The Obsessive Diary

First off, thank you all for showing up with such incredible kindness, generosity and love since I published “Shattered”. I was conscious of the delicate line between asking for witness and flinging a dead cat on the table, and I hovered over the need to speak for sometime before pressing publish. The threat of indulgence is a constant in my British mind, as are the dysfunctions of story as identity and pretending there’s no hole in my bucket; I recognise the latter particularly, that however much public attention I get, it’s not enough, and to deny this while holding it out for more is to deceive those giving. So I’ve been plugging that hole with every day love, and my bucket has filled up with gratitude, and I’ve you all to thank for that. Thank you. It’s meant the world to me and I’m happy to say I feel a whole lot better.

I’m working up a post about sex and love addiction, all that has come into focus in the last few weeks, but first I need to do something which doesn’t come naturally, makes me feel slightly sick, but is a necessary part of publishing. I need you all to help me with numbers.

I’m holding my nose here, so please bear with.

Here it is:

Fallout is coming out next year, and I need to get my Subscriber numbers up to 10,000 so that the Substack Gods, and those affiliated, promote it. It’s completely free to subscribe, and you can think of it as activism (that’s how I’m thinking of it). Fallout isn’t just a novel about a teenage girl running away to join a peace movement, it’s the story of Greenham Common, an iconic protest written out of history.

My aim has always been to put the story of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp on the educational map where it belongs. It’s up there with the Suffragettes, and Fallout is the first work of fiction to be set there. The novel highlights the point of political activism, why we do it and must keep doing it, the impact of non-violent direct action, and most especially the power of being annoying. The persistently disobedient women of Greenham Common changed the world, and we can never stop learning from them.

From the moment I began Fallout, the urge to raise Greenham to the visibility it deserves became the driving force behind its creation. It doesn’t matter who wrote it, anyone could have done it, what matters is that the persistent energy of Greenham Common is heard by another generation. So, please tell your friends, recommend, restack and sing, help me get The Literary Obsessive above the 10,000 subscriber watermark so that the women of Greenham can be remembered, celebrated and their actions go on to inspire another generation. Once Fallout is up and dancing, I don’t mind if you all quietly slope off. It will have been a ride.

Oh, and pre orders are a massive help, too. Here are the links:

Okay. Brrrr. *shakes off the discomfort of asking for numbers. I’ll be posting a proper Obsessive Diary post on Friday. Meanwhile, join me today for LIVE with Heather Bartos for all things sex and menopause….

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It’s been useful having the memoir to republish over the last month because in that time two relationships have shattered. That makes three this year, if death can be called a shattering, although my relationship to my mother now, six months on since she left, feels more whole than it ever did. So I don’t count it, except if the frame is a fundamental repositioning of foundational connections, in which case I very much do. So that makes three.

My mother died. Fine. It was always going to happen and when it did she shuck off the armour that had kept her a distant, unassailable stranger and revealed her as no less strange but a whole lot more interesting. She pops in now and again to check on me. I feel her presence and our engagement is simple. Behind two enormous sliding doors she is getting on with the next bit, and occasionally I see those doors slide open and there she is. I know she is watching. I know she takes it seriously. I know she is dispassionate in her love. That is enough.

The last time she popped in, a sudden face up close to mine, I was lying in a hotel bed in New York after the second shattering. This is how I know she’s watching, because she was watching then; because she saw and her concern woke me. Eight years ended when I was four thousand miles away. When I was looking forward to coming home, when I was missing him and the feeling of being held, when my thoughts were comfortably on a future together. Eight years shattered and a friendship much older than that was shattered with them. I cut the call that already was sending a howl up through my blood, and six flights up in a New York hotel room I witnessed parts of myself spinning off into the universe.

There’s an incredible, momentary clarity that comes with great shock. In the first few minutes after it happened I said to myself and the room and New York, I’m going to imagine that this is the best f*****g thing that could possibly happen to me.

I am treating it like an addiction, focusing my energy on my own jurisdiction; what is the pattern? where did it begin? why these choices? Within the grief is the chance to go back to the beginning, and as if my body needed to make that clear, I landed in the UK five days later with a tooth infection stemming from the root. I’ve realised what I’m addicted to: charming, emotionally battering men who disappear, and anyone who’s read my memoir will know why. Okay. Thanks universe. Message received and understood. One last thing - the complex and crazy-making experience of grieving for someone who causes me pain. This, also, is my childhood. Except back then, when the basement shadow man vanished, so too did any chance of it being seen. That original shattering was rendered completely invisible. Which is why, in this hall of mirrors, I’m choosing to write about the pain I’m in now. I need it to be visible. I need to not pretend I’m all right.

The third shattering is perhaps more complex still, certainly older, and is a last straw in a relationship with a sibling. I must be oblique, there are people involved who I love, but as with the end of my man relationship I need to talk about it somehow. I don’t want to go over and over the story - I’m already tired of that, I don’t want to tell it, the telling of it cements it each time and the details don’t matter. What matters is that I’m walking around with a third devastation, a severing of what was, as a child, my strongest rope, and I need it to be seen. I cannot pretend it’s nothing.

So that makes three, and I can’t help but see the correlation between them all, the essential untying of terrible bonds, the liberation that’s on offer amongst all the flinging pieces.

Yesterday in a café in London I could not stop crying. I had a meeting to go to with people who’ve no need to know any of this stuff, and I found myself locked in lavatory with my hands against the door. I have never known grief like this. When my father died I had three month old twins to care for. There wasn’t time. When my mother died I felt a keen sense of liberation. I’ve lost friends, and I’ve friends who’ve lost children and all of these have been terrible, sudden gut punches and gasps for air and caused gaps in which I’ve stopped and taken in the sky. But this is different. This is mainline. I am not in control of it. It shows up on the tube, in cafés, in restaurants in Covent Garden. It arrives when I least expect it and when I most expect it and any god damn time it pleases in between. It is hurtling through me. It is my turn.

Eleanor

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It’s funny to think that within days of the black box opening I headed off to the Venice Biennale, that most surreal and picturesque of places which on a normal day is like walking into a dream, but which during the festival is beyond Alice in Wonderland. The missing pieces of the jigsaw had come tumbling out, I had a seen a picture awful but whole, ugly but a thousand times better than the jumbled nonsense I had lived with; memories that made no sense, feelings that had no grounding, behaviour at odds with a childhood apparently so blessed, and the revelation was like taking acid as my world changed shape and settled into its new reality. It was with this that I landed in Italy and pulled my suitcase noisy along the cobbled canals, Venice out of body, an explosion of art for which I had no grip. I spent three days lonely and drinking and out of my mind, putting on a show for the people I knew so that they would not know, spinning with all the shattered pieces of me around this one fantastical, unavoidable truth. Now I knew, and the pictures came together, and I had to live conscious with what had been hidden. Recovery is for another book; it is an ongoing process but I will say this. Within a year of remembering I stopped drinking. I’d been a steady wine-in-the-afternoon-on-my-own sort of person, combined with spliffs it had been for over a decade my way of connecting with the thing that was lost. Abuse splits you off from yourself and I was seeking that person, all addicts are doing the same, at the heart of all addiction lies trauma. But those couple of hours every day manufacturing a feeling of not being alone cut me off from twenty-three other hours of connecting properly, and it was time, so I stopped. I cried for a month. Then the sensation of acid again as if I was tripping. By the third month sober I’d found my feet. It’s saved my life. I have saved my life. When I started this memoir, I didn’t know the sun around which it would orbit, the story I was telling. That only became clear as I wrote, that most magic of knowings, the unconscious, driving the story of a girl running blind, acting out, being lost until she is found. I found her in a gremlin, in a black box, in words on the page and this thirty-thousand-foot view of my life has been a gift; I have seen patterns, a way through, the picture, again, has made sense. I don’t know how to end a memoir. I suppose you do it like this.

“In our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand.” James Baldwin (1924-1987)

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Bad things happened in the basement of that house. It’s taken a long time for me to say that. The pictures of my childhood never made sense, why I was so frightened and unhappy, why I built an armour and ran away and kept running. We had such plenty, enormous wealth, a revolving door of parties, artists, cocktails in the drawing room; These spoilt children, our mother would say, Don’t you know how lucky you are? Yet at its heart was something dark that left us splintered. The woman who escaped the Czech revolution who was given the job of being our nanny was troubled, but her husband, the shadow who lasted three years was worse. He faded into myth, the truth shut up in a black box marked my first love while she took the role as star tormentor, the one we could blame, her psychotic presence, the horror of her in our lives was not forgotten. She was ill and my mother didn’t have the heart to cope. When she screamed about the house, convinced we plotted methods of her torture, my mother would say, Cruel children, these people have nothing. And when she banged the pipes in the basement my mother would crouch beside me and say, We can’t leave the house in case she burns it down, and we would cancel plans to go out. She was arrested eventually, for running the streets in her underwear, I heard she was taken to a nunnery. And I left home and started my own race to outpace the demons in my head, answering the question, How can I live with such pain? by building an armoured heart and taking a lot of drugs; a search to make it my fault was an answer in itself. I married for a second time, had children, my father died, I got divorced; throughout it all, from childhood to changing nappies, I wrote. I published a novel about someone else’s pain; my father, his mother, and it gave me liberation of sorts but still I didn’t know. The pictures of my childhood, these fragments I’d remembered, sliding up the bannisters at night, the day the shadow man promised to take me with him, weren’t enough to create a whole, until one day it happened. I was sitting at my kitchen table researching author websites, flicking through images when I came upon a woman in a bath holding a glass of wine. It was not like the actual I had seen as a child but it didn’t matter to that lock and key in my head. Something clicked and the black box opened and those pictures I had hidden as a matter of survival came tumbling out onto the floor and I saw.

“Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is duty.” Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Baronne de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817)

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I’m going to tell you a fairy story. Once upon a time there was a little girl who saw something. She happened upon a woman in a bath who was drinking a glass of wine and the woman’s expression said she saw it too but she carried on drinking her wine. The little girl knew she was going to die so she took what was most precious inside her and gave it to the Gremlins who lived in the hollow of roots beneath the trees that grew on steep cliffs behind her father’s house. And then the bad things happened to her, the things she had seen that would surely end her life, and a million pieces of her were split in a million ways, shattered and sent spinning and she put those pieces in a black box marked my first love and then she grew up. She forgot about the box. She forgot about the one precious piece of her she had saved and given to the Gremlins to keep safe. She forgot she had once been whole. Years went by. Voices in her head telling her she was s**t made her run. She left home and picked up speed. She tried every which way to outpace them but no matter how quick or how nimble, the voices chased after, grew louder, and she didn’t dare look behind her; she feared they’d grown into an army. If she stopped she would die so she blocked her ears and closed her eyes and ran faster. But one day, tired and exhausted by the fight to not see and not hear, she stopped. The Gremlin wobbled up to her, delivering its message. Not an army but a single round and hairy beast from her childhood who had lived in the hollow of roots behind her father’s house. She thought it was going to tell her how bad she was, how worthless and useless but instead, as it grew closer, she heard a different voice, and the voice said, Help. The Gremlin stood quiet as she reached inside it and there, trapped but alive, was the one precious part of her that she had forgotten. She held it to her chest. She felt it click into place. The Gremlin wobbled away and the million pieces of her that had been shattered and sent spinning came spinning back.

“Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.” Eric Jarosinski

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At the heart of addiction lies trauma. It’s an answer to the question, How can I live with such pain? My love affair with needles was a problem-solver and like all dysfunctional relationships it began with the explosive belief that I’d found the one, and ended with my world reduced to a pinprick. For three years I travelled back and forth to Australia using crystal meth and cocaine to make life feel better and for a while it worked. I was stick thin and unapproachable but to a degree I was happy. My friends and I partied in remote and beautiful places, liberated in trance for days at a time, pounding the earth, our bodies loose, all rules abandoned, an ironing board for a bar, an inflatable for a pool party, ketamine and vodka for breakfast, we drove them wild. I made friendships that I cherish to this day and I see how close I sailed to the edge and it takes my breath. It was magic and it was terrible and we’re lucky to have had it and come out of it alive and some of us didn’t. But temporarily it solved the problem, How can I live with such pain? while not telling me what the pain was, a deal that by the third year was just me and my gear in a room and the most fleeting of escapes. Because addicts are chasing the feeling of finding the answer and it’s never as good as the first time. By the third year I’d cut all connections, what did I need other people for, they just got in the way. I cannot pass a parked car in a lay-by without thinking the people inside have stopped for a taste and when I think of the ritual my cells remember. I have lain in the bath and apologised to my body and my veins have stood up in my arms and my blood has pulsed visibly and let me be clear, the body does hold the score, it is conscious, it forgives and it remembers everything. The end came at a party in Australia, not an outdoor trance delight but a room in a house where we’d gathered, the people there linked not by friendship but by method. I was lying in a bed; bodies were scattered about, and on either side of me were two people with needles in their arms. I remember having a moment of seeing the scene as if new, without irrational explanations. I remember thinking, what am I doing? It was so sudden and so obvious. I got up and left, flew back to England, never used again. I felt I’d got off light until I understood it wasn’t needles or crystal meth or cocaine that I was addicted to, but something deeper.

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

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It’s now that the shaman overplays his hand. You’d think cutting the brakes on my car and locking me out of my house would have done it. Or throwing a party while I was away called Going Ape that he’d advertised with fliers all over the local town. Or his misogyny. Or megalomania but don’t forget context; I’d come out of India, Israel, commune, cult, and Centro Maya was just another chapter in an already overloaded book. And he’d got inside my head because even the most poundshop shaman knows enough tricks to make it look like they know a lot. The bulbs are flashing again in the kitchen as I write this, that little boy from Kent, annoying as the bluebottle circling my head; I’d better get on with it. After I’d climbed in through the bathroom window and left the car nose-first in a fence I met the shaman in the kitchen. He said, You have to take the stone circle down, and that was when I knew. The realisation that he’d hit my edge, the boundary across which I would not go was sudden and disappointing. I remember thinking, Oh. You’re an idiot. This is the moment when crazy met crazy. The bird of paradise appeared wearing a magician’s hat, tall and felt and covered in stars, the rest of him naked but for my dressing gown which flapped open. He broke into the shaman’s temple, stole a bow and arrow from the altar and snapped it over his knee. The shaman was incandescent. Rage made him drop all pretence. He took chase. They ran about the garden. The shaman called his henchmen. The bird locked himself in the car. The shaman sat exhausted and powerless on the stone steps and said my family and home would be cursed for a thousand years. The sink in the downstairs cloakroom spontaneously fell off the wall. The bird stayed in the car. I walked the shaman down the drive to the main road. I told him he was not welcome. I said he could never come back. The last I saw of him was on that road, standing alone, small and defeated. He wrote to me once, years later, a badly worded email with grammatical errors saying it was about time he thanked me for his time at the farm. Not actually thanking me, mind, just saying he probably should. He’s still out there, buzzing around. He can thank me now if the years since have brought him an ounce of the wisdom he lacked. Meanwhile the bird of paradise with the wings grown ragged got to stay in his stead, and with him the needles and parties.

“If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.” Anon.

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