Women must fight for their happiness

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This. This is happiness to me.

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A Month in the Country!

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"A MON TH!" This is the main reaction I received to the news that I was going away for a month to write a book (about motherhood, as it happens).  I couldn't work out whether it was men or women who were more likely to stare in incredulity. As if I was leaving my children on a frozen hillside, or having an affair with a well-known politician. Of course there were some people who got it (I think), who didn't react with a quickly-suppressed cough of scandal in their throats. These people said, “Go for it, just make it worthwhile, get that book written already! How brilliant that you've got a room of your own!” Of course it’s the doubtful  and silent  judgers I believe. Yes yes, it’s wrong to go, I should be safely at home, doing the washing, shopping for the endless routine of children’s teas, monitoring the activities, the homework, the notes home from school, the Forest Schools equipment, doing the Guides run, making inane conversation at drop off...
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Thank goodness for Andrea Levy! I knew when I read The Help that there was something subtly wrong with it. Essentially its politics were good, its characters were interesting and readable, and the ending a happy one for most concerned. Big ticks all round. So what was wrong with it? Nothing so simple as the fact that it was written by a white woman — after all, no one can help the colour of their skin, right? No, it was that The Help is enslaved to the narrative of slavery, while The Long Song is emancipated from it. This seems to me the task of fiction — to free itself from the facts, in order to imagine the lives that might have fleshed out those facts. Not properly, but improperly. It will be argued that The Help does this fleshing out in spades, and so it does. And it's not about your actual slavery on Jamaica, but about racial integration in the deep South of the United States. Yet it misses out one key ingredient. Uneasiness. The Help makes us feel safe and cosy. It is i...
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Time of the Month

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How do I bring this experience to an end? I have just been given the most generous gift possible by my husband, my children, and my friends — a month, by myself, in the country. To come away from my everyday life for a whole, fire-filled, walk-soaked, wind-wakened month, to be able to write exactly what I wanted and have been trying to write for so very long — the release from a bottle I have to stuff myself inside most of the time — has been… calm. The whole point about being here has been its understatement. To be able to escape the hysteria of exams, schools, Forest School clothes, what Doris Lessing calls 'the housewife's disease' through her character Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook: The tension in me, so that peace has already gone away from me, is because the current has been switched on: I-must-dress-Janet-get-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michael's-breakfast-don't-forget-I'm-out-of-tea.-etc.  Each morning I have been able to wake when...
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