At sixty, I published a book called I Just Wanted to Be Normal.
There is something slightly ridiculous about the timing. By the age when you are supposed to know who you are, I was still looking at the girl I had been and asking: what, exactly, did you think you were responsible for?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
As a child, I wanted a life that looked like other people’s lives. Adults who behaved like adults. Things I could count on. Nothing particularly ambitious.
But when you grow up inside a complicated family, you don’t have another childhood available for comparison. You have yours. You learn how things work there, and you adjust.
Only much later do you start questioning some of those adjustments.
Writing the book gave me time to look at them properly. A memory that had always been there suddenly needed a beginning, a setting, a sentence. I had to slow down enough to notice what I had previously hurried past.
Sometimes it was painful. Sometimes I found myself laughing. Occasionally, both happened on the same page.
I wanted to keep that.
The people in my childhood were people I knew and loved, even when living with them was difficult. Writing honestly meant allowing those contradictions to remain. Affection did not erase what happened. What happened did not erase every moment of affection.
That makes for untidy writing material. It also happens to be true.
There was another difficulty: deciding how much to explain.
I could have followed every scene with an adult interpretation. I have had plenty of years to develop those. But the girl in the story did not have my explanations. She had what she saw, what she felt, and whatever she could make of it at the time.
I wanted the reader to spend some time with her before meeting all my conclusions.
People sometimes speak about telling your story as though opening your mouth, or publishing a book, immediately sets you free.
I would love to report that it also fixes your habits and clears out your cupboards.
It doesn’t.
What it did give me was a way to speak plainly about parts of my life I had carried for years. I could put them into words, decide how to tell them, and let someone else read.
There is freedom in that. A fairly practical kind: less effort spent making a complicated history sound simpler than it was.
I Just Wanted to Be Normal tells the story of my first eighteen years. There is pain in it, but also affection, absurdity and humour. All of those belonged to my childhood. All of them belong in the book.
If you would like to meet the girl before deciding whether to read her whole story, you can read three scenes free here.
Dolka