I Take You Page 14

  Note

  The author acknowledges with gratitude the words of Virginia Woolf, which provide each chapter with its opening quotation.

  Anonymity

  Why did I do it?

  Behold a cautionary tale of writing, refuges, and worlds to be free in.

  Once upon a time I had a brilliant idea. Well, it seemed like it at the time. The plan was simple: to write a novel that was an examination of marriage with a forensic, unsparing eye. But book writing has always been a process of gradual disappointment for me; the grand ambition of each project contracting over time as I realise that what is emerging on the page wasn’t, quite, what had been envisaged at the outset. To be blunt: my novels slip away in the process of creation, become something else. And so I’d just try again, and again, to get it right; that was the rhythm of my novel-writing and each subsequent book. Early on, this tetchy new book – my fourth – about sex and marriage was not going to plan. I had a title, The Bride Stripped Bare, and not much else. The disappointment was gathering force heart-sinkingly soon into the process. Six months in, in fact. The story just wouldn’t lift off. The prose was resistant, leaden. Trying to write it was like wading thigh high through a river rushing towards me. Definitely not a good situation to be in with a newborn baby by my side, my first, and another little one on the way (the lesson here: do not believe those who tell you it is impossible to conceive while breastfeeding).

  Then one day, in the thick of new motherhood, I chanced upon Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. It was the type of book I hadn’t read for a while, drowning as I was under my sea of baby-manuals, and I seized that clear, sharply intelligent prose; remembering a woman I was who devoured books like this once. Woolf described anonymity as a ‘refuge’ for women writers. ‘For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.’ And with that simple sentence, my recalcitrant novel was unlocked.

  It was as if a lightbulb was suddenly switched on in a room of sickly light. My name would be removed from the project. Simple. I’d write with brutal candour about a women’s secret life – and brilliantly, no one would be hurt in the process. Myself, of course, but also those closest to me in that precious little coracle of early parenthood we were floating in then, that tiny boat of nappies and naptimes and leaky breasts and wonder, endless wonder, that contained just my husband and our child and our new one soon to join us. Because I knew that if was going to write something with eviscerating honesty there would be reverberations years down the track, for all of us. People have always confused my fiction with autobiography; I’ve always had readers assume it was people close to me who were in my books, and judging them as well as myself. I was seized up by a fear of that; that they would mistake fiction for fact. And as I’d struggled to make that sodden first draft work I’d felt clogged up with caution – afraid of too much honesty, of showing too much vulnerability, and afraid of hurting people close to me.

  The door was flung open, gleefully, when anonymity presented itself. ‘The world was made to be free in. Give up on all other worlds except the one to which you belong,’ the poet David Whyte wrote. Oh yes. The Bride Stripped Bare was brewed in a blazing little world far removed from any other. It shone with light, and truth, and power; a deep and thrilling sense of satisfaction amid all the exhaustion and uncertainty of new parenthood. It was my one certainty, my anchor. I didn’t want publishers breathing down my neck. Didn’t tell them about it. My previous book, Lovesong, had had its ending compromised in the rush to meet a contractual deadline and I never wanted to get into that situation again. Bride freed me again, as a writer. If this book wasn’t sold when completed it would be slipped into a bottom drawer and that would be the end of it, it would be ‘one that didn’t work’. No one was expecting it. Agents and publishers had written me off into babyland for several years at least, perhaps longer. In their eyes I’d disappeared.

  Gloriously. Mischievously. Writing became fun again, exhilarating.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez said every person has three lives: a public life, which is known to everyone in the spheres we move in; a private life, which perhaps just a partner or close family member knows; and a secret life. That was the one I was fascinated by. Who dares to presume they know anyone else’s secret life? I wanted to write about a woman’s secret world – any woman’s; if you like, every woman’s. Wanted to write about the raw underbelly of a woman’s thinking in all its complexity, all its shocking ugliness as well as its beauty. It could only be done with the gift of anonymity, the egoless existence that liberates you from what people think, frees from the indignant eye of public opinion, from judgment. And some of this book would be eviscerating.

  Why not just go for it? Say whatever I wanted to, all those things I’d been thinking, feeling, for years but had never had the courage to voice. Not to girlfriends, and certainly not to partners. The whole idea of it fitted snugly into that egoless existence of early parenthood, when all my wants/needs/ desires are subsumed by someone else. Basically, at that point in my life, I just didn’t care a jot about my name on a book, because I had bigger things filling up my days. And the glary business of selling my work – emotionally investing in its precarious journey into the world – was just too swamping to think about within the thick of the babymoon. I write within what feels like the glow of candlelight, a world that’s still and quiet and vividly alone, but selling a book, as the author, is like a sudden blast of fluorescent light. I’m a writer who doesn’t enjoy that side of the business; in fact, gets a knot of agitation at the thought of it. Anonymity was my rescue.

  The words came strong. Fast. I wrote with the arrogance and innocence of my first novel, Shiver. I’d not had that sense of a quickening, a rightness, as I laboured through the second and third novels, weighed down not only by publisher and reader expectations but my own. As I was writing Bride I was high on hormones, flushed with a sense of womanly invincibility. It felt easy. This manuscript would be the child conceived and carried then let go of at the orphanage gate, now and then checked on from afar. The perfect plan. For after all, I had other children – real children – cramming every corner of my life. I wrote with an unflinching veracity. Wrote of sex that was bursting with light and life; all the magic and messiness of life as we know it. It wasn’t porn in any way, the opposite of it in fact. It was a brutally honest take on sex, from a woman’s perspective. (Porn – urgh. When I think of that I think of something bleak, mechanical, unreal, ugly – and with an utter absence of tenderness.) I wanted a book driven by love and truth; a book where women would respond, ‘Oh, that’s me!’ and where men would respond, ‘Oh my goodness, did my partner write this?’

  Having ‘By Anonymous’ bold on the cover felt crucial to that sense of enchantment, cheekiness, artifice, honesty. Removing the author’s name meant the book carried with it a shock of universality. This could be anyone’s story. Not just ‘so and so’s opinion’ but anyone’s, everyone’s. It felt audacious and authentic and absolutely right.

  For after all it’s hard, in a relationship, to be completely honest, to show your partner your secret self. Vita Sackville-West described herself as an iceberg, said that her husband could only see what was above the water’s surface and that he had no idea of the huge mass below. She speculated it was the reason their marriage worked. What relationship can survive the shock of absolute candour?

  For me, brewing my little secret during baby naptimes, the jolt of Bride would lie in the protagonist’s very ordinariness. She’d be the woman you don’t give a second glance to as she walks down an aisle in the supermarket or waits patiently at the school gate; the woman who’s completely disappeared into her role as ‘the little wife’.

  I, too, had found it difficult to be completely sexually honest in the past, and was fascinated by the capitulations and silences that can stain a relationship – but also knit it together. Why is it still so hard for some women, basking in the glow of so many feminist advances, to be more candid about sex? To say such simple things to our sex
ual partners as, ‘No, I didn’t have an orgasm,’ or ‘I don’t like this,’ or ‘Sometimes I find it monotonous when you make love to me,’ or ‘Sometimes it hurts.’ Why are so many women still so subservient to their partner’s pleasure at the expense of their own? Because we don’t want men to turn away from us, perhaps. Because we want our partners to think we’re someone else. Because sometimes we’re willing to put up with a lot: to snare a relationship, to keep it steady, to have children.

  The aim was to be as merciless in print as a Chuck Close painting or a Ron Mueck sculpture – but as far as I know, those artists do not often turn their extremely critical eye upon themselves. Now I know why. I’m not someone who’s completely relaxed about nudity; I’ve never been comfortable in a bikini. And like many women in a swimsuit, I’m afraid of revealing too much. But when the idea of anonymity came to me, everything clicked. I was suddenly like a woman on a foreign beach who’s confident she doesn’t know a soul and parades her body loudly and joyously without worrying what anyone thinks of her. A lot of us can’t face the thought of people seeing us as we really are – for it means losing control of the public persona we’ve so carefully set up and maintained. And we never get closer to the truth of our dark, vulnerable, messy selves than with sex. Perhaps that’s why the prospect of being unmasked as the author of this book was so very difficult to bear. Perhaps if I was alone, without family around me who I deeply cared about, it would have been easier. Another reason for the anonymity was that it came from a deep love, a deep sense of compassion – I wanted to protect so much.

  Anonymity also meant I wasn’t afraid of Bride failing. It seemed such a strange hybrid of novel, memoir, treatise and sex manual and I wasn’t sure if people would ‘get’ it. I’d lost my professional confidence. My brain just didn’t work in the way it used to. The previous novel had gone to sixty drafts over several intensive years and I just didn’t have the stamina, the mental elasticity, to work that way again, or to worry over whether it worked.

  Bride is also a response to another anonymous text: a mysterious 17th-century document known as WoEman’s Worth. Its tone is boldly sexual, its honesty shocking and its authorship disputed. Germaine Greer believes it was written by a man close to his mother; others say it was by an anonymous housewife. I choose to believe the latter and loved the idea of a 21st-century housewife also writing a secret book under the nose of her husband. Saying all those things she might think but never say – even in this sexually liberated day and age. I loved the boldly subversive, almost cheeky tone of the 17th-century text – and recognised it. The author could only have written these charged, highly subversive sexual declarations in secret. I wanted to respond to the author, say: ‘Hey, it’s 400 years later and women have come a long way, but actually, not so far in some matters.’ I was intrigued that this 17th-century writer seemed to have more confidence, sexually, than a Western woman in the 21st century who’s lived through several decades of feminist advances.

  So there I had it. A vivid little manuscript with ‘By Anonymous’ on its front page. It was sent off, heart in mouth, to my literary agent in London. Because he of course knew it was really me, knew what type of a woman and writer I was – and I didn’t want to be associated with this kind of book. His response? Silence. For weeks. Agony. Of course, I reasoned, it was all just too damned vulgar, crude, embarrassing – and this man almost 60 cannot bear to face me. Great. I’ve lost an agent now as well as my writing confidence and possibly my career. Then, after several excruciatingly long weeks, the phone rang. The manuscript had been sitting on his ‘pile’ that he hadn’t got around to amid all the busyness. But a girlfriend of his son had picked it up the past weekend, read it, and said ‘I think you should take a look at this …’

  He did. He called instantly. The manuscript went to the Frankfurt Book Fair. At that point only he and three people in the UK publisher’s office knew of the book’s authorship, as well as several trusted writer friends and my husband. I was feeling good, my agent was excited and I trusted his judgment implicitly; we had a ‘goer’ on our hands. Just after the Fair I read a newspaper article at a London bus stop. It said an anonymous book had caused a sensation in Frankfurt. In normal circumstances this news would be the cause of much exhilaration in an author. Yet my heart beat faster in panic. For you see, the article was brimming with speculation about who the mystery author could be. Disgruntled wife of a former Booker winner? Suburban housewife? Man? It was a call to arms to track down the writer’s identity. As a former journalist, I knew it would only be a matter of time. My heart sank.

  It took just a week. On a night my husband and I will never forget, we were subjected to the terrier-like force of Fleet Street’s finest: incessant phone calls, door-thumping until almost midnight, babies waking and screaming in terror. The reporter who broke the story said the writing style pointed to one author in particular. This was of some comfort, for I’ve always aimed for a distinctive voice as a writer. The reporter went on to say the author’s identity was confirmed by a senior figure in the British publishing industry. This was of no comfort. Suddenly, trusted friends and business associates became evil, Machiavellian blabbermouths. Felt besieged. Trusting no one, suspecting everyone – publishers, my agent’s office – until I eventually thought: oh Lordy, it was probably someone pissed at a cocktail party. And most likely one of my writer mates. ‘The fewer writers you know the better,’ the writer Maeve Brennan cautioned once, ‘and if you’re working on anything, don’t tell them.’

  I’ll never be able to face the journalist who broke the story. That feeling, back then, was of one huge flinch. I’d lost control of my book, and my brand as a writer. My little baby was suddenly everybody else’s and I didn’t like it one bit. No one’s ever given a hint of how it happened. I still don’t know who ‘shopped’ me. Spent several years afterwards trying to work out who’d done it. A phone hacker, some have since suggested, for after all it was rife among newspapers in London at the time.

  The problem, as a writer, was that I was outed before the book had been edited. I went back to my editor, the gracious but steely Courtney Hodell, armed with a red pen. ‘I’m deleting so much,’ I declared, ‘and I know exactly which bits.’ Because I was unable to face my name being attached to so many of the rawer passages in the book. ‘Don’t,’ she pleaded. Why? ‘Because all those passages are the excruciatingly honest ones, the things that readers will connect with the most.’ I couldn’t bear it. It wasn’t the way I wanted my career to veer. We argued. There were tears. She won. In hindsight, she was right. But I couldn’t see it then; still trying to protect so many small kingdoms, still unable to emerge from the world I’d been made free in. I just didn’t want to embrace any other brutal, mocking, indignant, cynical world, didn’t want to publicly own this book.

  I felt, above all, hugely naïve. On the day of the book’s publication in Britain my publisher insisted on a celebratory lunch. OK, I said, OK, even though I didn’t particularly feel like one – wasn’t sure the situation actually called for celebration. But for a writer it’s not a politic thing to refuse a publisher’s lunch – especially if your agent and publicist have also been invited – so I dressed to the nines and ordered a taxi to take me to a very smart restaurant indeed. This was an occasion, after all. And I’d never been to this restaurant. It’s a fabulously expensive one, and I’m a writer.

  The taxi driver picked me up precisely when he’d been ordered and traffic was flowing smoothly, I’d arrive on time, all was going well. But about 10 minutes from our destination I started weeping. Couldn’t stop. My gentle Afghani driver kept on turning in alarm, asking if I was alright, wanting to take me home. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, wiping tears furiously from my cheeks. I asked to be dropped off around the corner from the restaurant. The taxi driver didn’t want to let me out into the world, he was being extremely fatherly; I insisted. But as I waved goodbye to this kindly man, smiling a tight smile, the dam burst. He disappeared into the distance and
the tears became great keening howls and there I was, on the day of The Bride Stripped Bare’s publication, wandering the streets of London’s Fitzrovia as if I’d just suffered the most terrible bereavement. I must say this strange episode restored my faith in humanity, for many huge-hearted people came up and asked if they could get me a glass of water, if I wanted to sit down, rest, use their mobile phone. What I couldn’t tell any of them was that I had written an excruciatingly honest account of sex, anonymously, and had been found out. And on this auspicious day it was, well, just too much to bear.

  Stress rushed into my world in a greedy, ruthless way. Stress has a lot to do with an inability to dictate circumstances around you – uncertainty, in whatever form it takes, is extremely destabilising. And there was so much uncertainty over this book. I dreaded the reaction from friends and family. Panicked that I’d shot my career in the foot. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t shut my brain down at night, felt like my life was imploding. Couldn’t finish sentences or complete the simplest tasks – freshly washed clothes were heaped in my sons’ bedroom and phone calls went unreturned. I felt as if I was on the edge of a cliff and the silliest thing would push me over. I discovered the horror of migraines for the first time in my life. My life was now held hostage by the feeling that an axe was embedded across my right eyebrow, with brutal regularity.

  When the book was published, and took off among readers, the stress only intensified. Of course my publishers wanted me to explain it; the Good Author did what she was told. The Good Author got a bucketing. Often the loudest attackers hadn’t read the book. Maybe if they had they would’ve understood. I said to them back then and I say it now: why don’t you attempt to write about sex with a ruthless, unflinching honesty – and put your name to it. All those things you may think but never say, especially to your partner, your friends, your family. It’s exhilarating if you’re anonymous, but highly traumatic if you’re a wife and a mother of two boys, not to mention the daughter of two gently bewildered people in their sixties. And what the naysayers didn’t seem understand, in any way, was that anonymity could also arise out of a deep sense of love; a desire not to hurt or confuse people who are cherished. A particular trait of female writers, of course. And so we’re back to Virginia, to anonymity being a refuge.