the nicest things actually about being a writer is getting to read books early. So I've read it and I just think it's wondrous. It's about growing up in Birmingham in the 60s and 70s, an Irish mother, a father from St Kitts, and the mother becomes a Jehovah's Witness. There's an awful lot about being poor, being being religious sort of how that all fits together but in lots of ways again that's this is the thing with memoir you see they're about all

these gloomy difficult terrible subjects but almost always they end up being about love almost always they end up transcending yeah and this is about this the love between the siblings is amazing um it's just wonderful and she's just such again, it's that thing of how she puts the life on the page, I guess. It's just so present. One to look forward to. I like something to look forward to as well as something you can get now. Arifa Akbar. Yeah, it's called Skybound, A Journey in Flight. It's by Rebecca LeCrain, who died before this book was actually published. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in her 30s. She died at the age of 42. It's funny because this book isn't defined by that diagnosis. It's not a book about the medical process or the last days even. It's about how she learns hand gliding and she takes to the skies in those final months, years.

And it's sort of a perspective on life and death and joy and exhilaration. And you see the earth from a new perspective, from high up. And the drama of the sky, honestly, is the most euphoric thing. It's a meditation on fear and on death but but also conquering fear and and actually meeting death and this feels like the most glorious skybound journey it's yeah it's beautiful thank you gosh taking us to the skies now and ann patchett finally to you the microphone uh gregory boyle the whole language the power of extravagant one? Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language, The Power of Extravagant Tenderness. And this is his third book. And I recommend all three, Tattoos on the Heart, Barking at the Choir, and this new one,

The Whole Language. Greg is a Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, which is the world's largest gang prevention and rehabilitation program. And it's his lifelong work with gang members. And the message is really, if you go and stand with the people who are perceived to be on the margins, they are no longer on the margins. The margins are never where we are standing. And we just need to recognize that not everyone has been given the same opportunities. And there is an endless power for rehabilitation. They're just really beautiful, important books that if you want to know

how to live a better life and what you can do to really help change the world. Greg Boyle is a tremendous role model. Well, that's some homework for us all. Some brilliant sounding homework. Thank you very much to all of my guests today for sharing so much and giving so much of themselves. And for anyone who has been inspired to write or is already writing, happy writing. And may I wish you a very happy new year indeed. Thank you so much for your company today. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Thank you so much for your time. Join us again for the next one.

From the makers of The Battersea Poltergeist, a new podcast series for BBC Radio 4, Uncanny. Do you believe in ghosts? No. Have you seen one? Yes. Real life stories that are supernatural, told by the people they happen to. Presented by me, Danny Robbins. There is a very strong sense of pure evil. Subscribe to Uncanny on BBC Sounds. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.