Motherload

I have been micromanaging today. In the attempt to be a true Noel Goddess, I have facilitated Gingerbread House squabbling, paper chain tearing-up frenzy, lunch fallout, glittery tree decoration fritzl, a military parade of getting dressed and doing teeth which has lasted until 2.15pm. Not necessarily in that order. In this I was not alone. There were 4 other adults to the 4 children: notionally an excellent ratio. But this of course leads to the bumping into, multiple apologizing, different ways of doing it, whether or not to say that everything comes from Father Christmas politics, Husband the Chef trying to brine the turkey without having a discussion about it, the underfoot, the underslept and the underwear all over the house. It is only mid-afternoon, yet I am locked up with the computer, desperately hoping to find some equanimity amongst the contradictions, the crowds and the pointlessness. What a snob I am. It hasn't felt pointless this year at all. The whole of December has...

December 2009 has proven the first major obstacle for two of my highest-flying female friends. One a Director of a major publishing company, and another a partner at a major accountancy and consulting firm, both of them had not only survived giving birth, one to 3 children, the other to 2, but had determinedly gone back to work, and stayed the course. One had managed to arrange her hours so that she went in at 8ish and left to pick up her children by 2.30, then worked at home in the evening. The other had a fantastic nanny arrangement. Both were up at nights, and never missed a school bake sale. This Autumn, both were called into meetings, one an appraisal, the other to inform her about restructuring, and told that there wasn't room in the organization for them. Both have fought back, through unions, and both have or will walk away with payouts to prevent tribunals taking place to investigate constructive dismissal. Neither woman has ever received anything but the highest praise, a...

I came across the essay below by Zadie Smith in January's Prospect, and was blown away by it. What I love is that she is so honest about what she calls micromanagement of novel-writing, giving credibility to the model that privileges just feeling one's way, rather than knowing what the ending is. When I was working on my doctorate (which I'm afraid is still my point of reference for writing), I was told so often by people that it was better to know exactly where one was going. I could always make constructions for my phd, that neatly put in boxes what I was trying to say, but I could never be bothered to write into a box. I desperately wanted my phd to be a voyage of discovery, where even I would not know what I was unearthing until it appeared on the page in front of me. After all, it was a doctorate on Proust, who essentially did much the same thing. Zadie Smith still organizes her lecture into sections, but given what she says about dismantling scaffolding where one reco...

I've been reading The Lottie Project by Jacqueline Wilson to my daughter, Beauty. I have to confess that I look forward to the evening read specifically because this book is so excellent. My first foray into Wilson, and I'm hooked. The story moves between Charlie's account of her life at school and with her young mother, Jo, and sections excerpted from Charlie's Victorians school project. She has hit upon the idea of writing her project in the form of a kind of diary, the servant girl Lottie's life. Each chapter about Charlie is headed with themes such as 'Family', 'Sunday, 'Courtship' and so on. As the story unfolds, we realize that each chapter is then mirrored or echoed by Lottie, who discusses a parallel theme in her own life. Charlie and Lottie are two halves of the same person, modern day Charlotte, and her imagined understanding of a Victorian underling. Jo is a single mum. The way Wilson writes about single parent family life opens up th...

When I was writing about A la recherche , I stumbled across an amazing quotation: "Because they don't take in what is really nourishing about art, they need artistic joys all the time, victims of a bulimia that never fills them up." I thought this was an extraordinary sentence when I first saw it, and made it the epigraph of my book. I didn't even know ' la boulimie' was a word back in the 1900s. Ever since, I guess I have been trying to make decisions about 'what is really nourishing about art', trying to find a credo to live by, and avoid the trap that I think Proust absolutely put his finger on. By using bulimia as a metaphor for the ways in which we fail to find satisfaction from our lives in general, and for him, from art in particular, he neatly brought together all kinds of appetite, some conscious and some unconscious. We're all hungry for experience, don't want to waste our time on earth, and this shades over into greed when some of o...

Several months ago, in November 2009, I attended a rather wonderful course at The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com). The morning involved several exercises designed to enable us to reflect on our family makeup. The afternoon included a session introducing us to constellation therapy. Constellation therapy relies on a theatrical moment. It isn't (quite) a trick, but nor is it completely devoid of trickery. A group of people sit in a circle and compose themselves through breathing techniques. Someone offers a problem. He or she briefly names the problem, and has a short discussion with the therapist about the background to the issue. Then the questioner is invited to choose several people from the circle, who are to represent key characters in the issue. The issue is always interpersonal. These representatives are then positioned, seemingly at random, by the questioner, within the circle. The questioner acts instinctively, placing the representatives in a pattern, or co...