The three words I would use to describe my home are cozy, colourful and bookish. It’s never tidy, there are always piles of things to sort out and my main concern is where we can put another book case. Currently we have seven and two book trolleys. But there are piles of books everywhere. Crime and romance live on the landing, counselling and other work related books in the office. Downstairs I have a glass fronted bookcase with my special and signed editions in the living room along with a corner of unread hardbacks. In my study is a bookcase made by my father and this holds contemporary fiction, historical fiction and spooky reads. In the same room there’s a little alcove with unread proofs and my main book trolley sits underneath with everything I need for blogging. There’s always a bag of books in this room so visitors can rummage and borrow old proofs and once a month it goes to a charity that cooks Sunday lunch for the homeless. The books seem to fly from there every time.
My textile sculptures, this is Kiko and Betty.
Every so often we go to a holiday cottage and I think ‘our house could look like this’. Everything could match and it would be restful and tasteful. It could be in fifty shades of beige or grey, which seems to be the new magnolia. The truth is I love colour and pattern too much. I’m a huge fan of William Morris and Liberty print, especially my ‘strawberry thief’ desk. If we did a declutter with Stacey Solomon I think she’d have a lot to say about my textile sculptures of hares, the amount of art on the walls and the piles of books living on the floor because I’ve run out of shelf space.
My William Morris writing bureau
My book obsession has even made its way onto the decor with bookish cushions, prints and kitchenware covered in Moomins. We have framed poems on the walls and characters like Mr Tumnus.
Even the cushions have bookish credentials
The most recent thing we did was renovate the kitchen, more in keeping with the period of the house which totally gutting the room and took three months to finish. I love the colour, the old pieces of furniture that don’t match and the blue units with brass. It’s the most I’ve ever spent on anything in one go but it makes me happy every time I go in.
The new kitchen
If we did declutter what would I do with my weird old objects, most of which end up living in the study. No one else would want a candelabra that’s a monkey in a Chinese dress or the decorative bird houses, the chesterfield armchairs that belonged to my friend Nigel and the oak kitchen table we bought from Facebook for forty quid. I have an old dresser from a previous home full of china from my previous in-laws, glasses with poodles on and a Polish pottery teapot that holds eight mugs of tea and stays warm with a tea light underneath. There are prints from seeing Monkey: The Opera in New York, my photos of Venice and my rabbit mask. Snowglobes, lanterns, orchids, antique taxidermy, stones from all the beaches I’ve been to, 17th Century dough bowls, phrenology heads and vases because there are always flowers.
Piles of books awaiting a home.
I love that my home has cozy places to read, like my chaise longue (all day long) and my chair in the study usually occupied by Max. I love that my cats have places to lounge and the dog knows she can hop up on the couch. I like the soft light from lamps and candles and the way the sunset gives the landing a peachy glow. I want people to come into my house and feel comfortable, welcome and to see who we are as a family.
On the chaise longue….
I guess I’m just a maximalist at heart, greedy for colour, pattern and soft soothing light, beautiful art and quirky collectibles. Of course most importantly a lover of books.
My study, Dolly and my reading chair from my friendThe hallway camphor wood chest and William Morris chair My pink and blue living room.
What’s a song lyric that has stuck with you forever?
There’s joy not far from here, right I know there is This isn’t everything you are
These lyrics are so important to me that they still make me cry years later. This song isn’t the Snow Patrol song I played at Jerzy’s funeral. For that I chose Open Your Eyes, prompting my friend to tell everyone to bring their tissues because I was going to ‘Snow Patrol’ them. He listened to that album all the time in bed at home when he could no longer get up. Gary Lightbody writes songs that cut to the quick, somehow taking me deep into the emotions of a single moment.
When Jez died that morning at 5am it wasn’t a shock. We’d been sat there waiting, talking to him, telling him I’d be ok, urging him to let go. He was a stubborn man. Then suddenly he did. As I laid on the bed next to him and my brother lay in two chairs half asleep my huge, charming, intelligent, handsome husband was suddenly gone. I sat for a few moments and it felt like an intense roaring in my head. Then people were talking and I was responding but it was like fighting through static. The nurse gave me a hug and it must have been like holding an ironing board. I couldn’t relax into it. I don’t think the roaring stopped for months.
This song comes four years later. My memory is of putting it on full blast in the car and the singing the chorus at the top of my voice. Or on the stereo while I was in the bath. It was when I was at rock bottom. When I couldn’t see any way out of the deep well of sadness and despair. It was my way of reminding myself that I wouldn’t always feel like this. It was my inner voice coming to me through the music and reminding me that this was just part of my life, not all of it. That one day I would feel happy again. All the pieces of me that shattered that morning would come back together. Maybe not in exactly the same shape, but I would feel like me again. That moment might have been earth shattering, but it wasn’t everything I was.
If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?
If I could rewrite a book’s ending it would be for purely sentimental reasons. The first time I read One Day by David Nicholls I burst into tears. Genuine gulping sobs. Spoiler alert here, this line broke me.
“Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever.”
It’s such a simple line, but beautifully written. The change from past to present tense so we’re right there in the moment of the accident, it’s the finality too. Not just a body but that peculiar magic of thoughts, ideas, and beliefs that make up a person. That make us fall in love with a person. David Nicholls spends three quarters of the book manipulating us into falling in love with Emma and in a moment she’s snuffed out.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this response was down to my personal experience. Probably so. Partly I probably was grieving for my husband Jerzy, he’d only died two years before. Isn’t it strange the way our memories become confused but I would have sworn the book came out before he died. I imagined I’d read it while I was at university in 2001 but since the book was published in 2009 my grief would have been raw.
It’s the futility of all the time they danced around each other, for twenty years until Dexter gets his act together and recognises how much he loves this incredible woman. He certainly takes his time. Only for their time as lovers to be cut short in a second.
For me Emma is at her happiest in Paris. She’s cut her hair. She has a lovely apartment. She writes books for children. Everything she’s hoped and worked for is hers and then Dex turns up, newly divorced and suddenly she’s on his radar. Finally he sees what’s in front of him. So I would leave Emma in Paris, meeting men who see her value and writing her books, exploring the city that’s kickstarted her dreams and done with being Dexter’s consolation prize. She will always care but knows that’s the right decision for her and her happiness. We leave her with her thoughts and feelings intact, buying flowers and meeting a man for a gallery and dinner.
Ever since I was a little girl and visited Scunthorpe Library every other Saturday morning I have had the same dream. That someone like me could one day walk into the library and borrow my book. It’s hard to overstate how much I loved the library when I was little. Unless I had a book token, we couldn’t really afford to buy books. One of my most treasured presents was from my teacher Mrs Milmer when I was about eight years old. She got married and moved away and I sent her a paperweight as a gift. She wrote me a beautiful letter of encouragement that I still have and she sent me a book token. I used it to buy a notebook to start writing. She was my favourite teacher, in fact looking back I don’t think anyone ever stretched or appreciated my imagination like she did. My best friend Zoe and I would write long stories about ghosts in attics, time travelling mammoths and anthropomorphic animals – I’ve always loved an animal in human clothing, I blame Lewis Carrol and CS Lewis. My animals were not quite as upper class as those classic creatures, mine tended to wear flat caps, argue with their wives and disappear to the pub. My parents watched Emmerdale religiously. To be able to read as voraciously and widely as I did was down to teachers who realised I could go through the whole reading scheme in an afternoon and let me roam the school library for classic novels, but mainly it was my mum who made sure that reading for pleasure was part of our upbringing.
Scunthorpe Library in the 1980s
Alongside that came a love of writing, even if it was only the journals I’ve been using since I was a similar age and got a lockable diary. I have them in hat boxes under the bed and my best friend is under strict orders to burn them when I die. I am full of book ideas, scraps and fragments of potential books live on my iPad and in notebooks but for some reason I never seem to pull together a full book. I think I lack discipline, having chronic health issues doesn’t help but it isn’t the reason I haven’t managed this dream. There are self-doubts of course. Is anything I write good enough? When I look at some of the extraordinary writers I encounter through blogging I’m in awe of their talent. Blogging has also helped me realise that a finished manuscript and the book that appears on the shelf can be two very different things. What I write at my desk will be rewritten, edited and shaped to be the best it can be with the help of editors, proofreaders, agents and all the other people who help a book along the publishing process. I know now that at 52, I really do need to get on with it if my dream of seeing my book on a library shelf is to come to fruition. Wish me luck.
Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are?
Me aged 4
That depends on what you mean as ‘who we are’. The question suggests a character or personality that’s innate and set in stone, clearly distinguishable from our life experiences. My life is a series of chapters, each one informed by those defining moments where my path can be clearly divided into before and after. Does my character stay exactly the same through all of that? No. Experience changes us.
I broke my back when I was eleven years old, in the last few weeks of primary school in the early 1980s. Our cottage hospital was so basic that I had to lie still on the ward for the weekend, because there was no specialist to review the x-rays till Monday. I remember looking at the ceiling as I was wheeled from room to room, wondering if I would be able to walk. Every time the bed banged against a corner or skirting board a jolt of pain went through my shoulder blade. I didn’t even get a collar or blocks to protect my spine. I broke two vertebrae and crushed a disc, but was sent home with paracetamol and told to rest. There was no physio. No rehabilitation. No spinal unit.
I just got on with it and avoided things that were painful. A couple of years ago I had an MRI of my whole spine because I’ve been suffering pain for forty years. Where my back was broken there’s a lesion in the spinal column and something called a vertebral hemangioma, a benign vascular tumour that forms from clusters of blood vessels. Then there’s scar tissue formed around the injury, caused by the body trying to protect the site but causing stiffness and nerve impingement. Our emotions are like this. Something happens to us and we try to heal. The things we do to cope are like scar tissue, lying over what happened to protect us from the pain.
Each experience teaches us. Did what happened at 11 years old affect me?Yes. I was so scared and I was alone until my parents were called. The school secretary Mrs Boot was sat nearby so I wasn’t alone, but she was no comfort. I wanted someone to tell me it was going to be okay but all the adults seemed more scared than me.
Am I resilient because of what happened then? Or does some essential ‘Hayleyness’ mean I’m able to pick myself and dust myself off? An innate optimism. I think we assume our character is whole and fixed because the alternative is scary. When Princess Diana died the outpouring of grief was a surprise, but the conspiracy theories started very quickly. It’s easier to believe there’s a secret service plot or that the Royal Family had a hand in her death, rather than accept that such a dazzling woman, a princess, could die in a car accident at only 36. It’s too mundane and ordinary. It means she was mortal. Just flesh and blood like the rest of us. It means we have to accept how random life is. That it can end in a moment.
Similarly it’s scary to accept that who we are shifts according to each new season of life. Virginia Woolf probably best captured how fractured and complex our inner worlds are and how changeable. We shift and flow, open to new possibilities and ways of being. I think I’ve learned to enjoy that ebb and flow. To discover new parts of myself all the time. To take on each new challenge and embrace the change within me. Again and again and again.
‘You cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and you are not the same man.’
The above quote, attributed to the philosopher Heraclitus, is also applicable to a favourite book. In the time you’ve been away and reading other books, the world has moved on, progressing with new ideas and opinions that bring a fresh focus to an old favourite. We also change as readers. With every new concept learned and each new experience, the filter we view the world through changes and we become open to different interpretations of a novel we know well. The book I’ve read more than any other is Jane Eyre, starting out as a childhood favourite I’ve been reading this book every few years since I was ten. My first read coincided with the BBC adaptation on Sunday evenings, starring Timothy Dalton as Mr Rochester. Back then, for me, it was a romance and a ghost story. I was spellbound by the creepy laugh in the night, the candle set to burn Rochester in his bed and the dark, vampiric ghoul that takes Jane’s wedding veil and tears it in two. Yes I was scandalised that Rochester is already married when he tries to marry Jane, but given the choice I’d rather have him than St. John Rivers who has none of the passion and feeling that Jane needs. At least she knew herself well enough to avoid that path, even before Rochester’s strange telepathic call during the fire. I remember also being horrified by the injustice of Jane’s treatment at the hands of her Aunt and then at Lowood. I also found the death of the incredibly pious Helen Burns being particularly traumatic too. In my teenage years I studied it for my English A’Levels and back then un my teenage angst I felt Jane was lacking in feeling. Why did she have to leave Rochester? I compared her with Wuthering Heights and Catherine Earnshaw, full of passion and running wild. Both characters wander the moors, but Jane is rescued from that wilderness by a man of God. I identified more with Catherine as I wandered the flat fields of Lincolnshire walking our dogs, because she was wandering with the alluring Heathcliff. They ran away from the prying eyes of Nelly and Cathy was also experiencing all those dramatic feelings we have as teenagers. I admired Cathy for never losing her feelings for Heathcliff, by comparison it felt like Jane had chosen the good and holy way, but denied herself happiness. I loved the angst of Wuthering Heights, the constant drama and passionate declarations of love, a love that couldn’t be separated by death. I didn’t understand someone who didn’t choose passion and with my church upbringing I didn’t know if Jane was being true to herself or following the religion of Lowood School and her missionary parents as I was expected to. Cathy was my rebellion and Jane felt too safe.
I next encountered the book in my late twenties at university, alongside a huge amount of context and literary theory. I was learning that I could view the book through so many different lenses and my views were changed even further. I learned so much about 19th Century history and the governess as a cultural figure, from a different perspective I studied post-colonial literature and how important it is to the understanding of Bertha Mason’s marriage with Rochester. It made me wonder about her ‘Creole’ roots and whether it was not so much her madness that was hidden but her mixed heritage. I could imagine how powerless and bewildered she must have felt to be torn from the Caribbean, declared mad and locked in the attic by her husband. I read Wide Sargasso Sea and considered how Bertha has been renamed by Rochester, much like masters would rename their slaves. She is Jane’s double – a cautionary tale of what Jane might have become if she’d stayed the little spitfire who had to be locked in the dreaded red room. Lowood’s founder Mr Brocklehurst had been determined to knock the passion out of Jane’s nature, her spirited way of answering back and lashing out to defend herself against her bullying cousin John as well as her inability to hold her tongue when criticised by her aunt. It’s a broader use of the word ‘passionate’ than we tend to use now. In feminist terms men wanted to break her spirit, to turn her into the model and saintly young woman that Helen Burns was trying to become, never daring to look up from the floor. It made me think about women who are deemed acceptable in society and those that aren’t – inconvenient women who won’t shut up, have educated themselves and want to live life on their own terms. Jane has a freedom as a governess she’s never had before, an ability to earn her own money and use her knowledge to teach. She’s without the pressure to find a husband and marry well, the main focus for an upper class woman like the visiting Blanche Ingram. Jane doesn’t have to socialise and meet men, she can choose to leave and work elsewhere if she’s unhappy. Governesses are liminal figures in fiction, not in a specific class, outside the confines of the marriage market and choosing how they spend their own money. She’s invisible and there is freedom in that invisibility.
Jane Eyre BBC Adaptation 1983
When I read the book again recently I had another insight that came from my personal experience. I’d been in an emotionally abusive relationship for a few years and found my way out. Living alone for the first time in ages, I picked up a lot of old books as comfort reads. This experience made me look at Rochester differently, especially in some scenes that had always made me uncomfortable without knowing why. Is the Jane that Rochester claims to love the true Jane? When Jane first meets Rochester, he does try to intimidate her in conversation and finds he can’t. He enjoys her intelligence and seems fascinated by her imagination, the inner world that informs her art work. However, just as young contemporary readers would red flag Heathcliff, Rochester is no stranger to manipulation. He doesn’t tell Jane who he is when they first meet on the lane, instead choosing to surprise her after dinner. He brings the awful Blanche Ingram to Thornfield Hall, just as he and Jane seem to reaching a friendship and instead of allowing Jane to retire gracefully to her room in the evening he insists she stay in the drawing room with his guests. Jane can only sit on the edge of proceedings, as someone of her status should, so why ask her to remain at all? She does hear Blanche’s opinions on governesses and the general expectation that she will become Rochester’s wife. All she wants to do is stay in her place, upstairs with Mrs Fairfax, Adele and Sophie, so his insistence on her presence when all the company ignore her seems cruel. Then there’s the strange incident of the visiting gypsy fortune teller who wishes to read the fortunes of the unmarried ladies at home. Jane is sought out by the woman who claims to know there is another single lady in the drawing room and she obliges the old woman even though she isn’t interested in seeking her fortune. To her surprise the gypsy turns out to be Rochester in disguise. This is far from normal behaviour and so outside of his usual character that the only purpose can be to solicit confessions or secrets from an unwary Jane. Although, judging by her mood he also takes the opportunity to torment Blanche Ingram too. Throughout Jane and Rochester’s interactions there is a definite hot and cold feel to their communications: he hints that she isn’t his friend so she will assert that she is; he tells her stay and leave in the same conversation; he holds her hand a fraction too long. Is the purpose to leave her unsure or unsettled? It leaves Jane unsure of his meaning and intentions, but in the position of his employee she doesn’t want to offend him. He holds all the privileges being an educated and well-travelled man of means and property, sought after in society and with the freedom to come and go as he pleases. Psychologically, the Madonna/Whore Complex is also at play here, because how Rochester describes his wife is very different from how he sees Jane. When discovered to be attempting bigamy he uses words like pure and innocent for Jane and when he thinks of his wife escaping the attic on the eve of his wedding he imagines her standing over the ‘dove’s nest’ Jane sleeps in, innocent and vulnerable. Surely, even as he asks it, he knows Jane won’t agree to be his mistress or take his promised gifts of furs and jewels?
Bringing my own experience to the book I saw that Jane leaving Thornfield was about her asserting her own boundaries. She doesn’t reject his offer of becoming his mistress just because it’s immoral and she fears other people’s opinion, it’s because she could never reconcile it with her own soul. Her wandering on the moors and almost dying of exposure is something of a rebirth, after a dark night of the soul where she wrestles with temptation she’s taken in by the Rivers family. Her subsequent friendship with St. John Rivers, who finds her on the moors, confirms her determination to be true to herself. She can see that an eligible young woman from the village has feelings for him and those feelings are reciprocated but rather than enjoy a marriage based on love, St. John needs to be sure that his future wife has the qualities he needs in a missionary’s wife. His future wife will need to share his mission, willing to suffer hardships, dangerous situations and live in poverty. He sees the qualities he needs in Jane and although he does not love her, he does make an offer of marriage because she has the moral qualities of a missionary and the ability to work hard. It’s here I could see the balanced character Jane has achieved through her life experiences. She rejects Rivers’s proposal on the basis that there’s no passion or love in their relationship. Yes, she would be a great missionary wife but she wants love too. These men are at opposite ends of the spectrum, Rochester is all passion and Rivers is all reason, Jane needs a middle ground and she won’t settle for anything less. After my reread I went to a talk about the book and I was really cross when a woman said that Jane’s return to Rochester is a betrayal of feminism. I argued it wasn’t. Jane makes the very best choice for her life and women making empowered choices is everything feminism is about. Jane is on a very different path when she returns to see Rochester after the fire, she is no longer his employee for a start and soon calls him Edward rather than Sir. She has also become an heiress in her own right, so while she was always his equal in intelligence, she is now his equal financially too. Rochester is also in a different position, with Thornfield burned to the ground he is a widow and trying to save his wife from the flames has left him blind and disfigured. Perhaps in Jane’s eyes this act of heroism redeems him slightly. His disability has left him reclusive, no longer in the highest society but that’s nothing to Jane. If they marry, it’s no longer a case of Rochester changing Jane’s position in society, she has already accomplished that on her own and he is no longer a dominant voice in the marriage. They finally come together as equals.
This is what rereading a book brings, that comfort and familiarity of a known story. Maybe there’s an element of nostalgia too. As I read the book again it’s a Russian doll experience; within this reading are all the other times I’ve read the book. Every discovery I’ve made within its pages informs me but my own changing experiences and societal changes give me a fresh eye every single time.
My favourite film adaptation of Jane Eyre from 2011
The Next Ten Books I Read Again and Again.
The Adrian Mole Series by Sue Townsend – touching, relatable, nostalgic and hilarious.
The Rutshire Chronicles by Jilly Cooper – glamorous, witty and sexy, with a rake we’d all like to reform.
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot – cosy and nostalgic animal stories, full of humour and warmth.
The Night Circus -, a love story with dark deeds set in a magical world that’s beautifully rendered.
Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott – the ultimate comfort book with an all time favourite heroine in Jo March.
Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult – a legal battle between the contemporary world and the closed off Amish Community with teenage girl in a heart-rending situation.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – a unique premise, Ursula meets the 20th Century again and again.
The Shining by Stephen King – a deserted hotel, hauntings, telepathy and the realisation that the things we fear can be much closer than we think.
The Final Testimony of Raphael Ignatius Phoenix – darkly humorous, deliciously wicked and incredibly clever.
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier – a brooding widower, a naive girl, a stately home on the Cornish cliffs and a wife who won’t stay dead.
If you had to change your name, what would your new name be?
Little Me 1973
I had to think about this recently when reading Florence Knapp’s novel The Names, where a little boy’s life changes depending on what he’s named on the day. It reminded me that my mum did want to call me something else. Something that’s been a great comic story in our family. I was my mum’s first baby, so although she’d told staff she thought I was close to being born they didn’t agree and sent my dad home. It was the 1970s and things were very different. When my mum was proven right only an hour later they couldn’t get him back. My mum and dad lived in a caravan in the yard at the farm where he worked. So there wasn’t even a landline to call. So I was born just after midnight and it was just me and mum. First thing in the morning my Uncle went to the maternity home and was told that only the father could visit at the moment and he told them he was so they let him in. A while later my grandad turned up and did the same thing. By the time my dad managed to get a bus to the hospital my mum must have been the talk of the maternity ward.
My mum’s a huge Joni Mitchell fan and loved the song Little Green. She really wanted to call me that and as a teenager I was fairly scornful of this idea. I could imagine being called all sorts of awful nicknames. My mum was definitely a hippy but my dad was a very practical man, having been the army and farming so he wasn’t sold on this idea. They agreed on Hayley which means ‘from a nearby meadow’ and I never really thought about it again until reading the book. I decided to listen to the song on Spotify and it was just so beautiful. Written for a child she had when she was very young. She felt she was too young to be a mum and gave her up for adoption. The song is so full of the hopes a mother would have for their daughter:
“Just a little Green
Like thе color when the spring is born
There’ll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow
Just a little Green
Like the nights when the Northern lights perform
There’ll be icicles and birthday clothes
And sometimes there’ll be sorrow.”
The book made me wonder whether I’d be a different person now had I been Little Green. Would I have been more confident? Perhaps I’d have been more comfortable in my creativity. Might I have written my book by now? How could I have failed with a name imbued with such hope?
Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?
This was a serendipitous prompt because I have been putting a post together for my Ten on Tuesday series about this subject. I’ve gone with books from primary school age first and this gives you a preview of what I’ll be writing about for the next few days. Many of my favourites were series and I think that’s because they came from a library. On Saturdays my dad played football and I would be dropped off in Scunthorpe with mum to shop and visit the library, a strange modern building with a glass pyramid lobby, not a great choice for a square overrun with pigeons. Mum always left me to make my own choices while she went upstairs to choose hers – on one occasion it was a Barbara Woodhouse training manual for dogs that our spaniel proceeded to rip into pieces, very pleased with himself. I’d have loved to hear that conversation with the librarian. I would choose my books, get them stamped (oh how I wanted a stamp) and then sit on a bean bag and start to read. We would travel across town to my grandma’s house on the bus and once I’d talked everyone to death I went through to the telly room and sat with grandad, who would be boiling himself next to the gas fire and watching either football or old black and white films. I would lie on the couch and read my books quietly until he wanted to check the pools. We used to watch the football results come in, my grandad swearing under his breath and me copying all the unusual club names like Leyton Orient or Heart of Midlothian. I used to take out five books every other Saturday and I would often finish a series, then start all over again with book one.
I think my favourite has to be Tove Jansson’s Moomin series and it is still something of an obsession. I collect Moomin crockery, particularly mugs and cake plates, but I also have Moomin jewellery, clothing and art around the house. I loved Moomin house and its magical Finnish surroundings. Moomintroll would always bring waifs and strays home, his parents always having enough to go round whether it was food, company or shelter that was needed. They also had buckets full of compassion and understanding for people. Little My was terribly bossy and bitey but there was room for her and her mother Mymble. Then there’s the Hemulen, a very learned gentleman who has a love of botany and can often be found shuffling around the gardens and beyond with his magnifying glass and notebook. For some reason he was always wearing a dress but nobody commented. The Snork Maiden is also a Moomin, but isn’t family. She comes and goes, mainly to see Moomintroll who she’s in love with, but she’s always worrying that she is too plump to be loved in return. Finally there’s Snufkin, Moonintroll’s best friend, who is a bit of a loner and loves to wander off and travel in the summer months. He shares a love of fishing with Moomintroll and although he doesn’t always understand Snufkin’s need to be alone he does respect it. All of these unusual people live under one roof and there’s always room. Moominmama and papa are wonderfully kind and never judgemental about their guests, they keep everyone fed and include them in their stories about various adventures. People talk about the personality types seen in Winnie the Pooh but the Moomins are it for me, I can easily fit anyone I know into one of these characters – my brother is a most definite Snufkin. They remain relevant today, particularly the Snork Maiden’s self-image and the Hemulen’s cross dressing. I only realised when I was older that I was lucky enough to have parents very like Moomintroll’s. I had a friend with a Mohican and very baggy Joe Blogg’s jeans who would stroll to my house with flowers he’d stolen from someone’s yard, or the graveyard, and announce to my mum that he’d come for tea and she always fed him. My brother and I constantly brought strays home, animals and people, and my parents were always there with food, a listening ear or some advice. I was living with Moominmamma and Pappa all along.
Reading the books over and over, certainly informed my own ways of dealing with people and might have a lot to do with my choice of career. In mental health, reserving judgment and accepting people as they are is vital in therapy. Now when I look at the books or buy something for my collection I get that feeling of nostalgia for my childhood and my family, whose way of being in the world meant we did live in Moomin House, it was just a bungalow in Lincolnshire rather than a blue tower next to a lake.
Look out for my childhood book blog in the next fortnight, or you can sign up and have every post sent to your inbox.
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
Wow it’s so hard to come up with only three but I’ll give it a try. The biggest impact books can have is an emotional one and since I love books that are complex psychologically with deep, realistic characters that’s why I’m struggling to restrict myself. So I’ll do three of the most recent ones.
Ciara has recognised she needs to leave her husband due to his coercive control. Here in Ireland, she has no real support. Her family is Irish but live in London and despite her yearning to see her mum and sister the law states that she can’t take the children out of Ireland without the written permission of their father. Her only option is the housing office, present as homeless and hopefully get some emergency accommodation. As she meets other women in the same situation, she founds out that emergency and temporary have a very different meaning to the housing department. They offer her a temporary hotel room, but some women on the floor have lived there for a year so it’s going to be a long slog. This small double room with one bed and no view is the first place they’ve felt even remotely safe, even if they do have to go down a separate staircase so they don’t bump into tourists. Will Ciara have the strength to stay away and build a new life for herself?
This book blew me away last year. I was so engrossed in Ciara’s story that when I was at 50% of the way through I decided to sit for an afternoon and finish. No distractions like music or telly, just total silence and when I finished I sat in that silence and I could feel, bodily, every step of her emotional journey. My chest was tight, my breaths were shallow and I was holding myself so tightly I was sore. When I put it down I had to sit in silence for a while and just digest it all. It’s the story of a woman trying to leave a relationship that is tying her down and eating her alive. Everything she was before – bright, intelligent and full of life – has been worn away. Enduring her husband’s treatment, as well as having two children in four years, mean Ciara has had enough. She can see his behaviour as a pattern and despite being absolutely terrified she needs to find the strength to go.
I was in a relationship like Ciara’s for four years, vulnerable from the death of my husband, I reached for what felt like safety, but was really control. I weathered the silences, withdrawals, rages, punishments and rare moments of calm that I didn’t realise was a cycle of abuse. The gradual withdrawal of friends and family, the breakages of things most precious to me, the arguments with his family I couldn’t understand, all started to wear me down. He told me I was overweight, undesirable when I was ill, nagging, controlling, not a team player. If I tried to be more desirable he rejected me because I was making a show of myself. I tried to get involved with his business, but had to be careful not to outshine him. He liked me to organise parties and BBQs but then raged that I’d taken the limelight. He even used my disability against me, saying he wasn’t attracted to me when my MS relapsed and questioning my symptoms, my need to use a blue badge. I’d never experienced a relationship so unsettling, swooping from happiness to despair in the space of a few hours. He kept telling me this is what a long term relationship was like, luckily I knew different. Then he did something that, if I accepted it, would have separated me from my family and left me utterly alone and exactly where he wanted me. Thankfully I had enough strength and family support to leave. I’m telling you this so you can understand how this book had such an emotional effect on me. When you’ve gone through an experience of abuse and coercive control it’s so hard to explain because like my disability it can’t be seen. The unexplained injuries and bruises of physical abuse are their own testament, but how do you describe being terrified of someone who doesn’t physically leave any sign of their abuse? When someone articulates your experience in this way, you feel seen and accepted. Ciara’s experience did that for me and I can’t thank Roisin O’Donnell enough for that.
In 1987 Cora is going to register the birth of her baby boy. His name has been settled on for some time. Cora’s husband has chosen his own name for his son, Gordon. But it wouldn’t be Cora’s choice. Cora’s choice would be something that doesn’t tie him so obviously to his father. She thinks Julian would suit him. Little sister Maia looks in the pram at her brother and decides he looks like a he should be called Bear. All of these options swirl around in Cora’s head. In this moment, Cora has the power to make a choice and it’s done. It can’t be changed. What would happen if she went with Julian or even Bear? In the short term Gordon would be furious. How bad would it be this time? Long term, would it change her baby’s character or path in life? That’s exactly what Florence Knapp does. The book splits into three narratives and we discover what happens to this whole family, depending on Cora’s baby boy’s name. We then move on seven years and meet Bear, a name that proves to be a catalyst for change. Or we meet Cora’s choice, Julian – the choice she hoped would break him free from domineering generations of Gordons. Although, what if he is called Gordon? Brought up by a cruel father to continue in the same mould perhaps? Or he might just break free from the shackles of his name. Each life is sparked by this one decision and it isn’t just Cora’s son’s story. This is the life of the whole family with all its ups and downs. It’s about how trauma shapes lives and whether love brings healing and hope to every version of who we are.
One of our family narratives is that mum wanted to call me Little Green after the Joni Mitchell song. Mum is definitely a hippy and Dad is definitely not. My whole life I’ve said ‘thank goodness for Dad’, as I ended up with Hayley Marsha Ann which felt unusual enough. However, when I read the lyrics of the Joni Mitchell song, it was just so beautiful. Written for a child she had when she was very young. She felt she was too young to be a mum and gave her up for adoption. The song is so full of the hopes a mother would have for their daughter:
“Just a little Green
Like thе color when the spring is born
There’ll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow
Just a little Green
Like the nights when the Northern lights perform
There’ll be icicles and birthday clothes
And sometimes there’ll be sorrow.”
The book made me wonder whether I’d be a different person now had I been Little Green. Would I have been more confident? Perhaps I’d have been more comfortable in my creativity. Might I have written my book by now? How could I have failed with a name imbued with such hope? Each of the book’s three arcs has its share of joy and heartache as Cora’s potential children cope with the aftermath of that day in 1987. For Gordon the legacy of his father is perhaps the most damaging as Cora feared. Growing up in his father’s presence means he could pass on the misogyny passed down through all the Gordons in his ancestry. It damages his relationship with his mother as he can be used as a tool for his father to oppress Cora further or to spy on her behaviour. It will also affect his own relationships with women, both his sister and potential partners – his teenage crush on Lily becomes something that’s very hard to read, but it’s right to include it. The author depicts inter-generational trauma and how it can damage the next generation in different ways. Abusers can’t always break patterns and sometimes I was compelled to read on in sheer hope. Each narrative has its moments of emotion where you have to look up from the book and breathe for a moment. Just to take it in. However, one narrative broke me. I was reading quietly in the same room as my husband and I actually responded out loud. He had to give me a cuddle because I did have tears coming and I’m astonished by the writer’s ability to absorb to that degree. To make words into a flesh and blood person I can shed tears over and another who has the potential to become a monster.
At an isolated research station in Antarctica, biologist Laurel Salter washes dishes for a living ten hours a day, six days a week. She tells no one why she left her career, or why her marriage ended.
But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t outrun her past. When a strange light appears across the ice and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo, her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind.
Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole, and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them – to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?
And this time, live it differently.
Once read, never forgotten, Under Story is a genre-defying exploration of the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love.
I can’t reveal too much about this one as it’s not published yet but I am constantly praising it because it’s the most extraordinary book I’ve read in years. I was quite simply blown away by this complex and beautiful story of science, loss and second chances. Our heroine Laurel is a scientist, studying fungus and how it grows but for some reason that isn’t clear at first, she’s on a research station in the Antarctic, away from her former husband Eli and without any fungus in sight. When she develops a fascination in the Arc that appears she thinks about its significance. When she becomes aware there is a matching basin underneath the water, her imagination is fired. Could this possibly be a portal? A gateway to a different world? She knows Eli won’t be far behind because she remembers his theory of the ‘duoverse’, the idea that at the moment of the big bang time and space was formed in two directions: our universe, the planets and the development of the world we know and in the other direction it’s complete opposite. I am not a scientist, in fact I barely have GCSE Biology, so I wasn’t aware of any background to this idea so could drift with it and enjoy two incredible minds exploring ideas.
Our characters are fascinating, Eli and Laurel are a couple who were made for each other but their relationship is real and particularly devastating events crash into their lives but I never doubted their love for each other. It’s fascinating to watch their characters face the concept of the duoverse, not just whether it is a portal, but if it is what will their relationship look like there and will going backwards fix whatever tore them apart. I felt both were analytical and might even appear cold at times, but in the moments of heightened emotion we really see who these characters are and the deep wells of love they hold. Every world the author presents to us feels absolutely real even though it’s impossible. I was on tenterhooks wondering about the duoverse under the ice and if Lauren is right whether they’ll ever be able to return? I found myself wondering how this world would look as time scrolled backwards. I was genuinely scared for them but also full of admiration for their bravery. The mirroring is so cleverly done, showing how life always comes full circle and we’re often helpless at the end and the beginning, if we’re lucky enough to lead a full life. It might seem like science has sent them on this potential journey, but it isn’t. The totally unscientific emotion of love is what pushes them on, but also guilt, hope and desperation. Loss is a huge theme in the novel, something that always hits me in the heart due to my own losses: losing my late husband and three pregnancies I was deeply moved by how the author dealt with loss across the novel and how the scientific concept of a duoverse changes this experience. This novel was moving, profound, invigorating, deeply intelligent and so full of life. I kept thinking about the symbols of the cover, the circle and the tree, the same under the ground as they are over it. As Laurel observes:
“A line implies before and after; a circle says And then, and then…”
I didn’t realise I had this fear until around twenty years ago. I was 36 and my husband had died from complications with his multiple sclerosis. It had become so severe he couldn’t swallow or breathe properly. I had this realisation that I’d never been alone. From being around 16, I’d always had a boyfriend or partner. It was a fleeting thought I wrote in my journal and then forgot about. We’d had a busy house, what with carers and nurses and family popping in all the time. I struggled with the time that stretched out in front of me, used to a demanding caring role that included clearing lungs, tube feeding and constant turning to avoid pressure sores, there were now no demands taking up my day. I was at a friend’s house and she asked me if I’d stay for tea and I automatically said no, forgetting that I had nothing to come home for. No matter who I was with or where I went, the crushing silence when I reached home was unbearable. It was as if the air in the room was heavy and empty at the same time. His wheelchair, parked in the corner of the garage was unbearable to go past. I was relieved to be able to sleep all night but then started having nightmares. Waking suddenly, covered with sweat thinking I’d forgotten to get up and suction his lungs. Thinking he’d stopped breathing, then remembering that he had. I had dreams where I couldn’t find him and I was wandering in this dystopian nightmare of bombed out houses and twisted metal. I was turning over wreckage thinking I’d find him underneath but he simply wasn’t there. I could still hear him trying to clear his throat. I kept falling asleep in the day, then waking up unable to move but hearing noises that made me think someone was in the house. My brain bringing up intruders just so I felt less alone. A year later I met someone. It was someone I’d known a long time and trusted. I was magical thinking. That the universe had given me this person so I had something to be happy about. I was owed a happy ending, right? I thought it was the least the universe could do. So I made it perfect. I fashioned my own happy ending. Only to be left four years later feeling like I’d been in love with a ghost. The man I imagined myself in love with didn’t exist. Instead this controlling, insecure and abusive monster was living in my house and I couldn’t work out what had happened. Why had he changed? Like all abusers he started off charming, but if I was honest with myself I should have walked away at the six month mark, when the first red flag appeared, but I didn’t because I wanted us to be happy. Now I would have to learn how to be alone again. This time though I leaned into it. I relaxed into the sadness and anger, allowed myself to feel it. Now I know I can survive anything.
The Lotus Readers 