This piece includes discussion of pregnancy loss.
If you’ve spent more than half an hour with me, you will have heard me say ‘everything is copy’. This is because like all white women who live in Central London, enjoy nice tote bags and buy books they don’t read, I love Norah Ephron.
I attribute the quote to Ephron, but it actually belongs to her mother - a screenwriter - But anyway, Norah put it best when she said: ‘‘We all grew up with this thing that my mother said to us over and over, and over and over again, which is ‘Everything is copy.’ You’d come home with something that you thought was the tragedy of your life – someone hadn’t asked you to dance, or the hem had fallen out of your dress, or whatever you thought was the worst thing that could ever happen to a human being – and my mother would say ‘Everything is copy.’”
Everything I’ve ever done of any significance has ended up being copy. I got into journalism by writing very personal, very private stories for very public outlets. Between 2015 and 2019 I wrote columns about literally everything that happened to me, and the universe rewarded me for it. I was successful, at a career I fucking loved, and I was having fun. Is it problematic that the route into writing as a woman is always the economy of pain? That it’s more profitable to package your personal life than to train as a Real Journalist? Probably. But I wanted to write about that stuff. No-one made me do it. I was banging down doors to tell the details of my sex life, my dating life, my marriage, my friendships, my everything.
In good times and in bad, I wrote. In 2019 I had a missed miscarriage, which I found out about when I was (supposedly) ten weeks pregnant. In fact the first thing I did when I got home from the hospital, with pills pressed up against my cervix to complete the miscarriage my body had started, was to write a post on Medium. And I didn’t do that for money (I didn’t make any money from it) or for clout. I did it because it was the only thing I knew how to do in that moment. It was a scream into the void. Every time I wrote about the brutal, painful, miserable, humiliating experience of your body expelling a pregnancy, women all over the world held me through the ether. Grieving very publicly was the best thing I could do, and it worked. But as life got harder, and as I got older, I found telling the truth about my life increasingly difficult.
So I did it less, and less, and less. Until recently, the last time I wrote anything deeply personal was when Caroline Flack died. I wrote a piece for the Telegraph about my experience of her, about how I’d written a critical piece about her and she had been upset about it, getting in contact directly over Twitter, clearly distraught. Again, it wasn’t for the money (I donated the fee), or for the clout (I got fired from my job at Grazia for writing it) it was because I didn’t know how else to process it all.
When I was pregnant and my marriage started to fall apart, and I was crippled with anxiety about having another miscarriage, my OCD was so out of control that I was counting my steps in sets of seven for 12 hours a day, I stopped writing almost entirely. I didn’t want anyone to know about the pregnancy, or my marriage, and I certainly didn’t want anyone to know about the OCD. And maybe worst of all, my brain wasn’t working like it used to.
I’d always been sharp and smart and quick. The first to make the really good joke. But pregnancy made me slow and forgetful, perpetually foggy. My vocabulary shrank. My world shrank. I was terrified about getting Covid and my baby dying. After she was born I could barely speak I was so tired. I attempted a couple of poems, which I put on Instagram and then deleted within minutes because I was so ashamed of my attempts. My confidence was destroyed, and I didn’t think I had anything left to say. So for the first time, I went dark. No personal anecdotes. No stories about my real life. Anything I cited that had me in it was from years gone by. I created a culture of total secrecy around my world, so no-one would know how bad things really were.
By winter 2022 everyone who knew me in real life knew how bad things had got. And so, because I wasn’t trying to maintain privacy anymore, I started writing again. To my own surprise as much as anything else, I started writing a play. And fuck, it was like getting an emotional blood transfusion. I was suddenly, magically, almost over night, myself again. The second my daughter went to sleep I’d grab my laptop and write. I wrote on my phone, on scraps of paper, late into the night. I wrote with every second I could write and by the time I’d finished I felt like a different person. Maybe it was the therapy of getting it all on the page, or maybe it was the nostalgia of writing about my life, just like I used to, and suddenly despite the fact that everything else had changed, it was like going home. I was off. I wrote articles, episodes, chapters - some of it not very good, very little of it useable, but words on a page for the first time in a very long time. And so I resolved that I was going to let myself write what I needed to, when I needed to.
The only problem with this resolution is that writing about my life inevitably means writing about other people’s lives too. And that doesn’t always go down terribly well. In fact it’s gone down really very badly in some factions.
‘How would you feel? If you were being written about?’ is a question I’ve had to answer more than one recently. It’s a fair one, actually. And the answer is, I think I’d quite like it. When I first started dating, I found that people would do one of two things upon learning that I was a writer. Either they’d blanche and make me swear on my life I wouldn’t write about them, or they’d smile and say that they’d love to end up in something I wrote.
The former camp were often men who shouldn’t have been on dating apps, so it became rather a useful filter. But within the remit of people who aren’t cheating on their wives, it’s actually just an interesting insight into a person’s character. I love being written about. When strands of me end up in someone else’s work I’m pleased, it’s like seeing a photo I didn’t know was being taken of me. I like seeing myself how other people see me. And it’s a compliment to be regarded as interesting enough to merit writing about. I understand why people don’t want it - at least in theory - that privacy is important. I just don’t get it myself. I’d very much like to be written about, because being written about means you’re being seen.
Norah’s mother’s advice, you’ll note, is that everything that happens to you is copy. Your pain, your failures, your rejections. It’s not carte blanche to write about other people’s lives. But the problem is, the more weight your life carries the more that’s difficult to avoid. My life doesn’t exist in isolation, it’s tangled up like necklaces left in the bottom of a handbag, it’s linked to my ex, my daughter, my family, my best friends, anyone I’m romantically involved with, the people I work with, the list goes on and on. And in order to write anything decent you have to be willing to write about all of them.
My intention is never to hurt anyone, but I do end up hurting people sometimes, to greater and lesser extents. I can’t write about being alone without - at least by inference - writing about how I ended up alone, why I ended up alone. So yeah, it’s a selfish act, even if occasionally someone gets in touch to say that reading my work has helped them, it’s still not actually about trying to help anyone. It’s about doing the one thing I know how to do. It’s literally only the fact that I love writing more than almost any other activity on earth which made life bearable in that period of my life. I can write anywhere, any time, without having to think about it, and because of that I was able to claw back fragments of my old life from the earliest weeks of motherhood.
These days it looks different, it’s writing in the garden with my writing partner, laughing until I can’t breathe, writing on trains to weekends away, writing during the nap time I know will be a reliable, predictable two hours. The snatched, panic, urgent nature of it has gone, it’s joyful and often companionable now. But it’s still the centre of who I am and what I do, and of all the mistakes I’ve made over the last decade, trying to ignore that was probably the worst one - and it’s not one I have any intention of making again.
I emailed a friend over the weekend - well, a former friend, maybe, who ghosted me - because I’m using something that happened between us as the basis for the novel I’m working on at the moment, and I wanted to let them know that. It didn’t feel right not to tell them. I haven’t had a reply and don’t necessarily expect one, but I didn’t want them to find out when the book is finished and (hopefully) published.
I read a lot of your stuff via here and The i and it always resonates (For info I'm male, Gen X and no kids so that's canny impressive really!) and this is absolutely no exception. I can absolutely relate to this (been writing books and stories for years but started blogging about my treatment and everything that went with it when diagnosed with Cancer and it really helped) and am glad you've found yourself again. I look forward to watching one of your plays when you take them on a regional run - keep going kidda!