I haven’t written to you for ages. It’s because I am person.

I am a person, with the finite capacities of a person, sworn to the messy work of caring for other people. I’ve been writing a novel while holding down a job while keeping my children clothed and loved and listened to. My productivity is impacted by life’s ordinary crises, the emotional storms of others, and the tiny teeth erupting through my toddler’s swollen gums. And I’m a person with a person’s need for creativity and joy; I fritter my time on friendship and going camping and making questionable bread out of leftover porridge. The plumber had to come back three times to get the dishwasher in straight; I am embroiled in life.

Lately praise has been plopping into this jumbled life of mine. I’ve been getting laudatory emails which begin with a breathless chirp of ‘I hope you’re having a wonderful day!’ before vomming out a few paragraphs about how great my memoir is. It would be very affirming if these emails were from people who had read the book.

Or if they were from people.

A lot of writers are getting AI-generated approaches at the moment. I’ve been asked to give talks to bookclubs, offered the opportunity to work with publicists, and invited by individuals to enter into some personal writerly chat. ‘I recently came across your book’ the emails breathe, ‘and I felt compelled to reach out’. What they all share is a kind of grandiosity and soul-sucking vagueness. ‘It is immediately clear that you've created something profoundly moving. This is far more than a memoir. It is a thoughtful exploration of [INSERT ASSORTED SCRAPINGS FROM BLURB AND REVIEWS]’.

Until recently, I’d rarely been known to exclaim ‘oh fuck off’ to my laptop.

But I can see how a writer might fall for these emails, and I’m sure many smart writers have. A friend once described her compulsion to read snarky Goodreads reviews of her own work; she’d given so many words and just wanted some back. We write to connect; we want to believe these messages that we’ve succeeded.

Perhaps my years in the classroom have sharpened my defenses. Because if there’s one thing this AI slop reminds me of it’s the bullshit students come up with when they haven’t done the reading. No quotes, no page numbers, no confusions, no light in the eyes. And I do get it; they were going to read the book but a chemistry exam or the confusing intensity of being twenty one years old got it the way. Being a person is hard.

I get loads of ideas for this substack, for instance when I’m running with my buggy (toddler in the seat, big kid riding on a board at the back) to make it on time for a didgeridoo show at the library (it was excellent and the kids got to touch a lizard). I just can’t write as often as I want to.

But when I write, I write.

I’ve spent time on this. It took me a full minute to pick between the words ‘vomming’ and ‘spewing’. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Writing isn’t efficient and it doesn’t come out in one instantaneous puff of bullshit (I assure you that if I ever write bullshit it wasn’t instantaneous). My new novel currently exists as many many thousands of words of disjointed notes which I’ll have to rake through and tend and burn and shuffle later. But through writing I am trying to work out how to be a person. And to continue working it out, not to arrive at a set of neat little bullets. The effort is the point.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I love you with my bloody heart.

Anna

Hello friends,

In January, I donned my professor costume and returned to work from parental leave. Though I often began letters to you in my mind, I struggled to find the scraps of time needed to actually get them down. How are you?

My news: We All Come Home Alive, is out in paperback1. People talk about books as babies,

but I’m starting to think they are more like old loves. For a time a book lives in the centre of your life, a glowing, vexing thing your thoughts go running back to. but eventually, it becomes more like someone you used to know. I’m proud that We All Come Home Alive is out there, meeting new people. I’m writing something new.

As I try to coax my new novel forth, I’m teaching a group of brilliant students who are doing the same. I wrote them a letter this morning, which I’d also like to share with you.

Much love,

Anna

Dear Writers,

Yesterday, I sat with my small daughter at our kitchen table, writing phrases she asked for in my notebook. I put down ‘The Land of Take What You Want’ (a location in Enid Blyton’s 1939 children’s book The Magic Faraway Tree). We talked about the word The - that mysterious thing of the th forming its own new letter - and we wrote it over and over, The The The. Her hair wild as always, a toe poking through a hole in her striped yellow pajamas, she leaned toward my moving pen, alert to the magic spell occurring before her.

Writing and reading are the transfiguration of shapes into sounds, sounds into meaning. I’ll never get over it. When you get stuck, slow down and return to that astonishing fact.

Igra, meaning “read”, is supposed to be the first word revealed to Mohammad. I learnt that from Rikki Ducornet’s transformative essay The Deep Zoo, which encourages writers to be ’tigered’ by things: to follow our obsessions, the images which won’t release us (tigers, in the case of Jorge Luis Borges, shells for Gaston Bachelard). Above all Ducornet tells us to read, read books and read the world, open yourself to its details. And write, which is to propose your own reading of the world.

I am so proud to be your teacher, to stand near your twelve projects as they come into being.

And they are coming. I know your energy and confidence ebb and flow, but your pages are amassing (this is why we have weekly deadlines). You mark yourself out as writers simply by doing the work. Earlier this week, I came across a lovely purple journal in a free book box in my neighborhood with ‘I dedicate this notebook to the love my first book will spread’ handwritten in the front. What followed were empty pages.

Fill your pages.

When we last met I spoke about the relationship between the words ‘author’ and ‘authority’, encouraging you to claim yours by confidently answering the questions emerging from your texts (we seem to have a lot of children of indeterminate age walking around in these projects). Don’t forget that it’s fun to be in charge, to reach into your imagination and take what you want.

This doesn’t mean you have to know everything right away. E L Doctorow tells us “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I can’t include that quote without mentioning to you, as a group of young people soon to graduate, that it can be a useful approach to life too; we can illuminate the immediate future and move into it. That’s often enough.

I end many of our meetings saying, keep going, you’re on the right track. My agent, Jenny, did the same for me during the long gestation of my first novel and it gave me just enough light to keep driving on.

Have a sweet Spring Break.

AB

Hi Friends,

I’d say Happy Christmas but I’ve spent today resolutely pretending it’s Christmas Eve.

We’re in the San Fransisco Bay Area (with its beautiful fog and coyotes, and flash floods which threaten to take the power out at any minute) to spend the holiday with friends. A crucial, beloved person won’t arrive until this evening, so we decided to delay our festivities by one day. My 3 year old doesn’t know. We’ve spent December 25th walking around wet playgrounds and marveling at exotic plants in people’s gardens, talking about how excited we are for [Fake] Christmas tomorrow.

We can shape time to our own ends, it turns out, just a little bit. We also can’t; my children have been waking before dawn here, their small bodies refusing the 3 hour shift from Eastern Standard to Pacific time.

I’m the mum in my family now, the culture keeper, the one wrapping gifts in green tissue and placing them in stockings.

But wasn’t I just recently the little girl taking a chocolate ornament shaped like a little bottle from my Grandma’s Christmas tree, biting into it and spilling sticky cointreau onto my party dress?

This Christmas with friends isn’t a repetition of anything. I’m away from home (Virginia) and homeland (the UK), the only one in the group who has heard of a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. I’m feeling time, which isn’t the same as feeling nostalgic. I’m at home in myself, and it’s time that brought me here.

Real Christmas Eve is the anniversary of my brother’s funeral and for many years, I assumed Christmas would always be painful. But I was wrong, and how wonderful to be so. Last Christmas, I wrote about crying with joy to Wham! I thought I’d share that letter again with you today.

All my love this Christmas [eve],

Anna

Hello friends,

I was livid yesterday.

Snowed in with my small kids, I lost all my writing time. And sure, there is magic to roaming the neighbourhood with my 3 year old, snapping icicles off the undersides of cars, the baby strapped to my chest keeping me warm-ish. But not writing really fucks with me. Not writing settles in my joints and fogs my brain. Too much not writing (did I mention yesterday was our third snow day of December?) makes me feel fundamentally off.

The world gets glassy.

I’m impatient.

The racked up exhaustion from sleepless nights with the baby suddenly crashes down on me.

And it is good: this weirdness and rage.

It is good when my need to write becomes un-ignorabale.

Because not writing is always the path of least resistance. The world provides ample obstacles, work and weather and children, and no one is coming with a snowplow to clear my way to my desk. It would be so very easy not to write another novel, so I thank god that not writing feels so damn hard.

Friends, I ran to the cafe this morning after the babysitter arrived, light-footed despite my lack of sleep. I’m here, at last, thrilled to be alone with my mind and my laptop and you.

Thank you for being here for me to write to. Your light beckons me toward the page.

Thank you especially to all of you who subscribed since my last letter, and to all who commented and re-stacked1 it.

That piece, on grief and the privilege of aging, garnered more responses than anything I’ve ever posted here. I wrote it hurriedly and slightly guiltily, stealing time from my novel, never expecting it to strike such a chord. Bear with me while I hop into my time machine to carry all those responses to my lonely younger self…

It’s twelve years ago. A mentor asks, out of politeness, how my brother is doing in hospital and visibly steps back when I reply ‘He died’. We are standing side by side on a floral carpet. That indelible step confirms my worst fears: that my grief is something ugly, dangerous, distasteful.

The flurry of activity around my last post was the opposite of that moment. We can talk about loss and be stepped toward. Grief can be connective, and in that way joyful, as well as isolating.

Next time I’ll get back to my series on friendship in life and in literature. New friends, you can find prior installments below.

All my love,

Anna

It’s the last day of my mid-thirties. Shock! Tomorrow I’ll turn 37, an age so close to 40 and so far from the 29 I was when I started dating my husband. 2 children have grown in and emerged from this body. 3 lines run horizontally against the vertical tidemark of the port-wine-stain on my forehead.

And, because it’s how the script goes, it occurs to me for just a second to think oh no, I’m getting old! Or at least, Oh no, I’m no longer young.

But then I think, John, John, John, John, John.

My brother, who died at 25, once told me that people act as if aging is unfair, but it’s really the fairest thing.

At the end of my first novel, Here Comes the Miracle, the protagonist Emily, imagines all the life her late brother Joe won’t get to have. Joe and Emily are of course rather like John and me.

‘And [one day] you would look into a mirror one morning and see a wrinkle forming, your face creasing from use. It would be at the mouth or between the eyebrows, a line of concentration. Perhaps you would rub in creams, like a man I saw once in a department store, shyly asking at a counter for advice, putting air quotes round ‘antiageing’, embarrassed to care. I thought about your future all the time. And it was funny to think that all that future was actually the past.’

Emily talks and talks to Joe in her mind, just as I continue to talk to John. You might think I’d have stopped by now, almost 13 years after his death, but the thing about grief is it changes. It grows up.

Though John’s life has ended, our conversation has not.

John, I’ll be 37 tomorrow, I say. I know how lucky I am to be here, on this bright cool autumn day, with my forehead lines and this cup of coffee and my children. I know, brother, that aging is the fairest possible thing.

Today, I’m thinking of the Lucille Clifton line: ‘won’t you celebrate with me/what i have shaped into/a kind of life?’

I’m thinking of Gregg Orr’s untitled poem which begins:

This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.

And I’m thinking of the Joan Didion quote I taped to the inside of a pink notebook almost a decade ago:

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

When recording the audiobook of ‘We All Come Home Alive’, a book which charts a car crash, my first daughter’s birth, heartbreaks and the rage of early grief, I had to redo just one line due to emotion. When reading the essay, ‘How to Live Without Your Brother’, my voice cracked unexpectedly on the words, ‘I am happy, John’.

I have lived so far past him. Lived my way out of my twenties. Lived to discover the confidence which comes over time, or if not confidence exactly, the grounding sense of what I might be able to expect of myself (I know for example that I have the stamina to write another book). And I have lived my way into more happiness than my grieving young self could have imagined possible.

Living, aging: it’s where it all happens.

I hope I get to keep doing it, letting it line my face.

Much love,

Anna

‘The minute I saw you I felt like ducking into the bathroom together and getting so high.’ Aimee Seu, ‘Nikki Lynn’.

Listen to this letter!

Long ago I had a friend who I always said yes to. It wasn’t that she pressured me, it was that, with her, I felt so invincible that everything became a good idea. The slash she shaved through my right eyebrow twenty years ago has never quite grown back.

This is part 2 in my series about friendship, and I’m here to talk about the adolescent ride or die.

In her poem Nikki Lynn, Aimee Seu captures the emboldening, volatile force of teen girl friendship. I asked her to read it aloud for me on the audio version of this letter, and you can also find it here.

I think of Aimee’s poems like hornets preserved in amber - little crushable bodies poised forever to sting, memory split into mosaic by compound eyes.

Nikki Lynn simmers both with joy (‘we stripped out of our hand-me-downs and got into the principal’s pool wasted’) and sadness (‘I think now we were miserable and didn’t even know.’) Nikki and the speaker of the poem seem painfully vulnerable throughout, but defiant too, making glitter out of broken glass. Together these two add up to something formidable. The poem defends the friendship, (‘People said we hurt each other but imagine having been alone’), but cannot leave it suspended at its glorious peak. The two short words ‘years after’, appear toward the end of the poem, girdled by white space. And we know before reading the rest that distance has bloomed between this pair. Because we know, don’t we, that friendships which burn with that kind of blinding brightness have to eventually dim.

We need friends who open us to risk, friends who teach us things about ourselves which we’d have been too chicken to learn otherwise. But there’s a dark side to that kind of unquestioning yes, and the other two pieces I want to discuss today concern the impulse to subordinate oneself to a BFF.

In the Spanish novel Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu, the ten year old narrator “Shit” (a name her friend has given her), is so beguiled by her bestie Isora that she’ll do almost anything to please. The pair live beneath a volcano, in a scrappy hillside neighbourhood in which the houses, like the two girls, are awkwardly close, unfinished, “little monsters”. Shit dreams of healing Isora’s sadness, saying ‘I wanted to be her dog and I wanted her to be my saint with scraped knees’. Isora manipulates the hell out of Shit, compelling her in one horrible, memorable scene to eat an entire chocolate cake. I have never read anything which so sharply captures the sadism of little girls.

You can read an excerpt here: https://lithub.com/dogs-of-summer/

Megan Nolan explores power-imbalance as a kind of friendship archetype in her essay for Granta ‘Ride or Die’. She writes ‘The first rule of this friendship is that it is devoted, overly so, as intrinsic and codependent and borderline morbid as any ill-fated romance. In this friendship, Girl A is the sexy, outgoing, somewhat rude or aggressive party and Girl B is the more watchful, self-conscious and drab of the two’.

Such friendships empower and enfeeble the weaker party. They can’t, they shouldn’t last. At the end of the essay, Nolan seizes control by suddenly moving away ‘with glib casualness’. Later she realises ‘I was really trying to flee a version of myself, a hapless and weak version’. The essay ends at a mature distance from the relationship. ‘We will never be friends as we once were, but then, I’ll never be anyone’s friend that way again. I haven’t the stomach to exist in the light of another person anymore.’

That light is perhaps the part of friendship which changes as we age; we become less moth-like, less drawn to the brilliance of others whatever the cost. And I am less heat-seeking in general as a grown up - all done with the urge to put a cigarette out on the back of my hand to see what it would feel like, the need for a friend to do it with me that we might contrast and compare. I no longer want friendships to intensify my life, but to cool life’s intensity.

And, as we grow up, we learn to spread our devotions. Networks are stronger than dyads. The thing about ‘best friend’ necklaces, just two puzzle pieces to be worn on silver chains at just two throats, is that the heart is broken.

Thanks for reading or/and listening, friends. I’d love to hear about the experiences in life and literature which have shaped your understanding of friendship.

All my love,

Anna

Texts discussed:

Aimee Seu's poem ‘Nikki Lyn’ from her book 'Velvet Hounds’

Andrea Abreu’s novel ‘Dogs of Summer’

Megan Nolan’s essay ‘Ride or Die’

Dear friends,

It’s always been my instinct to call you that, though I’ve only met some of you in person. Writing to friends reminds me why I write nonfiction at all: I believe our lives, whether or not they are extraordinary, have something to say to one another.

Keep reading, or hit play if you’d rather listen to today’s letter…

Friendship has been on my mind all year - the joy and mess of it, its power to heal and wound, the sheer life-altering force of the thing.

With our bed full of children, I no longer lie beside my partner wondering, where is this going? Romantic love used to be the site of my most charged questions. In my current phase of life, friendship feels like the more intricate terrain. And unlike romantic love, its beginnings and endings and edges are all ill-defined.

Enduring friendships can feel like solid ground to build a life upon. I treasure my own. But, even the earth under us is subject to tectonic shifts and I have come, belatedly perhaps, to realise that it is a mistake to think of anything as static. Friendships change.

I’ve been taking forever to finish this substack, because I planned to offer a few thoughts and recommend a few novels and stories. But I have more thoughts and a far longer reading list than I realised. Indeed, I think I might be writing a book about all this.

So I’m going to do a series.

I’ll explore novels, stories, nonfiction and poetry about friendship. Along the way I’ll think out loud. If this sounds like your kind of thing, subscribe so you don’t miss it. And, of course, tell a friend.

Subscribe now

I’m excited to discuss Andrea Abrau’s Dogs of Summer (in which adoration simmers to violence between ten year old besties), Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety (a portrait of a multi-decade friendship between two married couples), as well as stories from Grace Paley, Anne Serre, Roberto Bolano and Lauren Groff. If you have favorite friendship-lit let me know.

A reading rec to get us going: Weike Wang’s New Yorker essay The Trouble With Friends. Capturing the illusive obvious, Wang tells us ‘The wonder, and the curse, of friendship is choice’.

Much love,

Anna

Hello friends,

I am in Cafe Belle, a coffee shop which becomes a bar at night, sitting on one of the high stools just for grown ups, coffee at my side, a golden lamp in front of me and a rack of gleaming glasses hanging above.

I am alone.

I used to dither before starting to write - just this load of laundry first, this small mound of emails, this quick shower, this quick phone call. Hours might go by before I’d finally brave the page. But now I have children. It is so easy for my writing time to become compressed, the three hours imagined becoming forty minutes. It is even easier for writing not to happen at all. So I no longer dawdle toward my work, I run.

I’m a bit of a rescuer, and so leaving my partner floundering amid the children and legos when he’s stressed about his own work - it doesn’t come easily to me. But how many women’s stories have slipped away untold with the phrase, ‘fine, I’ll do it’ ?

There’s victory in simply being here by myself. In a moment, I’ll open my green notebook and continue feeling my way into my new novel.

I give all my notebooks epigraphs and the first page of this one reads ‘invisible lock, invisible key’. When I was sixteen, my English teacher told us a story about Emily Dickinson taking an invisible key from her pocket while her niece was visiting, walking to the door and miming sliding it into a lock. As she turned it she said, ‘freedom’. I have carried Dickinson’s key with me for twenty years.

A closed door doesn’t cut it at the moment; the three year old encroaches (‘Mummy I want to be in your room of one’s own’) and the sound of the baby crying activates my physiology, my breasts and brain tingling and pulling me back to her. I have to remove myself from them by a couple of streets. It works when I actually do it.

*

I’m in the library a week later, with the baby at my side gumming a silicone ring; I’m back to finish this letter to you. I can confirm that I did open up my notebook last week. I drew 100 possibilities for my new novel out of my brain and into the page. When I got home everyone had survived without me.

*

And now I’m at my kitchen table (baby asleep, big kid at preschool) thinking of Adrienne Rich yearning, amid “the discontinuity of female life with its attention to small chores,” for the “freedom to press on, to enter the currents of thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away.” I’m thinking of Tillie Olsen, who wrote, heartbreakingly, “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.”1

Decades and circumstances separate me from these writers, but not entirely, not enough. The book I wrote before I had kids was called ‘Here Comes the Miracle’, but the books afterward shall be the miraculous ones, the ones haltingly spooled out into existence against the odds. I don’t really know how I wrote ‘We All Come Home Alive’ during my older daughter’s infancy, though childcare and caffeine and sheer bloody mindedness had plenty to do with it. Now I have a new baby, and a new book to work on. I can just about foster ‘the simplest circumstances for creation’, but only if I am determined.

Determined then I shall be. Because Motherhood asks, ‘are you a writer or not?’ and dares you to prove it.

I’m curious, friends, about the things in your lives which ask for steely determination. Do write back if you’d like.

Much love,

Anna

How are you?

Last time I wrote it was from the fag end of pregnancy. Now I’m typing as fast as I can as my 3-month-old sleeps, her face occasionally animated by whatever infants dream about.

Despite my basic grasp of how babies are made, I really can’t say where this child comes from, with her quick smile and the small gleaming eyes of a beetle. A surprise pregnancy amplifies the thought, who are you? and I spent much of her gestation with Peter Andre’s questionable mega hit ‘Mysterious Girl’ playing on loop in my head. You can read all the books you like, I guess, but nothing imprints on the psyche like primary school discos.

I have been happy lately. At night, when my 3-year-old has given up on her own bed and clambered into mine, her hair hay-like and her body insistent even in sleep, I sit up in the sliver of space left beside her and feed the baby and read. As my body mothers on into the small hours, books are the escape hatch for my mind.

A character in John Williams’ novel Stoner says ‘lust and learning...that's really all there is’. Lust is something of a remote memory right now, but I think of Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as ‘the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.’ My life doesn’t look especially productive at the moment; I am between writing projects and on leave from paid work. But I am tending to my babies and books are tending to me. What else is there1

Here are some books I recommend, at 3am or any other time.

• Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (a complicated - to say the least- love story set against the dissolution of the GDR).

• ‘Agaat’ by Marlene Van Neikirk (A haunting South African saga which sat on my shelf for 7 years before I got round to reading it. Incredible).

• ‘The Gastronomical Me’ by MFK Fisher (the best food writing I have ever read. Come for the strawberry jam, stay for the sentences).

• ‘Liars’ by Sara Manguso (a white knuckle read about the dissolution of a marriage).

• The poetry collections ‘The Penny Dropping’ by Helen Farish and ‘That Broke Into Shining Crystals’ by Richard Scott.

I also reread ‘The End of The Affair’ by Graham Greene and it remains perfect.

Much love,

Anna

I’ve been quiet lately. We All Come Home Alive came out in January and I made all the noise I could muster. But since then, my mind has swivelled inwards. You see, I’m about to have a baby.

People liken them to books, don’t they? But my two books and two children have pretty much emerged into the world together, and I can tell you they are rather different.

Yes, making a book can feel like gestation. Ideas often seem to grow in the dark of ourselves, forming out of sight of our conscious minds. And yes, at the end of the process I feel heavy and impatient: words I might also apply to my current state as the days pile up after my due date. Like birth, finishing a manuscript takes a certain wildness; the surrender of control.

Unlike birth, you can finish a manuscript in the coffee shop. Knickers on.

Our books don’t need us, once they are out. I know that (if we want to be read!) it’s good to shout about them. To come up with Instagram posts and articles and generally take part in the big ego parade of making sure potential readers know one’s work exists. But ‘birthing’ a book is the end of living with it; a book is a discrete episode in one’s life, more like a love affair than a long marriage, nothing at all like a child.

A book is an overflow of self.

Joan Didion writes, ‘In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind’. My babies do not feel like saying I into the world but a monumental pivot from I to you. I am bound to them, but their being feels mysterious, only tangentially to do with me.

I don’t mind at all when others call my books my babies! And, though they are very different, both come from a yearning for a bigger, messier, more creative life. But, in my long path of working out how to be a mother and an artist, distinction feels vital; how else am I to uncover all the necessary parts of myself for doing both?

I hope to make a lot of noise soon. To rattle the walls of the living room where I write this and get this baby out.

If I’m a little quiet for a while afterwards, you will know why.

Much love,

Anna

We All Come Home Alive is out now!

For me, publishing feels both like the summit of a heap of work and the granting of an outlandish birthday candle wish. I can’t quite believe it.

After pouring so many words into this work, I’m ready to let We All Come Home Alive begin speaking for itself. So, here’s the prologue, just for you, my substack subscribers. It’s called, Listen in the Dark - a title which captures how much of this book felt to write.

Thank you for being here for me to write to.

Much love,

Anna

Listen in the Dark

I once asked, What is the worst thing that’s ever happened in your life?

I was thirteen, sitting up in the dark with two other girls, my back against the textured wallpaper of the room we were sharing. It now seems like a precisely thirteen-year-old thing to say, sweet and cruel, a corollary to all that superlative talk of favourite colours and best friends, which occupies the earlier portion of childhood. A question probing for the edge of things while assuming it will encounter nothing too awful, nothing beyond the realm of the sayable.

It was my last night with these girls. We had spent two weeks together on a residential theatre course, from which I can now recall only a single exercise: attempting to wriggle my hand while holding the rest of my body completely still. My interactions with the other attendees are what stay with me, the hunger with which we investigated and provoked one another. We had come from all over the country and sensed knowledge to be gleaned here that was not available at home. One evening, a languidly beautiful girl a year older than me leant against our doorframe and said, I mean, I don’t look good naked, but who does? and I quietly pondered her question from my narrow bed. I kissed a boy whose last name rhymed with buttock in a game of spin the bottle and was annoyed at him for grinning afterwards; I had wanted us to seem aloof after being labelled the most innocent people here. I did not know then how few of my kisses would be accompanied by such unabashed happiness. And I remember this conversation in the dark. Its intimacy and urgency, the way it sprawled into the night, our time together for passing around gems of our lives running out.

A girl I will call Bella was the last to take her turn. She hesitated. The pool of empty carpet between our three beds expanded for a second in the silence.

Then she said, My best friend died.

For a second, I wondered if she was pretending, whether the next thing expected of me would be a laugh or some kind of playing along, as if it were a dramatic scene we were trying out. But she went on. There had been an accident in a foreign country; I pictured her friend lying in a road softened by sun. Bella said that when she was told she had repeatedly thrown up.

We stayed up together talking for a long time that night and I felt very close to both those girls, though I do not know either of them now.

As adults we only ask about worst things by accident.

At twenty-two, I found myself in a single bed, chatting with relative strangers in a dormitory at a theatre course, once again. By then, I had abandoned the idea of myself as an actor who might, say, play Lady Macbeth or a tough but troubled TV detective, but I was still interested in performance. I had come to study for a week with a Polish company whose training involved a lot of guttural singing and running around together in rhythmic step to the point of delirious exhaustion. This method worked on me just once and for a few brief minutes I felt hot and shivery and full of unselfconscious power, as if possessed, but I generally lacked the required coordination and when the other participants threw sticks at me, I just cried. There were four of us in the little dorm, talking our way towards sleep. Someone asked how many siblings everyone had, and a young woman left a small silence before her number.

You didn’t sound sure about that, I laughed.

She paused again before telling us that she’d had another brother, but he had died.

The conversation lasted only a few more moments, in which I may have said, I can’t imagine that.

I would like to go back and tell her that now I can imagine it. Now, I understand her pause in the dark.

I am no longer interested in worst things, which is to say, I have long outgrown the belief that experience can be organised on such neatly vertical terms. But I still want to listen in the dark, as I did in those two bedrooms a decade apart. I am interested in the pause before a revelation, that intake of breath a gap to house a ghost in.

I want to listen in the dark.

And to pull things through into the realm of the sayable. To drop into the silences between one type of reality and another. The places where life shocks us and we must come back different, if we are to return at all.

Eight years ago, I left a new year’s eve party just after midnight. It was the very very beginning of 2017 and everyone around me was singing the words of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to the tune of Drake’s ‘Hotline Bling’. I was grumpy and out of celebratory steam. Heading home by myself, I realised that I’d gotten something fundamentally wrong about life. 

Back then, I was mainly an oral story storyteller, while writing my first novel in secret. I loved reaching the final minutes of a show, and not only because it felt like nearing the end of the tightrope (telling an hour long story, from memory, is a ‘just don’t look down’ experience). Whenever I drew toward the last line, fixing all the little frictions I had set up along the way, I felt the whole audience relax with me; as the story resolved, our heartbeats slowed as one. 

I had, I realised, been waiting for life to give me this kind of satisfaction.

I had been making resolutions each new year with the expectation that life itself would one day resolve.

This occurred to me like a joke that night as I walked home that night through the dark South London streets, the foxes I’d usually meet there scared into hiding by fireworks. I was fresh from a breakdown of sorts, reeling from the discovery of the preceding year that life is not linear, that my heart could break then mend then get smashed up again, that grief could feel so much better and then suddenly so much worse. The discovery that I was, in fact, a person, not a project to be tweaked toward perfection.

The next day I wrote a piece for Huffington Post on ditching new year’s resolutions in favour of new year’s experiments. It’s still up, hurried typos and all. 

Since then, I have written two books. The second, We All Come Home Alive, comes out this month. Writing, more than anything, has taught me the value of both commitment and provisionality.

In his very useful guide ‘The Art of Revision’, Peter Ho Davies urges writers to adopt an experimental mindset, writing to test hypotheses and treating our ‘failures’ as information. 

To write, we have to commit; a book simply cannot come into being without a certain amount of bloody minded ambition. And yet, writing rarely yields linear progress. The process is wildly inefficient; we draft and redraft and realise that a section or character we spent hours or years on really should be cut. Writing asks us to balance deep investment, our willingness to venture down the unseen path of an idea, with a willingness to retrace our steps, see things another way, try something else. I think life is rather like this too. 

So here’s to revision over resolution in 2025. Provisionality and commitment.

All my love,

Anna

It’s Christmas Eve. Twelve years ago, I buried someone on this date. Back then, I thought Christmas would always be a very painful time. But I was wrong, and how wonderful to be so. When my family put up our tree last week and added the baubles (or as Americans say, ‘ornaments’), I found myself crying with joy at my wrongness, to the sound of Wham!

I’ve been reading the poet Amy Key’s stunning memoir, ‘Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone’. The blurb poses the question, ‘What happens when the romance we are told will give life meaning never presents itself?’ and Key’s book feels like a manifesto for making meaning on one’s own terms, as well as determined examination of loneliness. Reading it put me in mind of Charles D’Ambrosio’s description of discovering MFK Fisher’s writing and being won over by ‘the right she assumed to be exact about her life’. Key describes the lack of fanfare the world allows single people (without weddings, anniversaries, birth announcements). But in her precise descriptions (of her grandparents’ house where nothing was wasted and dishwater was thrown over the flowerbeds, of painting her own home with friends, infusing care into its walls) she declares, a rich life is still unfolding here, a life resonant with meaning.

Whether we are partnered or single, so much of our meaning-making is indecipherable to others. I roll out pastry and cut it into little stars which I use to top my mince pies. I brought the jar of mincemeat back from my last trip to England, protecting it in my suitcase with a pair of thick socks. It is December and I am happy, and Christmas songs no longer fill me with grief: a personal wonder encoded in a nothing-much action.

I also finally read the essay ‘Play House’ by my friend Katie Rice in ‘Compound Butter’, a magazine of art about food. In it, Katie writes about the house she and I used to live in together and the way we all cooked and ate there. The piece is illustrated with great clouds of our roommate Aimie’s chilli-cumin-honey popcorn. Katie describes us eating cross legged on the floor with take-out chopsticks, the table littered with dripping candles and bottles of three dollar wine, a record turning in the background. And somehow, through her exactitude, she conveys the sense of play alive in that house, all our cheap ingredients coming together into shared meaning. It made me ache for the romance of friendship.

Tomorrow I’ll get up early and cook. Friends will bring over roast potatoes and a jar of cranberry sauce and eat with us. It will be low key, and hopefully lovely. And at moments it may be slightly sad, because it’s Christmas, so it’s freighted and all the best songs of the season have a streak of melancholy anyway. I’ll take it all. And perhaps I’ll try to write it down.

With much love1,

Anna

‘Truly, I live in dark times!’ Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1939. The poem, ‘To Those Born Later’ was written in exile and goes on: ‘What kind of times are they, when/A talk about trees is almost a crime/Because it implies silence about so many horrors’

I have found myself hesitating to write to you all, tongue tied after the US election, about which I feel both implicated and aloof. I can’t vote here, but do live here. My child is an American citizen.

I was away when it happened, in London, recording the audiobook of We All Come Home Alive. I hadn’t been in England in November in 7 years and had forgotten to expect fireworks and paper poppies pinned to clothes. I asked my mum and dad to leave Radio 4 off on the day of the result. The violently loud had won. I couldn’t bear any more noise. 

Walking through the airport in DC, my small child loopy with exhaustion, I thought, did you vote for him? Did you? at each face I passed. Something had arrived in the post while I was away: my ‘unconditional’ Green Card.

It took seventeen hours to get from my parents’ front door in South London to my own in America. And I returned to a new colour, my yard in Virginia carpeted in pale orange pine needles.

The response to the election among my friends here feels muted, less like outrage and more like grief. We are horrified. But we talk about all the other things. 

I have no hot takes for this letter. I don’t write much about politics (how disappointed my seventeen year old self would be). My subject, if I have one, is probably how we might live with dignity and some measure of joy despite the brutalities of life. I don’t know what that means here, in this very odd country which I actually do love, and now, in 2024. But I shall stay and try to find out.

Thank you for reading, friends. And know that wherever you are in the world, you can always write back.

Anna

I’m in the sky right now. I’ve scheduled this letter to reach your inbox while I’m mid flight. Picture me, a (hopefully sleeping) toddler and the (hopefully sympathetic) stranger sat next to us, somewhere over the Atlantic.

There’s a short story by Lucy Caldwell called All the People Were Mean and Bad, in which a woman takes a transatlantic flight alone with a restless toddler, experiences some unexpected intimacy and thinks about place and grief. I love it and you can read it here.

I'm in the sky, but I’m also in the bathroom, actually writing this. My laptop is balanced on the toilet (something never once did before becoming a parent, but has now become an occasional strategy). I have mixed food colouring and soap to keep my toddler absorbed in painting the sides of the bath. 

In these letters I often try share a constellation of texts which inspire me or some kind of hopefully-useful thought about how writing works. But you should know that much of the time, my mind resembles a to-do list scrawled over by a two year old with a permanent marker. My days are not spent reading Proust in a big leather chair. My current reading consists mainly of redditt threads on how to remove permanent marker from various items. And it often feels as though imaginative thought - the kind a writer can work with - flashes just briefly through my mind before vanishing, like those ultra-vivid dreams which dissolve to nothing as you lift your head from the pillow. 

I used to worry that my domestic self - she who wipes and soothes and is always opening another can of chickpeas, who pushes a buggy all over the hilly town I live in - was in competition with my writing self. But my continued writing disproves this. And the the micro eras when I’m just too knackered to pick up a book are always followed by the thrill of redisovery. My god, I think, just as I did reading Charlotte’s Web at the age of seven, books are brilliant.

It’s true that time, with oneself and with the work of other authors, matters greatly for writing. But I think (and am determined to think) that my caregiving and my creativity are engaged in a dance, not a battle.

Yes, it is sometimes an awkward dance where you can’t quite find the beat and one breast keeps escaping your dress.

There’s a story about poet Diane Di Prima in the excellent book by Julie Phillips The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind Baby Problem. One night at a party at Allen Ginsberg’s she got up to go home and relieve her babysitter. Jack Kerouac, sprawled on the floor, told her, “Di Prima, unless you forget about your babysitter, you’re never going to be a writer’. As Phillips has it, ‘she wouldn’t have been a writer if she’d stayed. To write and to come home on time, she argued, required “the same discipline throughout”: a practice of keeping her word’.

So, I’m in the sky. 

I’m flying to London to record the audiobook of We All Come Home Alive, ahead of its release in January. I’m ready, I think, except for deciding what to do about accents; the book, like my life, is full of Americans.

It will be a literal homegoing (getting off the plane at Heathrow, the lovely grey sky, scanning arrivals for my dad’s face, the particular taste of an M&S vegetable samosa…) and an artistic one: back to my roots as an oral storyteller. I think I’ll finally understand what We All Come Home Alive is once I say it all aloud. It will be available, both as a physical book and an audiobook, this January.

Much love,

Anna

Dear friends,

Lately, my life has been stranger than fiction. 

Around the time I sent off the very final edits for my memoir, ‘We All Come Home Alive’, subtitled ‘a life in shocks’,  an embarrassment of shocks befell me, first dumbfounding then painful then wondrous.  

‘The short story is a tale that encloses a secret tale’ Ricardo Piglia writes in his essay, ‘Theses on the Short Story’. I’ve always found the essay title deceptively dry, but the premise thrilling: in a great short story, one story is told on the surface while another is narrated in secret, ‘encoded in the interstices’ of the first.

‘The effect of surprise is produced when the end of the secret story appears on the surface.’ Ricardo Piglia

When I think of the secret story, Jumpa Lahiri’s ‘A Temporary Matter’ comes to mind, in which we follow a couple drawing closer together, only to realise at the end, with an intake of breath, that we’ve actually witnessed them falling apart. I think of Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, in which…actually just read it, is really hard to explain (The movie Arrival is based on this story. I love it, and not just because I can point to it and say, ‘see, I can read sci fi’).  And I think of Ling Ma’s wonderfully odd ‘Office Hours’, which has the audacity to tell us, when a secret door is discovered halfway through the text, ‘On the other side is where the story begins’.

Piglia’s examples are from Borges, Chekov, Quiroga, Poe, and Kafka.

Of course, not all stories reveal their secrets. A favourite of mine, ‘The Empty Family’ by Colm Toibin, hums with all it isn’t telling us, while its narrator walks around and pauses to intently gaze out on ocean waves through a telescope. Classic short stories open their palms with a magician’s flourish at the end, but modern ones often work the tension between the surface story and what lies beneath without resolving it. These stories speak to the multiplicity of things, the palimpsest of our outsides and insides, present and past. 

Everything that has truly happened in my life has come as a revelation that my reality, my story, wasn’t quite as I thought it was. 

The secret story is not only structurally satisfying - a more sophisticated version of the twist - it makes sense to me on a cellular level. A breakup, a bereavement, an unlikely line forming, pale but distinct, on a pregnancy test: our shocks swerve us from one narrative lane into another. 

In both my fiction and my nonfiction I am interested in the doors which appear before us in life and declare, on the other side is where the story begins.

Thank you for reading, friends. I’m finding my feet here on Substack, and plan to write to you more often. Do write back if you’d like to. I think of you all the time. 

Much love (as my Granny always signs off), 

Anna

Here’s a picture of me in Louisville, Kentucky, home of the discoball and the KFC Yum Center. Where are you in the world?

A fortnight ago I sent my memoir in essays, We All Come Home Alive, away for its copy edit. It will be checked over for grammatical errors (and possibly misnamed objects, as with my last book) but the creative work is done. After sending the email, I may or may not have spent the afternoon listening to breakup songs.

You see, it’s a bit like having an affair, writing a book.

I had to get away from my husband to do it. I definitely couldn’t do it with my child in the room. Sometimes it made me sneak out on them both as they slept. The book and I had our own thing going; we usually met at the same table at the same cafe and it was always kind of awkward if a friend came in and tried to a chat. And I gave it the most vibrant version of myself, someone quite unlike the often-exhausted domestic me.

Shortly after I became a mum and almost every minute of my time became shared, I was struck by a vivid fantasy: I could say I was doing an evening class but instead spend the time just walking aimlessly around. I imagined the thrilling double solitude of being both alone and unaccounted for. All of a sudden, I understood the appeal of secrets.

Thankfully, I had a book to finish.

In her novel, Children of the Albatross, Anaïs Nin describes a child hiding beneath a shawl in order to ‘travel’ . Writing is like this: a private imaginative adventure.

Publishing is the surrender of that privacy. It’s exciting and scary, and also just a little sad.

It’s a privilege to publish, and a joy. In case the Gods are listening, let me state clearly, I really do want We All Come Home Alive to be read1. But handing a book over has the sting of a goodbye. I don’t know any songs about parting with a manuscript, so I’ve been making do with Leonard Cohen and Adele.

This is my very first Substack, and I’m still experimenting with what I’d like this space to be. I seem to have begun by talking about endings. Thank you for subscribing.

Much love and more soon,

Anna

Subscribe now