MINDING MY BUSINESS
As a cub reporter on the now defunct Northampton Chronicle and Echo I was sent to interview the bereaved father of a lad killed in a motorbike crash. I returned to the office, full of tea and fags and sobbed into my copy as I typed it up - on a typewriter with carbon paper!
A kind News Editor told me people like to talk through their grief. But I felt it was wrong, somehow. Wasn’t I exploiting someone’s private agony for a story?
Fast-forward to the years I spent editing Dr Miriam Stoppard’s now defunct Agony Aunt Page in the TVTimes and my subsequent presenting stint on a now defunct* satellite TV channel hosting The Agony Hour. I read thousands of letters splattered with tears (and dubious secretions on pervy letters from The Green Ink Brigade) and I interviewed scores of people – abused, bereaved, traumatised – and they all wanted to talk about the worst moments of their life.
Now, if I’d had kids, I might be farting rainbows like Caitlin Moran, but I didn’t and I’m not. I’m frequently on the edge of an abyss, a hairbreadth away from falling off the wagon into a vat of mojitos and a cream cake the size of Knutsford. And I have my own smorgasbord of sadness to mine.
I wouldn’t say I’m more comfortable writing about my own dark times, but that’s my position on the diving board when I launch into a novel. I use my own past as inspiration, like artist Tracey Emin, who catapulted to fame with her installation of an unmade bed, and the tent chronicling the names of people she’d slept with. Some in the art world vilified the marvellous Tracy, but she became friends with David Bowie, so she wins.
It feels honest to use my own experience as a starting point. I still worry that people who’ve been involved in my life might feel exploited reading a version of their past twisted into a form that suits my story. But I write fiction, not autobiography. I exaggerate and push boundaries (to date I have never stolen a child like the protagonist in Call Me Mummy) but I’m open about my worst thoughts and feelings.
My writing is a form of therapy. It’s a ‘fuck you’ to the losers and abusers who hurt me along the way. And it means some of the bad things that I’ve encountered can be used in a positive way, to catalyse my creativity – so I win!
*I see a pattern here.