In the blue post-pub screenlight

on being called brave

I’m trying to locate how I feel about my book being published. On the night of my launch party, almost everyone who came asked me ‘how are you feeling?’ to which I said either ‘a bit mad’ or ‘I don’t know’. We overestimate our own and other’s abilities to name their feelings in the moment. I needed to process.

There are certain life events one speculates will alter you forever. Some absolutely do. You eventually integrate the experience into your present, they’re with you always. Others you imagine will, but you’re left unsure – turning eighteen, losing your virginity, getting married. You hope they might alter you in some identifiable way, and then when they don’t, you’re left with doubt (did that really happen? Did I do it right?) or in some cases disappointment (ahh, it’s not that thing that will make a change, I need to do the other thing too). It makes me think of a song I love by Stina Nordenstam ‘So This is Goodbye’. The song troubles with how unreal a goodbye felt. The mismatch between the occasion as it was experienced and the occasion’s meaning, what was projected onto it.

A day or two before my publication date I was sitting on the toilet, the setting for many an idle or searching thought, and I said to myself what have I done? I’d just received the audio files of my book and listened to the first few seconds. Someone can now buy 8 hours and 43 minutes of me talking and sharing some of the most intimate details of my life. About two hours into recording, I learned a colleague had died and because of the schedule I had to continue. To me it will always be a document of that. I can’t bear to listen to hear if the shock of grief is discernible, or not. Both answers would be hard in their own way.

At my launch event with Megan Nolan at the LRB Bookshop, Megan asked me a question about how it feels to have one’s writing called ‘brave’. This was something many readers and critics said to Megan when her first novel Acts of Desperation was published. She shared her own complex relationship to ‘brave’ – at times being gratifying, at times patronising. It’s a word people have used about Arrangements in Blue. As a former civil servant, when I hear the word ‘brave’ I recall Yes, Minister a sitcom from the 1980s. The civil servants would describe a Minister as ‘brave’ for taking a decision that would lose votes, and ‘courageous’ for a decision that would lose the election. Often, when I hear someone call my writing ‘brave’ I interpret that as ‘foolish’. Something they wouldn’t do because it’s a bad idea, something that will lead to difficult consequences. I saw another tweet – which was complimentary about the book – that said, ‘reading it made me realise how many things in my life I don't feel it's appropriate to talk about – it felt kind of shockingly brave.’ I guess in some ways that was the point of writing it, to give people an encounter with an experience of singleness that did not insist on a kind of frenetic empowerment of the state. To do that I had to say things I’d previously left unsaid. But how can I be sure in doing that I’ve not transgressed important boundaries of my own?

While I was writing my memoir, I received an advanced copy of Melissa Febos’s Bodywork. She recommends writers of personal narrative write ‘before considering how others will feel reading it. If you begin leaving things out, skirting around or obscuring them, you may be leaving out vital organs that your book cannot live without.’ That was the approach I’d taken to writing. I tried to make sure all the blood and guts and bones and muscles and organs were present, and then through uncomfortable negotiation with myself and conversations with my editors and agents, I took away what wasn’t needed or adding to the particular concerns of this book. No memoir is a complete document of a life. I’ve made many judgements along the way.

Leslie Jamison posted on twitter a description of her lecture series on ‘The Self’. In it she said, ‘I feel the shame of self-interest. But the fact remains many of my favourite books were written by people who were interested in themselves, too.’ This is true for me, a note I had tacked to the wall as I wrote came from a literary event I went to where one speaker said ‘the absolute basis of any creativity is the self, and you use yourself’. Jamison continued ‘I'm interested in the idea that being interested in yourself deepens your capacity to be interested in the lives of others.’ If I am brave, it is for that reason. If I can work through and work out what is going on for me, then I stand a better chance of working out and considering with compassion what is going on for others too. But that isn’t to say I think vulnerability should be a precondition for human understanding and empathy. I reject the idea that we have to share an experience or status in order to be related to, or admired or intrigued or disturbed by? Surely we should be more curious than that? But if I look at my own resources, capability, capacities as a writer, vulnerability is something I can offer rather than the rigour of research, or theoretical agility. Vulnerability is one basis for my creativity, and that’s what I give. In her astonishing book all about love bell hooks wrote that ‘To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others’. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to publish it, but in this case I have. I’ve tried to offer a truthful account of my personal experience of, and feelings towards, romantic love and its absence. And some might call it brave. And some might call it naïve. And some might say, as Brandon Taylor did on twitter ‘A memoir? You mean your personal lore guide? No thanks.’

(I get it!)

Vivian Gornick describes the essay as an act of ‘arriving at what we know’. What I’ve learned since my book has gone out in the world is that this act of arriving is perpetual. It is renewed and adjusted and embellished by the experience of being read.