Alzheimer's: A Love Story

I’ve sold my book about my mother's Alzheimer's. (This is not a picture of my mother, but of Alois Alzheimer who discovered the disease.) The book's working title is Alzheimer's: A Love Story.

I originally thought I’d wait until I finished the first draft before sending it off to a publisher, but I changed my mind. I began to feel that I needed editorial assistance with the structure, and without that I thought I’d waste a lot of time.

I submitted the first ten chapters to Scribe, the first publisher on my list, and three days later they offered me a contract.

They called it ‘impressive and moving’. Yippee!

It makes me nervous. This book that thus far has belonged only to me now has to answer to the outside world. But I’m thrilled and excited too, and I look forward to working on it with an editor. And of course to seeing it in the hands of readers.

Writing As Therapy

People often make a sympathetic face when they learn I am writing a book about my mother's Alzheimer's. 'That must be therapeutic for you,' they say.

I find that condescending and insulting. How would they like it if I said to them, 'Oh, plumbing/social work/law/medicine, eh? That must be therapeutic for you,' as though all their training, experience and professionalism was cast aside in the drive to make themselves feel better.

I like writing or I wouldn't do it, but it's work to take my own particular experience and shape and form it so that a fragment gives the impression of being my whole life in a way that illuminates for the reader their own.

Lying on the sofa this cold wet Saturday afternoon, I read this in Robyn Rowland's essay in the current Meanjin:

The writing of poetry is lived. It is not something we do, but something we are. It requires a life of observation, an openness to experience, an ability to empathise, an engagement with the transforming power of image and metaphor. It requires a moment when the self is put aside, akin to meditation: an absenting of the self, so that the poem may appear...It also requires technique....Then comes the real work - the shaping, the editing.

If writing is personal, is it cathartic? When people say, 'it must have been really cathartic to write that', it irritates me. It's a statement that casts poetry into the realms of therapy and creative writing is not therapy. It's an art. One that requires practice and patience and skill. Yes, the writing might be therapeutic in that it might uncover for us our own understanding of what we feel or believe. But that individual experience needs to be made universal so that it reaches out to the next person.

Fiction as truth

This evening I watched Australian Story, about Richard Flanagan, the Tasmanian novelist. As a writer, as a person and as a Tasmanian, I found it very inspiring.

It seems funny in a way that a fiction writer is such a steadfast truth teller, but I think telling the truth is what good fiction does.

Flanagan is a brave man who has written some of the best journalism I’ve read. He has spoken without hysteria against a corrupt and vindictive government and its allies in big business. You might think that’s no big deal, but sadly, in Tasmania, it is.

Working Above the Abyss

My daughter, M, who these days prefers nonfiction to fiction, drew my attention to what the late much missed David Foster Wallace wrote in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007:

Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder — because nonfiction's based in reality, and today's felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex. Whereas fiction comes out of nothing. Actually, so wait: the truth is that both genres are scary; both feel like they're executed on tightropes, over abysses — it's the abysses that are different. Fiction's abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction's abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one's total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

I’ve thought about that a lot. I think finally I agree.

To me, fiction is about tapping into a world that exists in a dimension that you can only access a slice at a time. You work with what you manage to slice off.

Nonfiction is about this world that we live in, and the really hard part is to work out in the first place which slice you want to describe and then how best to do it.

In other words I’m still finding my nonfiction book a killer.

Commitment

I’m out of the habit of hunting for ideas for fiction now, having been immersed in my non-fiction book about my parents for nearly a year.

The other day I felt an idea stirring in response to a news item. The opening sentences of a short story came into my mind. As I wrote them down I felt the push of the story behind them, but I stopped before the narrator with her intriguing voice took too firm a hold of me.

When I wrote fiction I used to think a short story was an affair – a brief fling – where a novel was a marriage that needed commitment, devotion, faithfulness. It was tempting to have a fling after the long haul of this year, with plenty more work up ahead.

But although my book is a bit like duty to me now, it’s also something that I think needs to be written. And I want to write it. I feel a sense of urgency about it too. My parents aren’t getting any younger.

Each chapter is a struggle but I’m past the halfway mark now and when I look back I’m proud of what I’ve captured.

I can still hear the voice of that tempting short story. I hope she’ll keep but, like my parents in their long marriage, I’m committed.

Doldrums

I was in the doldrums for the last couple of weeks with my current book.

The doldrums are a belt of very still air near the equator that in olden times stalled sailing ships. I felt stalled too. The job was too big for me. It was too daunting. I was too far into the journey to turn around and go back but I couldn’t see the distant shore line either.

I was in about the middle of the book when I got stuck: I’d written around 35,000 words.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to go on. I had it mapped out in my head and even on paper. And I had lots of stuff drafted. It was just that each chapter was so bloody hard and I still wasn’t positive that the idea was even going to work out in the end. For a while I felt as though the wind had gone out of my sails permanently. It was hard to believe I’d ever get moving again.

I knew the cure: push ahead. And I knew that once I got this next chapter done I’d see how close I was to the end and I’d pick up speed again. But the strength and courage I needed seemed to have deserted me.

I kept going somehow. I revised a lot, and plodded ahead a little, and now the breeze is picking up and the book is moving once more. Phew. I’m out of the doldrums I think, but it was scary there for a while.

A steady hand on the tiller, some courage and persistence and I should make it. Wish me luck.

Gate crashers part two

Gate crashers revisited.

They ignored us; they just ate. The mother stuffed leaves in her mouth without bothering about the fan club at the base of the tree, but she maintained her grip on her joey all the time.

It was hard to get a photo with the mother's head in it because she was so intent on dining.