Motherload

I asked myself another question. Should I accept my lot? If I was to buy a ticket and travel all the way to acceptance, if I was to greet it and shake its hand, if I was to entwine my fingers with acceptance and walk hand in hand with acceptance every day, what would that feel like? After a while I realized I could not accept my question. A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own  (1929)).  Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know (2013) I have gone on loving Deborah Levy's essays on why she writes, although 'loving' seems hardly the word for the world of pain she is illuminating in each essay.  Without ever saying so direct...

Dear Dance Teacher, I was planning to come to pilates, but our washing machine is on the blink and had to give hubby moral support! My third Parkrun today was 30:34, so 40 secs faster than last week. Managed to run 2 out of 3 laps, and walked twice in the final lap, but came in with a sprint, so inching closer to actually running the whole distance. Sorry to keep boring on with these times, but wanted to tell you! I am determined to keep going – it’s hard and painful, but I let myself walk when I really have to, and then find I can get started again. Doing it in honour of that seventeen-year-old girl who hurt herself so much. Now I can look after her better. Thank you for the lovely, lovely, thoughtful, kind messages you have sent me this week. It’s actually been a very strange and rather horrible week, that includes the way the Mumsnet commentariat reacted to my story about letting our son keep walking to school, even though he was approached by a weirdo.  Do you ...

Sheer egoism , aesthetic enthusiasm , historical impulse and political purpose are George Orwell's four motivations for writing, as he articulates them in Why I Write . In  Things I Don't Want To Know,  Deborah Levy takes these four apocalyptic horsemen and reorders them, tossing them about like pizza dough, as she offers her own, uncompromisingly female, version of why she writes. In the first essay, 'Political Purpose', she reopens a notebook she has held on to, but not written in since 1988, when she went to Poland to write about an avant-garde actress. Irresistibly we are reminded of Doris Lessing's four notebooks, and wonder which one this is most like – black, red, yellow or blue (old depression, Communism, new depression, dreams)? The title of that first essay might draw us towards Orwell or Lessing's Communism, particularly as Levy's own father was a member of the ANC, and particularly as she explicitly calls this her 'Polish notebook...

I started both anti-depressants and dancing, back in Autumn 2009. I had come back from a summer holiday to see my husband's parents in Oz as depressed as I had ever been as an ill-treated lecturer at Cambridge. All I knew was that I had to do something to change the terrible way I was feeling. This was also when I embarked on the idea for a book called  Motherload . What I thought was going to be a year's work extended and multiplied, because, of course, I was still  living  Motherload as well as writing about it – because the children were still very young, because my husband's employment was so unstable for so long, because there was a global recession. I couldn't just sit down and research and write, and let everything else take care of itself. Well, I could and did for two glorious years in Australia. But that's another story. After I was kicked out of Cambridge (for having a baby), I was forced to keep thinking up new ways to earn a living. First of all I s...

Yesterday, I dropped my son off at school. First day back. We were late, running, son hadn't done his homework properly, everyone was ambling and ruinously slow. Son stormed off without saying goodbye. I stormed out of the playground, my emotions plastered all over my face.  Then I sat in the car and cried to my mother for a full hour and a half, venting every single one of the grievances I carry about with me like so much lead. A 47-year-old sniffing and snotting to her nearly 80-year-old mother. I should have been ashamed of myself (don't worry, reader, I was).  She was brilliant, as she always is. My quiet, self-contained wartime mother, whose magisterial sense of proportion is the equal of any classical architect. She said a couple of things that stuck: 1. You're quite wrong to keep on regretting something that happened twelve years ago.  2. If the kids shout at you, walk away. You don't have to put up with that.  Those two sentences, in amongst a lot of...

So, like the rest of the nation, I have been going through New Year, and found to my surprise that it DOES mean something. In fact, it feels as though New Year has gone through me, like an extreme weather event, or a bout of food poisoning. New Year is something visceral – a kind of terror in the body, gut-clenchings of nameless fears and monstrous brain creations, pulsing in the dead of night. All your evils come back to haunt you, and to cleanse you. In the daytime it has felt little better (having not been able to sleep, I have been an inzombiac). I have felt tearful, hysterical, irritated, anguished, furious, desperate, seared, flagellated, exhumed, empty, slackened, throttled, murderous. All these things at times; at points, all at once. In the days following Christmas and then New Year, the wastelands of yesteryear and the bleak untried plains of the coming year have blown through me. It has been difficult to locate handholds in amongst the rushing grains of what took place...