I was writing things about made-up people long before I was writing anything else. What drew me to fiction is still what motivates me now: a desire to understand people, their psychology, their motivations and their relationships. For me, writing has never been about catharsis. I don’t feel better about painful experiences having written them “out of my system”. It isn’t an emotional purging. It can feel pretty terrible sometimes, swimming in your own sadness, and it never feels better afterwards. The suggestion that an author’s characters are merely ciphers for their own mental state is most frequently levelled at female writers, so I feel compelled to say that none of the characters in my debut novel, The Tyranny of Lost Things, are me. And, of course, they all are, in some way, me.
I was very ill when I started writing it. I had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2010, and again in late 2015. It made life very difficult and there were times when I didn’t want to go on. I essentially became a recluse who rarely left the house (I was lucky to have been working as a freelance writer or I wouldn’t have been able to survive financially). I was swinging perpetually between terror and sadness, in a state of either fight-or-flight, or intense grief at the loss of a functional existence.
Yet in between there were also moments of pleasure, most often when I was creating something. The feeling of sitting and writing at my kitchen table wasn’t quite happiness, but it was a sort of peace. I realised that writing fiction was potentially transformative.
It took a long time – almost four years – from start to finish. I used that time to create a character who had suffered a trauma and transposed on to her everything I knew about the psychology of my condition. I drew on my own symptoms, but also on chats with other sufferers, therapists and writers. I read everything I could get my hands on about PTSD, and re-read tons of novels. Trauma jumped out at me from the pages of books I had always loved: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre; gothic fiction provided a loose blueprint.
Writing my novel didn’t cure me: the NHS did that, providing trauma-focused cognitive behaviour therapy and medication. I also discovered gardening and took to planting and tending roses when I wasn’t writing. What writing did was give me a focus and a creative outlet. I hoped that one day it would be published, but my main motivation in writing it was to produce a literary depiction of trauma that was true to life. What I ended up with was a strange, interior novel about a character who witnessed a traumatic incident that she was too young to remember, set among the north London squatting scene in the 1970s and 1980s.
When I finished the final draft, I didn’t know if anyone would want to read it, but I felt a sense of fulfilment. I had started going outside, taking public transport, swimming. I had sat in a restaurant and eaten a steaming plate of pasta without worrying that I would die. I had torn up a dancefloor. Breathing life into my characters had made me want to live.
Whenever someone tells me that they have succeeded in finishing a novel, I congratulate them. It is such a big project and takes so much time and energy that completion is an achievement in itself. I would urge anyone who has the space and time to do so to give it a try: especially if, like me, you are forced to spend a lot of time on your own.
Letting the book go by sending it out into the world was a bizarre experience. It no longer belongs to you and people will project their own reactions on to it. When publication day came, the book was praised, but naturally there were criticisms, too. Authors can get bogged down in these but you have to ask yourself whether you set out to achieve what you wanted to do. Mental illness can be unpalatable and complicated, and sometimes my characters were, too. The best part was finding a community of writers and readers who feel as passionately as I do about literature’s potential to convey humanity.
It is up to other people to decide whether the art you have made has succeeded or not. For me, though, the process is the best part. I’m writing my second novel now and feeling a familiar excitement. This will no doubt swing into despair and back again several times before I finish it.
My main reason for writing wasn’t to get better, yet getting better was a pleasant side-effect. But the best thing of all was readers saying that it made them feel understood. Some even recognised their own symptoms and sought medical help. That to me is everything.
The Tyranny of Lost Things is published by Sandstone press
