I fluctuate between loving and loathing my tiger, trying to keep it on a leash, sometimes trying to shoot tranquilliser darts at it when it’s giving me shit. A tiger is a magnificent thing, but it is a completely impractical house pet and it’s wrecked my furniture. Sometimes I give in and give it what it wants, and I almost always regret it because you can’t negotiate with a tiger. A tiger will never be satisfied.

This is what makes me the writer I am, the person I am. Being so willing to love and live so wildly allows me to connect deeply with people and indeed the world.

If tamed, and then spurned, the tiger dissolves. It doesn’t bear its teeth and claws. I live my life in a state of hyper-vigilance and so when the ‘inevitable’ comes, as it has so many times, I want to slam myself closed like a cranky clam (seems today I’m going big with the animal metaphors) and for a while, I do. When this happens, I go to bed, and I stay there, I retreat to my family and I take comfort in them. Indeed there have been extended periods of my life where I have remained closed indefinitely, a sign swinging in the window of a dark store. It is not out of fear of truly being truly seen, I’m not a coward. It is more a feeling of exhaustion.

I love nothing more than other people. The intimacy of knowing and being known. A feeling of safety in vulnerability. The closeness of true friendship, partnership, companionship, motherhood. Any place where I can find authenticity, I’m happy.

Life denotes that any and all love eventually leads to loss, and loneliness comes with it. Grief takes many, many forms. I am not a blocker, or a ghost. I will stay until the very end, I will hold your hand and I will fix things, salvage the bleached-bones from a dead relationship, build new ones from ash. Because when I choose a person I do so very deliberately. When connections are truly severed, by death or circumstance outside of reason and control, I know that they are griefs that I will carry forever.

Over the weekend, doomscrolling on Instagram, I saw this quote from the king of the lit-bros, Cormac McCarthy. It’s from his novel Stella Maris, which I have not read, but I’m sure I will in time.

I can’t stop thinking about this line, interrogating it, trying to counter it. The fact that it landed in my feed when it did felt coincidental, but then, there are no coincidences because of the algorithm, right? It knows that I have been reading a fair bit of McCarthy lately, as I’m sure it also somehow knows my inner emotional workings.

Maybe what McCarthy missed was the joy, I thought. But of course he didn’t. He didn’t miss anything. He was one of the most precise and brilliant writers in history, have you read this essay he wrote about the origins of language?! It blew my mind! Bookmark it, you’re welcome.

What McCarthy knew was that even joy is completely fleeting. (Maybe that’s why he never really wrote about it.) In truly happy moments, I am acutely aware of the fact that it will be seconds before it is lost to memory, such a poor second to the present.

That is grief, and so you see, they are mechanically linked. Maybe that is why we cry so much when we experience a flood of happiness. I remember, once, crying after sex both because of the intense feeling of safety and connection I felt, but also it was grief because that wonderful moment was so perfect, and so over. Hauer’s tears in the rain. I always come back to that one, don’t I.

McCarthy is correct because rage and grief stand for action and acceptance, respectively. The desire to change things: a person, a situation, how that person is treated or how you are treated, that is all rage. Rage is a desire to fix.

Accepting that you cannot change other people, or influence life and death and the weather, that is grief. And what else is there, really? Last week I wrote about control. This is the conclusion I was seeking.

Happiness is grief. Love is grief. Connection is grief. Because one way or another, it always ends, because human beings end. And we have no control over that. So just try to accept all of it, just let it be.

Trying to hold on to the moment is pointless. Time is slippery and intangible. But paradoxically time is also completely solid: it can’t be reversed (quantum physicists feel free to intervene here). What has happened will always have happened, and our own truth of it is all there is. I have borne witness to this many times recently. People can say it was different, that many things can be true at once, ‘cos perspective. But if we really look inside ourselves, be it at a tiger or a clam or any other animal you like, unless we are narcissists then we know the truth. We know when our memories, and our hearts, our words, are sound.

So now, in this era that feels heavily determined by many varieties of grief, instead of feeling angry about what is lost, I will grieve it, because it happened, and it can’t be taken from me. I am the tiger again, wild and loving, and honestly, even if I could go back in time knowing what I now know, and stop myself from entering a path filled with so much loss, I wouldn’t. Because it was beautiful, and because it really happened, and even when death divides us, we can not be separated from the truth of that.

My novel Bitter Sweet is OUT NOW in paperback all over the world, and 99p on Kindle for UK readers during July. My second novel Light Years is now available for pre-order in the UK HERE and the USA HERE.

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Then, sometimes, there are periods of time in which so many big things happen that you feel like you are drowning, taking enormous breathes when you can, hoping the air will last long enough to sustain you until you have another chance to break through the surface and fill your lungs. The big things can be a mix of the good and the bad. This is how my life has felt over the last few weeks.

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Today, I am sitting in the quiet of my house, at my dining-table-desk, for the first time in too long. I am completely alone. It’s just me and the strange comfort of an empty page, coffee and my records; I have three sitting next to the player today: Slowdive by Slowdive, Remain in Light by Talking Heads, and PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. It feels like such a relief to be back in my routine. It feels like today I can breathe, that I can process and refocus. I have finally unclenched my jaw.

Other than confused and embarrassingly raw scraps in my Notes app, I have not written in so long. The mechanics of my writing-mind are stiff and creaky.

The specifics of what has been happening are not important. But what I am observing, and what I am thus writing about, is how quickly life can change, and how we reach for control when they do. How fast everything can go from feeling so good, to so incredibly bad. How the rug can be pulled when you had altogether forgotten that there even was a rug. How things you barely allowed yourself to want can come to fruition, that you can actually make them happen.

I’m thinking about how there are many things that we can control, but more that we cannot.

We can’t control life, death, disease, the weather. We can’t force kindness or loyalty, even when we have given them with our whole hearts. We are not ever able to control other people’s feelings or behaviours. And equally, other people’s feelings, and their actions, are their own; they are not our responsibility.

In these wild moments when everything feels so completely overwhelming I think about what I can control, and I go towards it. I think about what makes me feel better. My daughter, my friends, exercise, routine, writing, what I eat. Like many people, my eating is very much dictated by my mood. My body is a direct reflection of my internal workings, because it makes me feel better to control my eating. It’s funny that we approach someone having lost weight as being a positive thing. Personally, if I’m skinny, the likelihood is that I’m absolutely miserable.

There are other things, behaviours I have touched upon here before. The obsessive counting, and the handwashing, and the other routines and rituals that start popping up again and again until they exhaust me. It is madness, I know. By my lizard brain thinks it is all extremely important.

Then there is the work. The writing is something that I can truly control. It is mine and mine alone and how much of it and how well I do it comes down entirely to me. I write the best words I can, in the best order. I push myself towards new ideas and stuff that interests me, new formats, concepts that feel out of reach. And in the flow-state I find some peace. It is also where I find my confidence, and my sense of who I am. It is through writing that I can see the truth. Not just my own truth, but the whole truth. Other people’s narratives are absorbed and digested and the path cleared in my mind.

The other night, I took my own advice and I wrote it all down. I filled the blank page on phone with everything I was feeling. It was a timeline of recent events, and it shook them into order. It was a letter that I will never be able to send. It is through writing that I was able to take control.

When I was done, I went to bed and I slept for fourteen hours.

I’m thinking of the good bits, now, because there has also been so much beauty, too. Dancing to The Maccabees on a summer evening with my friends, and feeling twenty-one again. My daughter’s fourth birthday party, her face when I presented the cake I made her. Cold beers and the sage words of friends on an otherwise bad birthday. Kind messages about my book. A torrent of unexpected tears in a therapist’s office. Comfort that I gave a friend that made her feel better. The gift of a book with flowers pressed inside, picked on a mountain in Slovenia. Sitting alone in my favourite cinema on a Monday morning. A lovely dinner in Shoreditch, a congratulations card. Watching Wimbledon, watching the World Cup. A bottle of ice-cold champagne shared in my garden. My roses, which came into bloom again and doubled in size overnight, because roses always feels like a ‘sign’ from my mum. A call with good news that will shape my professional future. The profound love that I feel for a friend going through unimaginable pain. A perfect martini.

Fleeting moments of happiness. Truly, this life is bittersweet. We need the darkness in order to see the light.

Bitter Sweet is OUT NOW in paperback, and 99p on Kindle for UK readers during July. Light Years is now available for pre-order in the UK HERE and the USA HERE.

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS

• I really enjoyed The Invite. I’m on Letterboxd if you want to say hello.

• Naturally I think Widow’s Bay is the best thing to be on TV in as long as I can remember.

• I am a good listener, so this beautiful ring made by my clever friend Emily who runs Apres Youth is just about my favourite possession (alongside my air con unit). All of her jewellery is truly stunning. She is on Instagram HERE.

  

For so many millennials, this film was an accelerant. We were spotty, confused, frustrated teenagers grappling with boys (and girls) and coffee shimmer lip gloss, whilst maintaining extreme focus on increasingly creative ways to persuade our parents to buy us Kickers as school shoes.

But then everything changed. It was this film that sparked what I can only presume at this point to be an entire lifetime of longing and yearning, the two things I most enjoy writing about.

Seeing Romeo + Juliet for the first time is a pretty vivid memory in an otherwise sludgy era. Weirdly, it was on a school trip to the local cinema in Worthing. I guess our English teachers thought Leonardo DiCaprio might be enough to get us into Shakespeare? It was a good call!

As the credits rolled and reality faded back in with the harsh house-lights, I remember thinking:

Real life is intolerable. I want a love that feels like this. This is what is out there, and it can be mine!

It’s hard to untangle if it was the character or the twenty-one year old Leonardo DiCaprio that I was so caught up in, but the moment he appeared on screen under the arch of the Sycamore Grove theatre on Verona Beach, drawing hard on a cigarette, journalling in his perfect cursive about his unrequited love for the chaste Rosaline, I knew that I would never be the same again.

That floppy hair, those blue eyes squinting at the sun, Thom Yorke twanging away, that perfect riff from the opening of ‘Talk Show Host’, the sun melting over the ocean. Who was this boy? I was well and truly cooked.

I was too young to have watched What’s Eating Gilbert Grape or The Basketball Diaries, although as a friendship group, we quickly found them on VHS at Chanel 5 Video Rental, and were just as quickly traumatised. Our usual Saturday night sleepover movies had up until this point been more in the vein of Clueless.

This was all before Titanic, or the very-young models on yachts. Leo was like some boy that went to another school, one we could track down and drink cider in the park with. This was elemental DiCaprio, and we had never seen — or felt — anything like it.

Without anything that resembled the Internet of now, our options for fandom were extremely limited. Looking for any place to indulge my new and unwieldy infatuation, I went towards the soundtrack. I remember going to Nova Records and handing over my ice-cream stand wages for the CD. I poured over every image in the artwork, tearing the edge of the booklet at one point. I listened to it relentlessly. It felt like a gateway into a whole new world.

It was the first time I felt like I had any ownership over music, because it felt like I had found it for myself. Garbage, The Cardigans, Des’ree. And of course, peak Radiohead.

Romeo + Juliet, this ancient but timeless love story rendered with such vibrancy and life, had unlocked an abyss of adolescence and it was one that I was prepared to free fall into for the next few years. At one point that summer, on holiday with my family, I was rendered mute by my love and longing for all of it. I couldn’t even talk to my parents, I just stared out of the window and refused to eat. I could not possibly bear another day of being a child, or living at home, or most of all, not having a boyfriend. Despite my best efforts, I was yet to secure even so much as a snog. But I was suddenly ready for everything.

The whole movie had essentially short-circuited my teenage brain. It was the beginning of the kind of possessing, lusty, messy and obsessive longing that exists for every generation of teens.

It was this feeling that very much informed the ‘love story’ in my novel Bitter Sweet (which is out in paperback in the UK now). In the book, Charlie has obsessed over Richard Aveling, her favourite author, since she was thirteen.

Like me, Charlie is a fantasist (I wanted to use past tense there, but who am I kidding) and she imagines Richard to be someone who will make her feel like his books make her feel. When she meets him, and he draws her into an affair, it is a literal teenage dream come true.

With clips of that fish tank scene flooding my Instagram, and the weird and instinctive glassy-eyes longing I felt watching them, I went back for a rewatch this week.

What a film it is, right from that TV screen floating in blackness with the prologue, into the gas station battle. Not a moment, not one single shot, is wasted.

It is visually beautiful, energetic, exciting, heartbreaking. John Leguizamo’s exquisite teeth, so feline in his perfectly tailored, Virgin Mary flak jacket! Harold Perrineau’s stunning drag performance, his perfect vulnerability and dichotomous exploration of masculinity, the disappointment in his voice as he chokes out ‘a plague on both your houses’ as he dies! Pete Postlethwaite reminding us just how sexy baldness is! Paul Rudd’s wonderfully comic Paris! Miriam Margolyes’ delightful portrayal as Juliet’s nurse!

Clare Danes, just seventeen, so beautiful, exuding purity and innocence, angelic in every sense, her bedroom filled with dolls. We loved her so much.

And then Leo, Romeo. . . dreamy and chaotic and deep and emotional. I know now that he is, of course, the original fuckboy — Crying his heart out over his love for Rosaline, writing poetry about her, locking himself in dark rooms, only to later the very same day declare his eternal love for poor Juliet, who he has known for all of two hours. But still. I felt flooded with something familiar, and old. He is half my age here, but then I am thirteen again for just long enough to remember how awful it is to be a teenager.

Still, I loved it. I ate it all up and appreciated all of it. I didn’t look at my phone for nearly two hours, which is impressive for me, even when I’m asleep. It’s a magnificent film and one that is a complete delight to return to.

Did it set the path for my expectations of true love? Did it send me off into the world hoping to find someone just like Leo’s fuckboy Romeo? Did it make me want to smoke cigarettes and take ecstasy and kiss boys in swimming pools? Did it romanticise love-bombing and toxic relationships? Did it leave me with a very low opinion of the Catholic Church? Yes! Yes it did.

If it was released today, what would people say? Would we examine this ancient love story in a contemporary setting through a modern lens, to the point that it would be unbearable? I don’t know. I consider this love, and if it is ultimately empowering to love someone at first sight, to allow yourself to fall into something that is forbidden, or if it is just plain stupid.

I knew how the film would end, of course, I’ve seen it a billion times and it’s the most famous tragedy ever written, yet I found myself hoping, as though there was some alternative cut of the movie playing. Maybe this time Romeo would notice Juliet is stirring one second earlier, and wouldn’t drink the poison. They would be reunited in the crypt and their love would have time to deepen and grow over their lifetimes. Their union would unite the Montagues and the Capulets forever. Tybalt and Mercutio would not be in graves, but in hospital beds, have surgery and recover. They would go on to do talks together in schools, discouraging kids from getting involved in gangs, showing their scars and explaining how they have learnt to deal with their anger. There would be lovely babies, and more parties. Maybe Friar Laurence and the Nurse would become companions of some kind. The Prince could retire having won a Nobel Peace Prize.

A happy ending. I think that even then, when I was thirteen, that’s all I ever wanted. Safety and beauty and peace, things I did not feel in my own life. Maybe that is why this film affected me so much. It was so close, and it slipped through their fingers. They had the kind of love we all want and it was not enough to bind them to this earth.

I think Énouement (an internet word you won’t find in a dictionary) is what I felt most deeply when I rewatched this film. But I’d never go back and tell the young me anything. That girl had to learn all on her own that no Romeo in real life would ever feel as good as she thought. There have been many of them, and none have brought anything like the passion that teenage me imagined. Conflating love with drama is a mistake and one that we must learn for ourselves.

That said, when my daughter is old enough to watch it, we’ll be having serious words.

You can pre-order a signed and personally dedicated copy of Bitter Sweet in paperback from Columbia Road Books HERE, or a regular copy from Waterstones or Amazon in the UK. American readers can pre-order HERE.

Light Years is now available for pre-order in the UK HERE.

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS

• I finally read Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation. It’s a one sitting book, wonderfully short. Through fragments, it tells the story of a marriage in serious trouble. I loved it and wish I had read it much sooner.

• I’m learning about the fall of The Aztecs, a period of history I knew absolutely nothing about! This Podcast series by The Rest Is History is brilliant.

• My good friend, the brilliant, funny writer and stand-up has a very buzzy new YA novel out this week called Coterie of Liars. Think: One of Us Is Lying meets The Inheritance Games with the vibes of Saltburn. Go Kate!

  

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I appeared at Beyond The Book literary festival in Brighton a couple of weeks ago, alongside the brilliant authors Clare Leslie Hall and Essie Fox. The title of our panel was Toxic Traits and Red Flags: The Darker Side of Love. What a juicy theme, and red flags: my specialist subject!

Ha ha, not really. I once dated a man who told me on three separate occasions that he was a sociopath. ‘I’m sure you’re not,’ I replied so very sweetly.

What I learned from this ‘relationship’ is that when someone tells you that they are a sociopath, they are probably a sociopath.

But I digress. I really like doing book events, and so I’m pleased to have more coming up. I get nervous, because it’s weird being looked at and listened to, but I always come away feeling good. I love meeting readers. I love talking about books and writing. I love long train rides and I love signing books and learning new names, and new spellings of familiar names.

As with any time I open my mouth and words come out, events are followed by intermittent flashes of anxiety as I remember things I did or didn’t say that sound stupid. In the Q&A bit at the end of the event in Brighton, someone asked: What had we set out to write about?

What an excellent question! (And, notably, an actual question and not a statement in monologue, which often happens at literary events.) Clare and Essie had brilliant responses; they had clearly approached the writing of their books with purpose and curiosity for a question that they wanted to explore.

I concentrated very hard on both listening to what they were saying, sitting up straight, and coming up with an answer of my own. (The mental gymnastics are a lot to balance and intrusive thoughts come at me like asteroids when I’m on a stage of any kind.)

While they eloquently answered, my internal narration went like this:

“I’ll say that I wanted to explore how trauma in childhood affects the adults we become! How long can you cross your legs without getting varicose veins? No, I’ll say that I was interested in examining the ways that holding onto the idea of a person can be devastating. Oooh look, and are here! God, Essie has such nice hair. STOP SLOUCHING. Maybe I’ll say I wanted to write about grief, I love talking about grief, that’s a good thing to talk about, but doesn’t really answer the question. Oh shit. My go.”

I opted for the dull truth: That I didn’t write Bitter Sweet holding tight to a philosophical question or a central dramatic argument. The same is true of my second novel, Light Years. Both these books started with characters, and a place that I wanted them to get to. The writing is simply following them to it. That is the process. It is no more cerebral than that.

I suppose I was worried that confessing this approach to writing, this lack of consideration of a bigger theme, made me less author-ly than the clever women sitting next to me. (I can’t remember who it was that told me I had a massive chip on my shoulder because I don’t have a degree, but I wholeheartedly agree with them.) So I gave the truth as my answer, exactly because it is the truth, and I like to have meaningful interactions wherever possible, but especially when I’m talking about my work.

(Also, people can spot my bullshit a mile off, so I find it best to just tell the fucking truth all the time. It’s been a forty-one year long experiment with mixed results.)

With Bitter Sweet, I had the opening scene in which Charlie and Richard meet in the rain in an alleyway, smoking, and I had the scene a year later: the one where they embrace on Old Compton Street. . . It was then about how I got between these two points. Sort of a problem solving exercise, a jigsaw puzzle.

The theme or the central question at the heart of my books only appear to me much later, and only through conversations with people that have read them, for the book only exists in the space between us. I know now that everything I write about is centred on how terrible things in our childhoods (I am resisting the word ‘trauma’ because it has been co-opted by the worst people I know on Instagram) shape us as adults.

I didn’t work this out for myself. I had to be told by someone else. It was such a lightbulb moment. This doesn’t mean I didn’t intend to write about these things, it’s more that the intention is not at the front of my consciousness when I write.

When I’m looking at this objectively, I of course understand there is no right or wrong way to be a writer, or to write. In contrast to this, I have nonetheless always considered what my idea of a ‘proper writer’ is. How she dresses, what she drinks, how she speaks to her friends, who she sleeps with, what time she goes to bed, what time she gets up in the morning.

I think of Joan Didion pouring a scotch in her Upper East Side apartment. I think of Sue Townsend drinking red wine and smoking cigarettes in her unmade bed. I think of Tove Jansson swimming in the Pellinge archipelago in a flower crown. I think of Iris Murdoch riding a rickety old bike through the Oxfordshire countryside on a summer’s day. I think of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West composing love letters to each other. I think of Sylvia Plath weeping into her typewriter in Fitzroy Road.

These ideas of a ‘proper writer’ are pretty, and very romantic, but also caging (and notably child-free). Should a writer read more books than a non-writer? Should a writer start writing earlier than 10 a.m.? Should a writer philosophically refuse to get filler and botox? Should a writer erase all mystery of her being via Substack? Should a writer have eleven tabs open, each with a very-similar-but-not-quite-perfect black silk slip dress? Are these all just whimsies and distractions that detract from the very serious work of writing, undermining the integrity of the writer? What must I do, what must I be, to prove that I am an intellectual, and a proper writer? And am I the only person in the world thinking about myself in such parameters?

How fucking stupid. ‘Should’ is so unhelpful. I wonder if male writers think in these terms. I’m sure they’ll let me know.

Although I didn’t realise it at the time, when I wrote Bitter Sweet, I effectively conjured two new writers into being: my character in the novel, Richard Aveling, but also Hattie Williams. My view of myself changed, and the way the world viewed me changed. I became a writer and in doing so I started to become some of these ideas of a writer. A little imitation, and, honestly, some affectation: I had portraits taken wearing a black polo neck and thick tortoiseshell glasses. I bought a beret, for goodness sake.

There is an element of freedom that comes with this job, when it’s going well. I am the only person that notices if I show up for work. I am the only person that I let down when I do not. That’s powerful. It’s hard to romanticise discipline. But discipline is what most of being a writer is. I can hold onto the decedent image of Joan pouring a scotch, because that’s much more interesting than thinking about her hunched at her desk, hungover, at 7 a.m. on a rainy winter Tuesday, pushing towards a closing deadline.

Our imaginations are so compelling. The idea of a person is all we ever have of them. Truly knowing someone is such a rare occurrence that it happens maybe once in our lifetimes, and that’s only if we are really lucky: The only person we ever have the opportunity to truly know is ourself. Ourself, and those people that we invent. Writing is, for me, the very best way to understand myself, and the world. It is a compulsion, now. And maybe that drive, that motor, that compass, that thing that looks like but does not feel like discipline, that is what is inside of every single ‘proper writer’. Beyond that, you can be whoever you want to be.

You can pre-order a signed and personally dedicated copy of Bitter Sweet in paperback from Colombia Road Books HERE, or a regular copy from Waterstones or Amazon in the UK. American readers can pre-order HERE.

Light Years is now available for pre-order in the UK HERE.

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS

• Two great books by two wonderful women: Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall and Catherine by Essie Fox (the latter being a feminist retelling of Wuthering Heights!)

• Absolutely hooked on two really smart shows on Apple here in the UK: Widow’s Bay, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles - both a hard recommend from me

• Australian skincare brand Sand and Sky’s beautiful, light, Tasmanian Spring Water Intense Hydrating Mask is absolutely lovely

• I switched to these Grace and Stella under-eye masks and they are much better than the really spenny ones I was previously using

• British band Slowdive are by no means new, but they are new to me, but I am having a deep love affair with them, in particular this song and album.

I remember, when I was child, feeling like time went on forever and that I would never, ever be a grown-up or have any autonomy over my bedtime (both are overrated). I have written about this before, and I keep coming back to it, this idea of time and the importance of it. How we measure it, what it means. The value we place on old things, but not on new things, as though one has more value than another, except for when it comes to babies. Those are the most precious of things of all.

I disappeared from here for a bit partly because I did not feel like writing essays. There has been a scarcity of that essential stuff, the thing as intangible as dreams: time. Essays take a lot of it. I have been busy working hard on many different projects, some of which I can talk about and some of which I can’t. I have been putting the finishing touches on my second novel, Light Years, which comes out in April 2027. (You might remember from the previous three-thousand times that I have mentioned this book, that it was to be titled Beginning. Middle. End. For reasons I will explain another day, that is no longer what it is called.)

Light Years is very much about time. It explores how we measure a life, and how we measure love. I’m excited about it, this big epic messy love story which I have written for you. I do not write entirely for myself, although that is what all the advice instructs. I write to connect with people, to express some part of myself that I can’t communicate interpersonally. In many ways, I am very emotionally stunted. When writing fiction, I feel free of all of it.

I have been slowly chipping away at my third, currently untitled book. A first iteration is not far from completion, but this is not another seven-week first draft, as the first two were. Again, time. How long something takes, fast or slow, we amaze at a novel written over ten years (speaking of which, where are you Donna Tartt?) and also at one written in under two months. I don’t know what the difference is, really.

I have been working on this third book in fits and starts for over a year, in Margate and in London, and a few other places in-between. A push through twenty-thousand words here and there, a lot of going back and unpicking (which I never usually do before a complete first draft), some timelines written in coloured markers on giant reams of easel paper when I’m really stuck, to give me purpose more than anything. I am driving myself deeper into the unknown with this one. I can definitely say that writing books seems to be getting harder, but the freedom I feel is greater with each. Hard: it’s not exactly coal mining, is it? Or nursing, or teaching, or any of the billion other jobs that are more difficult and emotionally and physically laborious than being a writer.

What a good problem to have; writing my new novel is difficult. If you’d told me that would be a concern five years ago I would have laughed at you. I wrote Light Years long before Bitter Sweet came out, as soon as I’d handed in the edit. I was terrified that it had been a fluke, some kind of isolated creative breakdown that would never be repeated, like the time I got the school record for triple-jump only to never be able to clear a metre again. When there is a lot of noise, there is a lot of expectation. Most of that noise comes from within. I probably need to try a little harder to adapt.

But back to time, and how little I have considered it lately, caught up in the minute, hour, day, week, month, but nothing much bigger. A date I have been looking at for so long is fast approaching: Bitter Sweet will be published in paperback in the UK on June 4^th (July 7^th USA). (There will be events! Please come. I’m very friendly.) It’s also, I realise with something like horror, ten months since the hardback landed and my life changed forever, albeit in ways I didn’t expect and didn’t understand in the moment.

This time last year, I felt like a fat goose sitting on a paper egg. I wanted to keep it close forever, probably because I was so scared of what people would think of it, and in turn what they would think of me. I wasn’t even sure what it was, so how could I let other people decide? That blind terror, that lump in my throat that I came to live with as one lives with the same understanding as knowing you have a big toe, is no longer there. I don’t remember when it went, or what happened to it. I do not recall a moment of beautiful cognitive clarity in which I accepted that it was a thing in the world. Maybe something like this is too intangible, like a song, like a baby, like death, like the end of love. Probably.

I suppose this paperback publication of the book, and this fancy new orange coat she wears so well, is making me reflective. I have an ugly tendency to be dismissive of the achievement of writing and publishing a book, because Bitter Sweet came easy. It all felt so very natural. But there were hundreds of minutes invested in the years leading up to publication and mine were only some of them. The writing of it, the edits and proofreads, the cover designs, the deals, the accounting, making it an actual book, translating it, printing it, pushing it into the world with publicity, Rosie Sheehy pouring her heart into the reading of the audiobook in a London studio, and then the hundreds of hours people spent reading it… the total time allocated to this thing I made up in my head must be enormous, which makes it sounds like my head is, too. But it isn’t.

What feels most interesting about it all is that Bitter Sweet is no longer mine. And I mean that in the most wonderful way. The book exists out there in the minds of readers, it is nowhere physical, not really. It is in the space between us, which is so much bigger than a small book. I don’t know if I will ever go back and read it. I very much doubt it. I want to remember it in the context of who I was when I wrote it. That person, she is unrecognisable now. Who will I be this time next year?

I am hyperaware of the fragility of everything at the moment. I had a run of time where nothing particularly terrible happened and I got a little comfortable. The smallest slipping of the rug can undo that. It’s an anxious feeling. In one of my happiest moments of recent months, watching Rosalía at The O2 in London on Tuesday with one of my dearest and oldest friends, Nora, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Caught horribly off guard, I found a torrent of tears on my shirt that had apparently leaked out of my own eyes without me even noticing. The release was wonderful. I am not a big crier. But to quote myself, because I know a few people really like this line, crying is wonderful when you get it right.

I settled into the moment, sat back in my seat – yes, we are old, we were seated - and I let myself be in the very moment in time that I was in, with the friend I was with, watching this extraordinary woman give us everything she had. It is a moment now lost forever, tears in the rain. It is so long since I have done that. I forget. I think we all forget. To come back into yourself and the moment and appreciate the strangeness of everything, and to remember time herself, is both unsettling and weirdly comforting.

After a few more songs, I looked at my phone, and I was pulled out of the collective euphoria of the arena because I had a text from my brother saying that my Dad had been taken ill. With this flip from a momentary concession of joy to deep anxiety, my sense of hope or possibility was so quickly shattered. It threw me for seven, or eight. I had only just remembered time existed, and now this, the most startling feeling of it: mortality. Maybe it is bad luck, maybe it is all chance, maybe it is my age. I don’t know. But more and more I am noticing these moments. I open my phone to find the sharp corner of something that feels familiar. Every time it happens, my heart contracts in the way it always has. Other sad and bad things had come in that previous forty-eight hours, many more in the last few weeks, things that are not my own but that I try to hold for the people that I love. Things, also, of my own. They are there and real and they remind me to never get complacent. I mean this not in some nihilistic way; but because of the very fluid nature of all things human. All understanding of time is so uniquely human. There are more moments of joy than of despair. I know this. But in the bad ones, time really slows down, doesn’t it? I guess this is why periods of depression are so fucking awful. The very passing of time seems to slow to a crawl.

To conclude; we are all transient, and sometimes the universe wants to remind you just how small and fragile everything really is, how precious the good things are, and how important it is to rebuild where things have been broken. Because time is both everything and nothing. We have no idea how much of it any of us has. It is fleeting and endless and more often than not, totally incomprehensible. My daughter Astrid Snow starts school in September. She is nearly four. It is twenty-three years since my mother died. It is nearly forty-two years since I was born and it is thirty-five years since I met my best friend, it is eighty-six years since the Second World War broke out and my father was born, it has been seven years since I got married, it has been ten months since Bitter Sweet was published, it is three weeks until the paperback appears in shops here.

All of these things feel so incomparable that it is like they should be measured in different units. How can something that feels as elemental and ancient as Astrid Snow only be four years old? How can a night when I can’t sleep, which is happening more and more because I operate in circles, feel so infinite? How can the trees be heavy and green and the magnolia blossom all be gone when just a moment a go, it felt like spring?

I do not know. Maybe to submit to the ‘not knowing’ is something we all must do. To not know, what joy. To instead, just let it all be, all of it, all at once.

You can pre-order a signed and personally dedicated copy of Bitter Sweet in paperback from Colombia Road Books HERE, or a regular copy from Waterstones or Amazon in the UK. American readers can pre-order HERE.

Light Years is now available for pre-order in the UK HERE.

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS

• Obviously I’m really fixated on Rosalía right now, so give LUX a listen, you’re very welcome

• Lena Dunham’s memoir, Famesick, with the audiobook naturally read by Lena, is heartbreaking and brilliant and also just pretty juicy? I’m listening to it and rewatching Girls and it’s a really solid combination

• Since I was last here, Rosie Sheehy, who read the audiobook of Bitter Sweet, has had her second ‘Best Actress’ Oliver Award nomination, signed to CAA, been in ‘Pillion’, and made a movie with Sydney Sweeney. Rosie is the actress of her generation and I’m proud to call her a friend. Read about her and all she has going on HERE

• Literary events are brilliant! I recommend book events and festivals whole-heartedly! Especially these ones, where I’ll be banging on about all the usual stuff.

  

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There was a sleep regression this time last year, and the year before. It has happened many times in the last three and a half years. As with every single time before, it has come as a complete shock. Sleep regressions are one of those peculiar things about having a child that you seem to forget as soon as it is over, only to be utterly astonished when it happens again. I guess this is why we keep having babies.

In Astrid’s great defence, she is, on the whole, an excellent sleeper. But when she is bad, she is very, very bad, and no memory of the child that slept even a few weeks before is of any comfort.

I have been sleep deprived before, long before I became a mother. I experience periods of chronic insomnia, the kind that lasts for months at a time, that you experience as a sort of single, fluid, endless day. This kind of insomnia can push any person to the limits of their consciousness. You forget who you are, what you are doing. A password you use twenty times a day, why you are standing in front of a fridge in a supermarket, where you are going on a bus, who you were about to call, why you can’t sleep, the very things that root us in the fucking world are so easily lost that you fear for your life because you could walk unknowingly into traffic, surely. You stop trusting yourself. You fear for your mind. Insomnia, in itself, is a kind of madness. It is certainly interlinked with madness; any mental health professional will start an appointment with asking how you are sleeping.

The very obvious (and very ‘tired person’) thing to remind you of here is that sleep deprivation is used as instrument of torture, and it is very effective as such. I would tell you absolutely anything at this point. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but this stuff is nothing short of opera.

My historical episodes of insomnia have generally (I can’t be sure, my memory lapses in sleeplessness) fallen over the summer when it’s too hot and bright to sleep and the morning comes mercifully — or aggressively, depending on how you feel that particular night — fast. A warm morning, and the promise of a day in London in the spring or summer offers something that acts as a lift, a little bump. London is so good in these early seasons that some misery can be forgiven, or at least briefly forgotten. A sleepless winter night is so much harder. But there’s everything to play for. It is the duration of the episode that determines your desperation. There have been summer nights when, so pushed to my limits, I have willed the world to stop turning just to make it night long enough for me to fall asleep forever. No amount of sunshine can make that feel better.

I remember the long winter nights when my daughter was just a baby, and how they felt so different to the summer nights of her newborn months that July and August. That first winter, it felt like the day would never come and the night would never end. I felt so completely alone in the darkness, then, as I do now. Because we are all much more alone in the dark, regardless of the company we keep. The dark refracts everything light, everything good. I know this well.

I know that this is why Astrid can’t sleep any better than I can.

The difference between chronic insomnia and a child that keeps you up is distinct, but still, you get to know the night intimately. You learn that it has a shape, as does the day. There is the evening, when I clock-watch, feeling that I should sensibly go to bed at the same time as Astrid goes down because she will soon be awake. Then comes the feeling of ridiculousness of tucking myself in at 8 p.m. only to find that I obviously can’t sleep, because it is 8 p.m. Body wired, mind alive, the owl takes over. I am and have always been more owl than lark. Everything stupid I have ever said or done lines up patiently for a replay. I practice every technique every therapist and psychiatrist has ever taught me to calm my brain but it is wild and stupid and determined and it will not listen. (Everything except to not look at my phone, obviously.)

The problem is that the day interferes with the night. Currently, in my waking (day) world, I’m trying to fix a specific type of creative problem, so I am doing what I always do in this same situation, and I’m reading a lot of poetry.

Now, in the dark, I chew everything I have read over in a loop. I imagine my teeth full of fragments of poems, things I have just read, things I remember, poems I learned by heart as a child, Michael Rosen blurring with Yeats, spiders on bicycles under night and light and half-light. The Tombola starts turning, sucking in bits of the news from the day, bits of nonsense absorbed from Instagram, lyrics and chord progressions I have heard while working or running, the soft, sluggish grey of my hippocampus now active and processing. The house sighs and groans, and I listen for those little feet, that little chipmunk of a voice calling for me, mama. I hear nothing, so I listen harder to her silence. If she is on schedule, I have two hours until the first wake-up. I sit up and stretch, relax my jaw, think about doing some yin on the middle of the bed, decide against it, lie back down, roll over. I try very hard to settle in the dark and tell myself it is nothing, that I should sleep before the next wake-up. I pretend I am asleep, something we all do every single night. But it’s hopeless.

Maybe an hour later, maybe a few minutes, I’m close, but then out of nothing but neurons and electricity, a thought. Is it an original thought? I’m too tired to tell. I won’t know until the morning. I’ll remember it. Back to trying to sleep. Oh, but it might be really good — this could be the key I am looking for in the dark! And if I can find the key, maybe I can sleep! I’ll remember it if it’s good. I roll over. But it’s hopeless. I wake the poison blue light of my phone, click to my Notes app and write it down next to a thousand other mediocre nighttime ideas, nestled amongst shopping lists and article links and book and music and show recommendations from a multitude of nights out. I spot a text draft I didn’t send six months ago and I’m so, so glad to that other me for not sending it that I could cry. I open the archived WhatsApp message chain and do what I should have done long ago, and delete it forever.

I regret it immediately. But I remember, that’s the exact point.

I start thinking about it, trying to remember what the messages I have just deleted said and how I felt back then, all those months ago, when I was sleeping and behaving like a normal human being.

Around midnight, as I fall asleep, she wakes.

We deal with it. It is awful. She is very sad. I sit on her bedroom floor until she goes back to sleep. The house settles. The middle floorboard on the landing creaks and I grimace, but it doesn’t wake her.

Here we are in the next part of the night, the bit where the pubs are closed and the Tube has stopped running and people all over the city are fast asleep. I am wide awake. I am lying in the dark with the hormone levels of a woman in red being rushed at by a bull in front of six-thousand cheering people. I fake sleep again, I relax my body limb by limb. But this reminds me of the claustrophobia I felt in an MRI machine recently, and with that thought I am again wide away. I sit up and take a pill, knowing it will weigh heavy on me tomorrow, then I go back to my own private showing of Everything Stupid I Have Ever Said and Done. At some point, I must fall asleep, because my phone says it is 3 a.m. and Astrid is hysterical. I hold her tight.

We deal with it. It is awful. She is very sad. Again, I sit on her bedroom floor until she goes back to sleep. The house settles again and again the middle floorboard creaks under my weight but again it doesn’t wake her.

At this point the night seems lost. It is around now that I start chatting with my fellow owls, all of us awake and feeling completely mad. We talk about the intimacy of the hour, that we feel like the only people on earth. They offer helpful advice on sleep training, we talk about what it means to be awake, what it will mean for our day.

As my dopamine drops and my cortisol level starts to rise, which happens to most of us somewhere around 4 a.m., I have to fight to remember that it is chemicals making everything feel so impossible. I am a collection of moderately clever meat and bones and hormones, I tell myself, subject to change and transformation. Some transformation will come with the daylight in a few long hours. By this point I am awake because I am so on edge that I can’t sleep and the morning feels too close. I imagine if it were a night shift, I would have my last cup of tea of the day. I think about going to make tea, but I’m sure that she could be up again at any moment, and what if I wake her with that fucking middle floorboard? Can I fix a creaky floorboard? Would WD40 work on a floorboard? What’s the point? In sleeping, in any of it? I am dying. The world is ending. I am a terrible mother. I will never write anything good ever again.

Around 5 a.m., the birds start their chaotic, erratic chorus. The hum of the traffic on the north circular picks-up. There is so, so much work to be done. I am so tired, and I am so behind because I am so tired. This tiredness will never, ever end.

Then, somehow, the light in my bedroom is a little more blue, a little less black, a little less of a tomb. It is a winter dawn and there is a song coming from the bedroom next door. That little helium-high voice is singing the lullaby that I wrote for her when she was a baby, and I am filled with endless, iridescent love. She sings it only to herself. A few minutes pass and then the pad of those perfect feet, the rattle of the bedroom door.’s porcelain handle and creak of the cursed floorboard. Then her face, next to mine. She is so proud of herself because her Grow Clock is yellow, which means it is time to wake-up, and she is allowed to be up.

She has absolutely no memory of the difficult night, of the multiple wake-ups, the tears. She just wants banana porridge and to watch Octonauts.

And so we slip into the day, somehow. We deal with it. She is very happy. The house comes alive again. I forget about the floorboard. Sometime later, unable to write on such reserves, I go back to sleep. I am free to do this, to settle in my lovely bed in my lovely home and nap. I am so very lucky.

Christmas is here. The nights are going to be far from silent. She will hear bells, she will hear monsters, she will fear the dark, she will not want to be alone. And neither will I. We will get through it.

My debut novel Bitter Sweet is out now, all over the world, in many languages other than English. You can find out more about it HERE.

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS

Louise Kennedy’s novel Trespasses is amongst my favourite of the last few years and I really loved the Channel 4, four-part adaptation. It made me cry less than the book, but still, it made me cry.

ROSALÍA’s album Lux has been on repeat for weeks, now. I mean, who hasn’t been listening to it on repeat? It’s beautiful and puts my mind in a strange place which has been helpful, of late.

Anna von Hausswolff’s new album Iconoclasts is dramatic and brilliant. Have loved her music for a long time and this new record is brilliant.

I recorded a few (short!) episodes of the podcast Box of Delights, talking about some of my most formative TV memories with Julia Raeside. You can listen to those HERE.

These Christmas weeks will inevitably feel long as we will try to come back together in the darkness, to find a new way of being, to entertain and feed a three year old. It won’t be long before I am restless to get back to my routine and to writing because I am shamefully workaholic. That this break is enforced is important because we all have to stop sometimes. With astonishing speed I will forget what day of the week it is, like the whole cadence of sevens which defines the structure of our short lives can just be abandoned. I am determined to be in the moment this year. So I am doing my looking back now.

The years seem to move faster the older I get. Hardly an original observation, but how accurate. The days are long, the years are short. Another cliche, and another little ‘ism’ that is so very true. I wish I could move through time as I can move through space, like Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians who knew all time existed simultaneously, and as a result, understood that free-will was an illusion. What a wonderful way to abdicate all responsibility.

I wrote last week about coming out of a period of low mood. I’m still on the up, overall, but this is a challenging moment. So, so many of us find Christmas hard. I feel a longing for the past this year that I have never felt with such intensity. It’s like homesickness, but the home, the caretakers of my childhood, the very things that made anything feel like home when I was not fully grown, they no longer exist. It reminds me of my mum and of the Christmases at, and then after, the end of her life. It reminds me of the Christmases when she was well enough, but the house was filled with tension and arguments. My little brother and I would have to fight so hard to be allowed a tree. Every year, my dad refused to get one, only relenting on Christmas Eve when the last saddest trees were either free or massively discounted. He didn’t like decorations, or the festive season in general, and this dictated the mood in the house.

There were years when I was a bit older that we would have another family come to ours on Christmas night, and we would play games and sneak drinks and that would be wonderful. The intimacy of sharing this day felt so comforting to me, this other, happier family gave us some of their joy and pulled us out of what felt like isolation.

After Mum died in 2003, none of us wanted anything to do with Christmas, yet it still insisted on happening. There were long years of fraught Christmases, me trying so hard to hold onto my family at the time we were least able to be together, when we were all in the most exquisite pain. But I had nowhere else to go. These were bad years. We made them better, in later years, by inviting lots of family friends over in the morning for drinks and this was always a very happy part of the day, but the peace would never last.

When Covid happened, and I couldn’t go home even if I wanted to, the tradition of spending Christmas with the family I had grown-up in ended. I believe it was a relief for all of us. I now spend it at home in London, with the family I built myself from the scraps I had. I have been able to make Christmas what I want it to be, what I want it to be for little Astrid.

I remember good things from Christmases past, too. I remember watching Shrek with my little brother, being allowed a Baileys. I remember my dad playfully cheating at board games one year, and watching The Snowman with my mum. I vividly recall the plastic tray of the Cadbury’s selection boxes gifted by my aunt, eating a Crunchie bar before breakfast, the sticky honeycomb stuck in my teeth. My brother’s absolutely wild excitement that meant he was up at 3am on Christmas Day without fail. I remember being with my brother and my dad on a Christmas Eve long after Mum had died, taking the jar of loose change that had accumulated throughout the year to the Sainsbury’s change machine, us each guessing at how much it would amount to and the winner taking a £5 while the rest was spent on Christmas food.

But the rest has been lost to the annals of time, much like Rutger Hauer’s tears in the rain, in his devastating monologue at the end of Ridley Scott’s masterful exploration of memory, Bladerunner. I know there were many precious days and hours and moments where I am sure there was more joy than I remember, but they are gone forever. All time doesn’t exist simultaneously. Or if it does, that is not how we experience it in this iteration. That feels more like the idea of Heaven to a Heathen like me.

It might be the extreme stress of the time of year, but something wonderful happened to me last week that served as a comforting reminder that time travel is possible. I was walking through Stoke Newington, a part of east London that I called home for a number of years in my twenties and wrote about in Bitter Sweet. It was a very normal weekday, the shops spilling with plastic decorations and pine bouquets and tinsel and trees, strings of coloured lights flashing in the gloom. I felt a surprising, sudden and powerful urge to listen to a song called Xanax by Maria Taylor. This is a song that I listened to endlessly during this Stoke Newington era in my life, and as I hit play, I was transported back to a long-ago winter when I was twenty-seven, to the love I felt at that moment. The street was indistinguishable, even all these years later, as was the weather. It was like nothing had changed from that moment in my life to now and I dissociated briefly, feeling like I had been thrown backwards. What I had forgotten, evidently, had not been lost because I was back in it. And it was strange and scary and utterly beautiful.

I feel something similar when I hold the locket containing pictures of my maternal grandparents, Kitty and Di Williams, who I never met. Running my thumb over the engraving on the front I feel five years old again, looking up at my Mum, the smell of her jewellery box, longing for this treasure to be mine, not realising she would have to die for that to truly happen. Fabric, like time, has the same power; my mother’s scarf, a red skirt of her’s, a dress that I kept. Her perfume, now discontinued, I keep for moments when I need her most. Memory, and these physical and sensory prompts, they allow us to travel through time.

If only we could undo mistakes, change our behaviour, see the bad decisions in a way that we could change them. But that is impossible. And anyway, I wouldn’t want to, because just the tiniest change could mean that I didn’t get my daughter.

I was always clear, even when I was a teenager, that I would make Christmas what I wanted it to be for my own future children. I parent in some ways that I was parented, and in other ways that go against everything I was taught. I get a huge, real Christmas tree and I get it in the first week of December from the same place every year and we decorate it together. We spend money to meet Santa. We watch The Muppets Christmas Carol. I hand-sewed Astrid a stocking using Liberty fabric and gave it to her for her first Christmas. (I am not the type of person who does things like this.) I try to make it magical and joyous to do that I have to flick that switch I mentioned last week because it is a hard time of year and I have to give all of myself to the pageantry to get through it. I think not of what I have, but what is gone, what is lost. The people, mainly, the huge family I used to have on my dad’s side who are all long dead. All of my aunts and uncles and grandparents and great aunts and uncles and one of my cousins are gone, as are many of the family friends who were always so close I felt like they shared my blood.

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On Monday, I went to the Pancreatic Cancer UK Christmas carol service at St George’s Church in Mayfair. I went with my beloved friend Jo, and another friend, Richard, read from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. During the service the names of those loved and lost to pancreatic cancer were read out, a candle lit for each. It was incredibly moving but ultimately so unifying to be together in silence, in church, at Christmas, with everyone around me considering their grief. I didn’t lose my mum to cancer but I felt so comforted and so soft and tears, unexpectedly, came easy, reminding me just how close to the surface I am living.

I am so grateful. I don’t want that to be misunderstood. I think of Sudan and Gaza and the rain and the cold and the bombs and the starvation and the lack of warmth and shelter and all of the things that the parents surviving there want to give their own children, when really they can only hope to keep them alive. I think we are all exhausted by another year of watching children burned alive, watching in horror as racists try to drive refugees out of hotels, as oil and gas continue to subsume everything good our planet can offer, The Labour Party does nothing, Trump gets away with it again, as we struggle with money and rising prices and the rising right and the diminishment of empathy. We work too hard, we seek fulfilment in the wrong places. The cognitive dissonance feels impossibly harmonious when we long for quick fixes, short sharp hits. We want, we long, and we don’t know what to do about any of it. So we buy more stuff.

Holding a knitted tree decoration I had as a child I am thrown back again. I am reminded of myself at Astrid’s age. Oh my sweet child, my lovely little girl Astrid. Made from an egg that I already I had inside of me when I was inside of my mother, Astrid who now in turn carries the seeds of my grandchildren (should that be her choice) in her own body, her life stretching ahead further than mine, mine back further that her’s. Astrid’s elbows, so reminiscent of the elbows I remember having, the elbows that now look like my mother’s. Astrid’s elbows that pushed against the membrane dividing her from me and the darkness of my womb and the bright, light, dangerous outside world as I painstakingly grew her.

I ask Astrid to carry me ahead with her after I am gone, as I carry my own mother. I ask that she makes Christmas her own, one day, and finds what I have been unable to give her. Saskia said to me that motherhood is a web, and a chain. She is right. It stretches through time and beyond the living and the dying. Through memory, through those we love, we are carried through time. One Christmas will be our last. Yet we can time travel. See?

It is time to slow down now. I hope that you can find some peace and some quiet and the kind of Christmas we see in the John Lewis ads. Vast families laughing and eating around a table, walking along cliff paths and doing the washing up. I would be happy with the kind of Christmas I have been sold. It looks lovely. Even if it’s a fantasy, even if there is no grounding or reality, I’ll take it over a Christmas that feels like an ending.

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One of the best ways you can support me in by buying a copy of my debut novel Bitter Sweet for yourself, or as a gift for someone you love this year. Bitter Sweet is out now worldwide and you can find out more about it HERE.

Not writing here for a month feels like a failure. Not producing what I consider to be good work for what is now well over a month feels like a failure. So much of my life right now feels like an abject fucking failure because I put the most outrageous expectations on myself, always pushing that boulder. My self-worth is entirely wrapped up in my work.

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It’s disappointing to accept that I’m just another cog in the big, capitalist machine. I always thought I would rail against such an existence, yet here I am, spending too much money on trainers made by impoverished children in the developing world, all in the hope that they will make me happy for five minutes. Capitalism is the reason we define ourselves on our output, on our ability to move through the world being happy and healthy and pretty and clever and consistent and ‘normal’. Image, self-improvement, wellness, there’s something we can work hard to buy that will solve all of our problems and ensure we are the dedicated little bees the hive requires.

It’s such bullshit though, isn’t it? The work is not the most important thing. Yet it always takes priority and has the greatest hold over our lives. I find it so hard to separate self-worth from productivity. But I do not attach any self-worth to pleasure, relaxation, hedonism, travel, the erotic. Pleasure is only a reward, a luxury allowed after enough hard work. Even then, pleasure comes with guilt.

Desperate to maintain a productive, functional, easy exterior as if it will somehow transform my interior has meant that I have been happily avoidant. As a result, quite suddenly the writing became hard, to the point of impossibility. Commerce, capitalism, these are the great enemies of creativity. I have been actively evading the page and the blinking, bastard curser, moving words around, making lists, cleaning the skirting boards, anything to give me purpose beyond doing the actual work that I love so much.

I hit a wall and I realised that it was time to turn things around and the only person that could do that was me. So here I am, after a lot of self-reflection and chats with myself in the mirror. Me writing here, sticking my neck out a bit, is me feeling better and coming back into the world, albeit wearing a metaphorical crash helmet.

I essentially ran away from my responsibilities, from my writing, from the uncertainty of my life. I feel increasingly that I have three lives; one at home as a mother, partner, dedicated writer. One outside of that when I am without my child and with my old friends; I recognise her. She is the pre-motherhood, pre-Covid, pre-novelist Hattie.

And then there is this other, new me that is emerging as a result of being changed by becoming a parent and a writer, and the mysterious peace and equal chaos that has come with entering my forties. She feels like she is just beginning. She lives in her imagination and she feels so free, or thinks she does. She is screaming for freedom without knowing what freedom looks like. And it is intoxicating, and it is confusing, and it can be extremely challenging. I’m not entirely sure that I like her. Yet here she is.

I guess most people feel divided like this at some point. As a mothers, that can feel like being split between the home and the children, whatever other intimate relationships need maintaining, and then everything else; work, friendships, play, caring for aging parents, exercise, the commute, admin.

Separate from this, it has always felt to me like I have an old life, and a current life, and a life in the future. Like Dickens’ ghosts, they all want to tell me something and I am waiting for the night to come so that I can hear them, because I am desperate to hear them. (I hope they sing Marley and Marley when they do arrive.) The me that exists in these three dimensions is refracted again through the many me’s that exist simultaneously.

To speak directly to this dividing of self in relation to domestic life and or parenting, I wonder, do you feel like there is a psychic switch you have to hit when you turn the key in the front door, when you reach the school gate in the evening, when you hear those little feet padding across the hallway at 6 a.m? Like you can flick it again when you hear their Paw Patrol toothpaste-breath settle in the glow of their nightlight, when the questions about what everything eats and why the moon is the moon and what happened to the rest of the donut they half-ate six months ago stop, when they are finally asleep? When you then, twenty minutes later, miss them, and you want to go for the switch again?

It is not an on-off switch. All states are equally as powerful, and equally as different. There might be two, three, four or five settings for the different versions of yourself required.

I did not expect life to feel like this. I find a lot of parenting very hard in a way that I feel most other mums maybe don’t, like I am missing something instinctive. I can’t sit and play with Lego for hours on the floor. It takes everything I have to play cafe or doctor or house for more than ten minutes. I struggle badly with anxiety when my daughter is ill; she had her first tummy bug last week when I was solo parenting and I had the flu, and combined with a whole other bunch of stuff going on, honestly I couldn’t cope.

I felt like a terrible mother. I know that I am good at the emotional part of being a mum, and I love activities and days out and taking her to the theatre and reading with her and teaching her about nature and animals and feeding her and clothing her and getting her vaccinations and giving her bountiful affection and cuddles and unconditional love but still, I often feel very stuck, and like I am not a good parent. Like there is something missing. What is hardest is I don’t know how to be better because I can’t change so much of what is inside of me that needs to change for me to become the ideal of a mother I hold in my mind. I feel emotionally bound in ropes and chains about so much and I want, so much, to be different.

When I first expressed concerns about my limitations as a mum to my wonderful therapist some years ago, she introduced me to the ‘good enough’ parenting theory created by Donald Winnicott in the early 1970’s. This is the idea that perfection is not only unnecessary, but also actually quite harmful, and that a parent’s realistic, less-than-perfect care is truly beneficial for a child’s healthy development. I have found this helpful, as I have found it helpful to confide in fellow mothers when I feel that I am falling short, which is almost always. Seems a lot of us feel this way because I am yet to find a mum who says, ‘oh, not me. I’m a brilliant mum.’ A lot of us find much of parenting very different to what we were sold through TV and advertising and Instagram. Yet to me, everyone seems to be doing it better than I am.

‘Good enough’. I wasn’t brought up to believe that ‘good enough’ was anything more than failure. I was raised to aim for exceptional at all costs, to work harder than everyone else, to strive for perfection and excellence.

It came from a good place. But you know what? I am forty-one and I am fucking exhausted. I have been living my life like this for so long, and every time I fall short, I feel completely miserable because I feel like I am letting myself down, that I am useless, that I am a failure, and that there is nothing worse than failure. This level of self-criticism is boring and tiring and I don’t want to spend any more of my numbered days feeling this way.

Failure isn’t always bad. Failure is how we learn. It is what AI can’t do. It is what makes people better than AI. I love my friends for their failures because it has usually come from trying. When it hasn’t, I love them for being human.

When I worked in publishing I believed that I should always work harder and longer and quicker than everyone else. Some of this came from the massive chip I had on my shoulder over my lack of higher education, but this belief led me to think that this is what I should expect from other people. For a long time I was successful in my career, until I failed, spectacularly. Without this failure I would not have become a writer. As I have written before, I spent a long time after I left publishing essentially in hiding from the world, because without my job title and big career I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t feel like I had a place in the world. I didn’t feel that I was worth anything at all because I was no longer achieving anything special.

So then I did something ‘exceptional’ and I wrote a novel, and then a few months later I wrote another novel, and then I wrote a couple of feature films and a short story and many articles and essays and TV pilots and some other stuff.

(Please forgive me for calling my own achievement exceptional, but whilst writing novels feels both extremely difficult and extremely normal to me, it is viewed as such externally. And I am specifically talking about the battle between internal and external.)

Did writing make me feel exceptional? Nope! Did other people seeing my achievements as being exceptional feel good? Yep! I had an identity again. I was a high-achiever, clever, creative, an outlier.

People’s follow-up questions when you have written a novel go like this:

‘But you’re self-published? Oh, you are really published, like, properly?! Wow!’

‘But it’s not your main job? Oh, you’re a full-time writer?! Wow!’

It’s both annoying and validating. I hate the expectation that I’m a hobbiest, and I hate the shock that I’m vaguely successful. It’s almost like I can’t be fucking happy.

‘Good enough’. We just have to be ‘good enough.’

This is what I tell myself, it is my mantra, it is my secular prayer. It is what I am telling you. Sometimes I can even convince myself of it. Until the moment that I am less than ‘good enough’, the moment when I fail to take care of those I love the most, when my consideration of other people fails, when I let down a friend or embarrass myself. Then the emotional impact of my less-than-even-good-enough becomes failure and that floors me. The shame, the awful shame I feel, reduces me to a little more than a shell of the Hattie Williams you may or may not know, either in-person or online. I am unable to write, to mother, to love, to socialise.

I am trying to unlearn my attitudes. But the neurological pathways are Roman roads in my mind, carved out before even memory. No cognitive reasoning, no damage limitation attempts, no self-medicating or actual medicating can help. I must just continue to try to rewire, to rewrite the pathways. To be human is to want, and to want is to desire things we can’t have, which is to say we inevitably fail, and along the way make a hell of a lot of mistakes. Some damage can be repaired. Some can’t.

So how do I balance these Manichean ideals to become happier, and less consumed by self-criticism? That’s a big question! Be exceptional, but writing for one hour is ‘good enough’. Be exceptional, but three out of five days is ‘good enough’. Be exceptional as much as you can, and if it isn’t all the time, that’s ‘good enough’. Biggest of all, when you are only ‘good enough’, that’s OK. And when you are less than ‘good enough’, try not to be exceptional, but just… yeah. You got it. Try to be ‘good enough’.

These are some things that have helped me get back to a place where I am writing again.

The big one was admitting I was not in a good place. Telling a friend I couldn’t get out of bed, and them leaving me incessant ‘nee-naw’ voice notes until I got up and put Fight Test by The Flaming Lips on very, very loud. Pouring it all out via text to my best friends, writing freely and messily knowing they would love me regardless. Apologising when I have messed up, and knowing when to give space. Asking for practical help when I have needed it. Saying thank you and being vulnerable when I have accepted that help, when people have selflessly gone out of their way to give it to me. The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique got me out of a horribly ill-timed episode of dissociation: bookmark it, friends. The reminder that the kind of work I do is not the kind of work that will happen every day because I am the mercy of my creative energy levels. Ugly crying on my friend’s shoulder in the pub. Allowing myself a day off, watching Sorry, Baby at 11am with a cup of tea instead of writing because my mind was too chaotic and anxious to work. Reading a fucking book. Listening to another fucking book. Watching Gabor Maté videos. Watching a load of old movies. Staying in bed. Eating vegetables and drinking water. Relaxing my jaw and dropping my shoulders. (Do this one now.)

And writing this. Coming back to the page and to you, who I hope understands, and I hope feels a little less alone for it. Everything I write, exceptional or ‘good enough’, must have a purpose, and that purpose is to connect us a little better. None of us are truly exceptional, or bad, or good, or ‘good enough’. We are all of these things. And we are unfinished.

BIG FEELING RECOMMENDS:

• My beautiful friend ’s Bad Patient Substack is one of the best you will find. Go subscribe, read, and thank me later

• Eva Victor’s movie Sorry, Baby is actually perfect

• I have been listening to Sophie K Rosa’s book Radical Intimacy and it is changing my entire worldview, and making me feel empowered to build a better life and a better world

• Bloopers give a nice quick hit of serotonin and I love them in a very basic way. This Instagram account is dedicated to them and it cheers me up a lot

• Violette France’s bisou balm in Sucette makes me feel about 25% better every time I layer it on because life is terrible and lipstick is truly magic.

  

Twenty-three essays later, here I am! I’ve written about everything from my strange experience of LA to my longest ever love affair, and many things between. I’m less nervous now when I press that little ‘schedule’ button, but still, I’m nervous. I mostly feel that I am being very embarrassing and millennial by being so open and candid on what was pointed out to me recently to effectively be a fucking BLOG. How very. . . Myspace.

Since you asked (or didn’t) the name ‘Big Feelings’ came about because I feel big feelings and that is now the theme of all I write here. Imaginative, I know, but I experience enormous, titanic emotions that make a lot of my life more difficult than it needs to be. I love hard, I love deeply. I throw myself into things and I want a huge life, which means there is inevitably mess along the way. As Sylvia Plath, the Patron Saint of Sad Girls once said, ‘I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.’ She did of course famously and tragically die with her head in an oven, but I think the quote still holds up, as does all of her writing.

Like Sylvia I long to experience chaos as much as quiet and stability. That said, I do feel less overwhelmed by my feelings than I used to. You couldn’t pay me to be twenty-five again (that said, I’d take back the ability to drink more than one glass of red wine without feeling like I’m going to die).

Totally at odds with the dynamic of the job, writers who are good at putting themselves out there, at self-promoting on social media and willing to talk in detail about their personal shit for magazines and newspapers and even on Substack, do seem to fare better than those that don’t. Social media makes me anxious. Like most moderately-sane people, at least five times a day I think about putting my phone in the bin, deleting all of my social accounts and moving to a log cabin the rural Pacific Northwest where there is no Wifi, maybe just a whistling Justin Vernon chopping logs for me. I think it all comes down to the fact that I hate putting my big, old face on the internet any more than I have to, despite what you may think from my late night, two-spicy-margs Instagram story selfies. But here on Substack, I was delighted to find I can write honestly and openly without exposing said big, old face.

Hilariously, when I got my book deal I decided that I wouldn’t talk about my personal life publicly at all. I will be like Sally Rooney, I announced to myself, high as a kite on the validation that getting published had brought. I will deflect! I will focus just on the books, on the writing, on the themes of my work!

I was sure that my writing was enough, that it said everything I wanted to say. How naive of me. Evidently, and much to my own disappointment, I am not Sally Rooney. I have needed to talk about elements of my personal life, my mental health and my ‘trauma’, all to secure media coverage for the book. It was a decision I came to completely on my own when I realised just how tough the market was, and how much I wanted the book to succeed. I have heard stories of agents and publishers putting pressure on writers, but I have never experienced this. My lovely team has always let me lead on this stuff.

The letting-up started slowly. I just started to open myself more and more, much like you do at the beginning of a relationship; I gave little pieces of myself away until I found I felt safe telling the world about some of the stickier, more sensitive parts of my life that I carried some shame about. Now it just feels normal to talk about grief and depression and therapy. That’s a really positive and unexpected thing to come out of it.

I have always tried to be truthful and authentic in my writing, in my conversations with readers, in interviews, at events. I want to have meaningful interactions in all areas of my life. If people are kind enough to want to talk or listen to me then I want to be respectful of that. Reading a book is a massive commitment of empathy as well as money and time and I write very emotional books about big things like grief and sexual assault and abuse and mental illness, things that affect many people in profound and deeply personal ways. Balancing my desire for authenticity and connection with my need to keep some things private has been a real lesson. How much should we give away? How do we separate privacy from untruth? And biggest of all, how do I stop talking once I have started?!

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In October 2021, on an astonishingly remote Icelandic beach just kissing the edge of the Artic Circle, I saw the carcass of an adult pilot whale. It was the start of winter, and unbeknownst to me, I was pregnant, which seems important now when I think back on it. The very dead whale was smiling and bloated, and had been fed on by artic foxes. I looked at it, and I felt both deeply sad and grossly fascinated. The visual metaphor was perfect. That dead whale was obviously me, and honestly that’s kind of how I feel now about writing.

(Last week, on my run along an east London canal, I saw a houseboat that was sinking into the water. A hoist had been built around it to try and support it, and still, it was sinking. But not completely! Again, I felt; yep. That’s me! That’s my life! Sometimes I wish the universe would be a little more subtle.)

But back to this question of truth. Despite what people think, Bitter Sweet is not a memoir. Writing fiction is an exercise in imagination. Characters may share our experiences and personality traits but this insistence on our stories being our actual lives, our characters being us, is sapping the magic and the mystery from fiction. It is also putting pressure on writers to keep well within their own experience, which is absolutely not what writing fiction is about. I wonder how many people have stories to tell, brilliant books in them that they don’t put into the world for fear of personal exposure, and pressure to put themselves on the internet.

(If that is you, I can reassure you that you don’t need to. It is not essential. Certainly don’t let it stop you.)

Non-fiction is different, especially memoir, which has a whole other purpose than fiction for both the reader and the writer. (Writing only exists in the space between us, after all.) With non-fiction and memoir, we go into the work knowing that we want people to see us very clearly. Well, unless we are Raynor Winn.

I put in, and get a lot out of, writing the pieces I share here each week. This leaning into the confessional has happened very naturally. Because there is no fiction to hide behind, it is deliciously cathartic, and the satisfaction I get from writing something on a Monday and putting into the world on a Tuesday is very much in contrast to the two year wait between writing a novel and publication.

Like you, I also long for truth in art. I, too, click the headlines that take me to articles that uncover the writer/actor/director’s personal trauma. This is maybe even more true for music. Along with (probably) every woman in the UK I have this weekend submerged myself in Lily Allen’s masterpiece of a new album ‘West End Girl’ and listened to it more times than is healthy. If you have been living under a rock, I’ll fill you in; it is a deeply confessional album about her marriage breakdown and subsequent divorce. To hear something so raw and real, not hidden in metaphor, has blown our collective minds, hasn’t it. But not to dwell because Sophie Heawood says everything about it that can be said much better than I can.

Maybe part of our fascination in the private lives of creators and artists is voyeuristic. Sure. But I believe that it is also because we all long so much for truth, to see parallels in our own lives. So much of what we consume (especially in celebrity culture) is fake and polished and airbrushed to within an inch of the fantastic, so it’s very hard to distinguish authenticity of any kind.

We keep the most interesting, painful stuff private. We construct personas for both ourselves and the world. Be it work, social media, dating, our parents, we all have multitudes within us that we sculpt into versions of ourselves tailored to what we need to be in any given moment. As a result, we have no idea what is real. Full disclosure; I have had filler and skin boosters injected into my face, I have had a boob job. I struggle massively with food, so if I ever look like I’ve lost weight, it is only because I am sad and starving and using exercise to cope. I am a workaholic driven almost entirely by fear of failure. I’m not always the most present mother, and I’m a less-than-perfect partner. Does it help to hear that, which is so at odds with what I put on my fucking Instagram? Maybe not, but it helps me to tell you the truth. Lily Allen has taught me a thing or two over the last few days. To bear witness to her being so open and vulnerable is nothing short of beautiful. To hear the honest account of the direct and collateral damage caused by an open relationship seems so urgent, her pain and humiliation so relatable. There is so much talk about ethical non-monogamy being progressive and forward thinking but why are we not paying attention to the people that get caught up in other couple’s shit? Sex is complicated. I don’t think that is less true just because we don’t want it to be.

What Lily has given us is non-fiction. It is a personal essay, it is the truth (as far as I can tell) and it feels truly authentic. It is heartbreak and devastation and addiction and divorce and betrayal. It is funny, too, and self-aware. It is everything we long for. Of course she comes from a very privileged position, but then so do I. There is much we can learn from her, and how people ultimately respond when you give them the truth. Which is that they will not laugh awkwardly, or look nervously at the ceiling. They will instead stare straight into it, even if it is blinding, and they will reach out towards to you and offer you a massive, fuck-off big hug. And that is really comforting to know.

Thanks Lily x

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS:

Keeping on theme this week! Some of my favourite confessional albums:

• Lily Allen’s ‘West End Girl’, obviously

• Self-Esteem’s ‘A Complicated Woman’

• CMAT’s ‘EURO-COUNTRY’

• Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’

• Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood on The Tracks’

• Elliott Smith’s ‘From a Basement on the Hill’

My favourite Substacks for beautiful, truthful writing from women I admire:

• ’s The Crow’s Nest

• ’s I Dare Say

• ’s The Way Life Feels

• ’s Changes

• ’s Love Story

• The Year of Undoing

The very best way you can support me is by buying a copy of my debut novel, Bitter Sweet. Hardback, ebook, audiobook, whatever your preference, it all really helps. The other thing you can do is share my posts here and subscribe, which are both free. Thanks so much!

Buy Bitter Sweet

Sometimes it offers creative breakthroughs, bad ideas, and, even worse: ideas that I think were completely brilliant, but for the life of me I can’t remember when I fully wake.

Sometimes, just sometimes, this ‘in-between’ carries me to a weird, liminal plane in which I am horribly and powerfully aware of my own consciousness, and with it, my own mortality.

Please tell me if you have felt this!

I tried to find prose for this exact feeling, having experienced it briefly on Saturday. I was away for a literature festival, and I was staying in a really lovely hotel. With hours free before I was needed anywhere, I gifted my moderately hungover (and totally sleep-deprived) self a mid-morning nap.

Somewhere in that in-between, sort-of-sleep, I experienced this strange, heightened state. I was somewhere else, and I was briefly unstuck. I woke up from it with the force of an elastic band stretching and snapping. I felt extremely anxious and confused. Honestly, I was terrified. My body felt unfamiliar, and reality felt thin. This has happened to me before, but I have never felt it this intensely.

Because I can’t really explain what it felt like, I won’t try. Instead, I will talk about the day of intermittent Googling that followed. I tried so hard to word it, asking the internet if there was a name or an explanation for what I had felt, where I felt my mind had gone. But I couldn’t find the words to even ask the question, and so the answers given were all totally off.

It wasn’t disassociation or depersonalisation. It was actually the opposite. The internet was no use.

Something similar to my ‘in-between’ has been explored in literature and film and TV countless times, usually in science-fiction. Often it is an imagined world between life and death, a sort of purgatory, but that isn’t what I’m getting at. What I mean is something less black and white, less spiritual and theological. Some examples of this; the ‘in-between’ in Stranger Things, a literal, physical place. Maybe most obvious is Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge. I also love the strange world of the telepathic mutant David Haller in Noah Hawley’s masterful, weird series Legion. (Watch that, if you haven’t. It asks so many questions about mental health and psychosis and it is also just really fun.)

In literature, where there are for the most part no pictures except the ones you imagine yourself, there is more room for nuance. So much of Murakami’s writing exists in this space, especially in Kafka on The Shore. Iain Banks’ The Bridge, in which the Forth Road Bridge becomes a whole universe, which is itself an echo of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, a total head-fuck of a novel.

Then there’s maybe my favourite, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5, in which Billy Pilgrim gets unstuck in time. ‘His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn’t anybody else there, or anything. There was just violet light — and a hum.’ This passage always stayed with me. It comes the closest to articulating what I am failing to describe. Like Billy, I was (briefly) ‘unstuck’. There wasn’t anybody else there.

Often it is the job of fiction to say what we cannot. Indeed the whole game of a writer is to find words for the intangible things we feel. I pride myself on it, on noticing, on observing, on listening to how things feel in my body as much as in my heart and my brain. I do my best to voice the bits of our internal worlds we all experience but often don’t know how to name. This is what good writing is.

But, to the point. What this strange, existential, trippy unsticking reminded me was that words are, a lot of the time, totally fucking useless. And it’s not just the fact that sometimes there simply is no language to do the job. It is that language itself undoes what we feel. Saying the thing changes the thing, and then then thing is no more. A feeling becomes a sentence that lives outside of us, where it exists forever. That is essential in moving through the world and getting stuff done, but it’s also why it is so hard for us to connect and understand each other.

How many times have we all said ‘that’s not what I meant’ or ‘I wish I hadn’t said anything’? We blame it on being misunderstood by others when often we are actually misunderstanding ourselves.

More interestingly, how often have we all said something out loud, something that has percolated for a long time, only to find that it isn’t how we actually feel? That the language we have chosen was a misinterpretation of what we felt, or meant? That the language gave the feeling an incorrect meaning, internally, even before it was said out loud?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There’s a lot to be said for shutting the fuck up.

I wrote Bitter Sweet in a sort of mad haze. It was an obsessive, wild seven-week sprint during which something between my body and my mind disconnected. There is so much of my life, my friend’s lives, my dead mum on the pages of that book. I didn’t mean for it to be that way. I didn’t even recognise myself in Charlie until other people read it, yet there she is, so alike the me that existed aged 23. There are observations I have no recollection of making. Language overtook my higher brain. It’s all there, on the page. Words, about 109,000 of them, some of them very carefully chosen, and some of them much less deliberate.

I am working through the copyedit of Beginning. Middle End. (which is my second book) right now. Or I’m supposed to be, obviously I’m actually writing this piece for bloody Substack. This is the point at which I really think about the language I have used, about sentence structures, and if what I want to say and what I want the reader to feel is being achieved.

It is also the point at which I doubt myself and the work the most because I am hyperaware of the limitations of my writing ability – and indeed the limitations of language – because I am observing it so analytically. This is so at odds with how I write, which is fast and instinctively. This is also how I live.

A well-worn metaphor, I know, but it is just like looking at dot paintings too closely. It’s all a mess and starts to mean nothing. You have to pull your mind back to get the bigger picture but you simply can’t because first you have to go through this bit of the editing process, which is essentially checking the dots.

Maybe this is how we should view our lives, and our inner workings, before giving either language. Maybe we all need a place to work through our shit before we use our words in places that leave the world changed. This is what therapy is, after all. It is also my voice note history with my beloved friend Saskia. It is the journals I kept when I was a teenager into my twenties. It is my Notes app now. In therapy-speak, these are safe spaces.

But still. I think about loneliness and I think about friendship and I think about love and sex and I think about how very difficult it is to feel understood. I think about that strange place my mind went in my existential hotel-nap-panic-attack. I think that really, all we want is a place where we can be quiet, and held close, and understood completely, all without any need for language. Knowing when we have found that, and managing to hold onto it when we do, is another matter entirely.

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS:

Two excellent books for you this week!

• Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth. I have just started this after meeting Emma at Liverpool Literary Festival and hearing her talk about it. Sisters, a caravan road trip, loads of 90’s stuff — absolutely full of humour and heart. Get it in me.

• Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis. I’ve known (Dr!) Nussaibah a while and adore and admire her. Nussaibah’s debut is a comedy novel about de-radicalising ISIS brides has been shortlisted for every award imaginable and I love this kind, clever, funny book.

Whilst I’m sure that most people here have read Bitter Sweet by now, if you’ve not, the very best way you can support me is by buying a copy. Hardback, ebook, audiobook, whatever your preference, it all really helps. The other thing you can do is share my posts here and subscribe, which are both free. Thanks so much!

Find out more

But then I don’t always feel that way. No one does! So while I’m going to leave it out there, this week I’m going write about something positive and wonderful; friendship. Specifically, the company of women.

The week before last, I went to my first Her Table, a supper club organised by my lovely friends Emily and Ella. I went to the event alone, on a day when my social anxiety was through the roof. As I stood in the flood of Arsenal supporters at Highbury and Islington Tube, trying to get my Google Maps to stop mirroring my spinning brain, I nearly bailed. But I didn’t, and the moment I walked into Papermill Studios I was met by a wave of fucking glorious warmth. These were kind, generous women who had come together with a purpose; to share in the experience of being women. The quality of conversation was extraordinary. It all felt fluid and cathartic. Something about the atmosphere was nothing short of magic.

When I was younger I was sold the idea that women do not support each other. Not by other women (obviously) but by men, usually via the TV or the radio. It was ‘comedy’, mainly, for cheap laughs, but also casual conversations in the house I grew up in, on the street, in the supermarket, in restaurants and pubs. Women were catty, mean, spiteful, competitive, superficial, dumb, incapable, in need of help. Women looked good or bad or too fat or too thin. Women can’t drive. Women can’t throw. Women get too emotional. What’s wrong love, you got your period?

The girls are fighting, a line which which we have taken ownership of since Trump and Musk’s spat, was one of many that perpetuated the many unhelpful stereotypes we were all exposed to, that we presumed to be true of ourselves. I think I sometimes behaved badly simply because I thought this was how women were.

How very wrong all of this noise was. I should have paid more attention to my mother.

The Her Table event that I went to that night was titled ‘It Takes a Village.’ The emphasis was that the village can be just one person, one woman who is there for you, who will be in your corner. I am so lucky to have a whole city. The women in my life are my reason to keep trying, keep working, keep loving, keep being open.

(It isn’t just women. I have a village of wonderful friends.)

At the end of the night I walked back into the chill Autumn evening and everything in my life that I had left at the door was waiting for me, because it always is. But I felt lighter, stronger, happier. I had enjoyed an evening in the company of women. Beautiful, kind, encouraging women.

Could men have an event like this? Would men seek something like this out, and pro-actively, independently engage with it? There is a male loneliness epidemic, we know this, men are in crisis. I have lost too many to it, men who were too sad to keep going. I miss them every single day. They should be here with us, with their families, with the fucking families they didn’t get to have. I feel the ripples of these losses everywhere. I see them everywhere, a face on the tube I mistake, for a moment, to be someone long gone. The recognition, palpable and hopeful, hits before the reality.

The message that ‘men are not OK’ is being broadcast everywhere, not that we need to be told. Last week, Nikesh and I went to see Alice Birch’s Romans at The Almeida, an astonishing three-hour play about this very subject, examining all of the ways that masculinity, often so toxic, is unravelling, and how it has changed shape over the last one-hundred years. How men relate to each other, how the world relates to them, much as changed and also nothing at all. So how can we help our men to find a stronger sense of community and friendship and connection? I wish I knew the answer. I want men to have the feeling that I did in that room, on that night, when I was feeling so lost.

I feel softer now than I did when I last wrote here. I’ve seen a lot of live music and good theatre with good people recently, which isn’t to take away from the fact that the last few weeks have been. . . Heavy. My women, and my men, rallied and it made me feel better. These times are extraordinary and can be overwhelming and I was overwhelmed. I was momentarily unable to see how things can get better. But they have, even in just a week.

I have been reminded by my friends to show myself the kindness I would show them. They have reminded me of how they see me, which is so at odds with how I see myself. They have reminded me to be gentle with myself, to pay attention more closely to what feels good and what doesn’t. To accept that this is a long ‘journey’ (sorry, I know this is gross but I can’t find a better word) and while every bump is a moment for learning, not every bump is necessarily a lesson.

I tell you this today, folks, because I hope that you can find the same compassion for yourself that I was missing for a moment. And if you can’t, turn to your village, and ask for the help that you need to be able to remember.

Whilst I’m sure that most people here have read Bitter Sweet by now, if you’ve not, the very best way you can support me is by buying a copy. Hardback, ebook, audiobook, whatever your preference, it all really helps me. The other thing you can do is share my posts here and subscribe, which are both free. Thanks so much!

Bitter Sweet

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS:

• Last week, I went to three gigs; I saw Ethel Cain, John Grant and Self Esteem and all were brilliant. Self Esteem was actually transformational. Nothing short of an exorcism and rebirth.

• I also saw Romans, which has finished but I expect will appear again in London soon enough, as well as Born With Teeth. That was very good, too! Queer, sexy Shakespeare.

• A new issue of my favourite literary magazine, Erotic Review, has landed. It includes this sad and sexy poem which you can read for free on their website.

• I am appearing at Liverpool Literary Festival this Sunday, October 19th, at 1pm! Tickets here.

More specifically, we need to talk about why we are treating each other so badly. Is it simply because we can? Or because we are unhappy, and times are hard, and it feels like the easiest way through?

The world feels like a tinder box. So does my heart.

I blame much of everything on technology, specifically mobile phones and the sodding internet. In an attempt to make all of life easier (a folly in itself, many things in life should be difficult, that’s the whole fucking point) we have built bubbles around ourselves, and lost our connection to each other. Equally, it is on the internet that so many people — often vulnerable young people, but not exclusively by any means — are being radicalised.

To interact with both the world and each other from behind a computer or a phone, to not make eye-contact, it just feels so at odds with what being human is about. This is filtering both up and down and impacting all of our lives. Just today, I have seen photos and videos from Gaza of probably ten dead children in tiny shrouds. And I am not catatonic, on the floor weeping. I have wept on the floor in the last two years at what I have seen, many times. But today I am writing. How is that even possible? These are children, burned, mutilated, lifeless little bodies. And I close my phone and open my laptop like this is normal.

Technology is is killing something inside of us. It is making us lazy and cowardly. We’re all so anxious and avoidant because we’re so disconnected. What we consume, the weirdness of it, the tragedy of it, is messing with our higher brains.

It’s not just what we consume, but what we put out there. It’s easy to throw a grenade into the digital ether and completely forget about it, ignoring the hurt and damage you have caused, because we don’t have to see it if we don’t want to. There’s a button for that, because there’s a button for everything. Block. Archive. Unfollow. Mute. Quick-scroll. Tra-la-la-la-la! It’s hard to see how the good is possibly outweighing the bad.

How many of us can say that we have been given information in a cold or inappropriate way? Be it feedback at work, medical information, a break-up, an intervention, an apology, even notice of a death. I can think of so many occasions when something that should have been a face-to-face conversation or even a phone call has been reduced to a text or an email or, lowest of all, a DM. Anything to avoid pain or discomfort and save some precious time, right?

Good communication is dialogue, not broadcast. It is not written by ChatGPT and it is not simply saying what you need to say. It is harder work than that, it means going to uncomfortable and inconvenient places and engaging for the sake of the other person. That is the price we pay for intimacy, to sleep at night knowing we have treated our fellow humans with the respect they deserve.

Do I really need to spell that out? I think I do! But I shouldn’t, which is why I am writing so angry this week, and also why there is so much swearing. Fuck it.

Like most of us I have been thinking a great deal about our general inability as humans to communicate effectively, and the total lack of empathy that prevails because digital communication allows us to avoid it.

It goes so much wider than the interpersonal (although I’ll get to that later) to the societal. The UK is in mourning because of a vile, utterly tragic terrorist attack on a synagogue in Manchester last week in which two Jewish people were tragically murdered (it is now understood that one of the victims was killed by the police ‘protecting’ them).

This abhorrent, horrific attack has fuelled the fires being stoked by cretins like Nigel Farage and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who all seek to divide us, and to get richer in the process. They use racial and religious hatred as their greatest tools.

The dehumanisation of Palestinians and the Islamophobia and antisemitism and racial attacks that have increased in recent years are utterly appalling, as is the weaponisation of both antisemitism and feminism. (This list is not exhaustive, please understand that I value every single human life, and hate is hate, and yes of course I condemn Hamas as I condemn Netanyahu and his regime.)

It feels closer to home than ever. I only have to open Facebook to see it for myself, horrible posts filled with hatred, describing trans people, people of colour, refugees and asylum seekers, queer people, any minority, as something less than human and so deserving less than our kindness and understanding.

Just this morning I lost half an hour, jaw on the table as I read a punishingly-long thread on a local Facebook group about the mostly peaceful protests in London in support of Palestine being ‘violent and antisemitic’. The main contributor was a woman who was proud to say she had never been to a single protest, and got all of her information from fucking YouTube. Her mind was firmly closed and she was not open to any evidence to the contrary.

How can I speak to her, and people like her? Genuine question. How? Can I change her mind?

The deep, disconcerting lack of empathy seemingly everywhere is flourishing because we aren’t listening. We shout, we block our ears, we give up on people without really hearing where they are coming from or trying to understand. This is why everyone is backing further into their corners. Ask many of the bacon-wielding-flag-shaggers on the far-right protests more than one question about why the are there, and you can see no one has actually engaged them in serious discussion about it. They stumble and repeat themselves, making no sense, not really knowing why. ‘Immigrants!’ They cry. ‘Protect our women and children!’ They chirp, standing next to convicted pedophiles and violent men who have been previously-incarcerated for domestic violence. ‘Full English!’ They chant, like someone is trying to trying to take their precious sausages away, before joining a singalong of that protecting-women-feminist classic, ‘Get your tits out for the lads.’

I despair. Racism, and homophobia, and transphobia, and any of the accompanying phobias and isms, are not simply an opinion you should be ‘allowed’ to voice, like it’s an opinion on last night’s episode of Traitors. It is hatred. Pure and simple. And it has no place in society.

Yet indignation presides. Nationalism presides. Hatred presides. It’s US and THEM.

The left are just as guilty of this lack of understanding and incapable of real dialogue. In fact the left’s failure to come together is just as much why we are in this mess; you only have to look at the shambles of Your Party and the division of Starmer’s Labour (and Corbyn’s before that) to see that even when we have a chance to create a fairer society, an alternative, a real opposition to the right, we are unable to get our shit together and do it. Starmer has silenced anyone who disagrees with him, banned them from attending party conference, taken away the Whip.

What he doesn’t understand is that you can’t just tell anyone that disagrees with you to shut up, remove their power and agency, and expect them to fall in line. People do not work like this. If we want to bring people with us we must have dialogue with them, even when we want them to get in the proverbial sea. It doesn’t mean forgiving or allowing or appeasing hatred. But if we don’t change minds now, then the next generation and the generation after that will have the same afflictions.

I just have no idea how we do it. Do you?

This lack of kindness, respect and empathy I am seeing is in the micro as well as the macro. It is happening amongst the people we feel close and aligned with, not just our ideological opponents. This has been a major topic of conversation amongst my friends and I lately. Especially the single ones, who talk a lot about how online dating is both dehumanising and desensitising us. Early commitment is a thing of the past. Dating apps are a candy box and so why would anyone settle for anything that felt like early promise? There might be something better a click or a swipe away.

‘Breadcrumbing’ is a term that I have heard from friends again and again, in which someone feeds you just enough tidbits of attention to keep you following along. ‘Benching’, in which someone keeps you on the side just in case they decide they want you later. ‘Pocketing’, where they won’t introduce you to anyone in their lives. ‘Ghosting’, well we all know that one. The depressing list of shorthand for ‘being treated with little care or respect in this digital age’ goes on.

I am in no way perfect. I’m a deeply flawed person. There are times in my personal and professional lives when I have said nothing, when I have kept myself closed and quiet, and times when I should really have just shut-the-fuck-up. I am guilty of presuming that what is unsaid is understood. I am guilty of sitting on anger or hurt because I don’t know how to express it without being further injured. I am guilty of avoiding conflict at all costs, even when detrimental to others. I am guilty of getting it really fucking wrong. I have hurt people, of course I have, we all have.

But I am determined not to stop speaking out on things I care about. I will work harder. I will keep trying to persuade people who disagree with me — although I will be avoiding Facebook for the near future. I will not ‘stick to writing novels’. And if I am misunderstood, I will keep trying to articulate myself.

But I will never, ever, shy away from the big, difficult and scary things, both here, in my personal life, on social media and in my novels and all other writings. The greatest hope for humanity is that we can try to be better to each other, and try harder to understand each other.

And in the process, all of us can maybe be a bit fucking kinder. I believe that we have it in us if we try.

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS:

I don’t really have it in me to finish this piece with some cute skincare and music recommendations this week, so instead a few organisations you can follow and support who are working to make this shitty world a bit better:

• Choose Love

• The Sameer Project

• Hope Not Hate

• Doctors Without Borders

• UNICEF

• Medical Aid for Palestinians

• Children Not Numbers

Get Bitter Sweet on Kindle for 99p

Because I can’t split out who gets this based on where you live, and thus if you are outside of the UK this might be quite annoying, I wanted to share this deleted scene from Bitter Sweet.

I am a criminal over-writer which means a huge part of editing for me is trimming, cutting, killing my darlings. It’s quite painful.

I take anything that has to go, but that I feel really wedded to, and chuck it in another Word document which I call SCRAPS. I usually forget about anything I have cut as soon as I’ve done it, but this little scene has always stayed with me. It just didn’t have a place in the book. I’m glad that it gets to see the light of day here!

In this flashback, Charlie remembers a formative conversation from her childhood, a moment between her and her late mother. I hope you enjoy it!

I remember when I was little, maybe seven or eight years old, I spotted what I thought might be a baby penguin in the garden under the willow tree. It was hopping about in the scrubby grass, and it couldn’t fly. This, as well as it being black and white, is probably why I must have thought it was a really small penguin.

‘That’s a magpie,’ Mum told me kindly as we stood watching at the back door, not wanting me to feel silly for such a childish mistake. ‘Their babies fledge before they can fly. Look, see? No tail feathers. Let’s just sit and watch. You’ll see its parents coming down to feed it.’

We sat and watched for what felt like hours, as minutes tend to do when you are small and impatient. We watched as the young bird’s parents squawked and crowed at it, showing it how to flutter its wings and hop into the tree, safely off the ground again. This went on and on, until eventually we tired of watching and went to make supper.

The next morning, we saw the neighbour’s tom cat carrying the baby bird his mouth. It’s legs and wings were still twitching. We tried to rescue the bird from the cat, but it jumped over the fence with it. I was very upset, so was Mum.

‘It should know how to fly before it leaves the nest,’ I said to her. ‘It was too young to be on its own.’

She hugged me tightly and said, ‘You are right, little one. You are right.’

UK readers can get Bitter Sweet on Kindle for just 99p today only, Friday 3rd of October. Click the button below to find out more. Thanks for reading!

Bitter Sweet

My Monday mornings are a transformation of both place and self and it is something that I have become dependent on. Three weeks ago, the Tube strike in London meant that no one could travel and the house was not, for those five days, my own. The week after, our childminder took a some well-deserved holiday, and Astrid was home as a result. Then there was a wonderful week away in Spain. . . Which means it has been three whole weeks since I have had that feeling of shifting against the world, against myself, letting go and indulging. It’s not cake or long baths that are indulgence to me; it is time in which I can engage my mind with absolute focus. And annoyingly, that requires solitude.

The silence that followed the door closing this morning was nothing short of beautiful. The house, which I had cleaned to within an inch of it’s dusty Victorian life on Sunday, became my own. I could feel something falling away from me, being replaced with a readiness and creative energy. No expectations from others; just my own, of which there are many. The relief at reclaiming myself and my home was almost euphoric.

It is, of course, all because I was alone for the first time in weeks.

When I was younger I feared anything that felt like quiet. I filled my evenings and days, desperate not to be left alone with my thoughts for even a minute. I was, I thought, an extrovert, in that I required time with others to recharge. I believed that if I always had company I wouldn’t ever feel lonely.

I don’t know when I realised that I was wrong about what I most needed. The truth is that I crave — I need — time alone, so deeply that I can feel like I am suffocating if I don’t get it. I become irritable and bad tempered, sharp and brusque. My mood dips.

I no longer associate loneliness with being solitary; quite the opposite! When I am alone I feel most myself. My own company, and the company of my characters and their worlds and the ideas that fuel them, feels pretty substantial. This is where I get my energy. I think this is a part of getting older and getting used to the skin you inhabit.

That isn’t to say that I don’t love spending time with people. I adore my child and two weeks with her has been wonderful. I am a highly-sociable person, I have wonderful friends and I love going out, as anyone that follows me on Instagram probably knows from the late night, blurry stories I post and then delete. But in the day, in the long stretch between 7:30 am and 5pm Monday to Thursday, I very much need to be on my own. I can’t focus and I can’t write with anyone else around, which is why I never work in cafes or the shared workspace that I have access to.

I really also love going to the cinema alone in the middle of the day, flying or taking a train alone, travelling abroad alone, going to the theatre alone, eating lunch in a restaurant alone, and drinking a glass of wine alone in a bar with a book. I recommend trying all of these things once.

When I am alone, I become someone else. Do you feel that? I’m genuinely interested to know. I don’t know if this ‘self’ is any more true than the ‘self’ that I feel in company, because even that changes depending on who I am with. But I get to be totally selfish in these weekday hours. I listen to the same songs over and over; Imogen Heap’s ‘Hide and Seek’ currently soundtracks my kitchen dance as I make my first cup of coffee, setting the tone for what I hope to achieve in that it is a perfect song that expresses something inarticulable. I can leave a butter knife on the side, a plate in the sink, have the heating on high if I want; these small freedoms feel like a release because time alone is truly a luxury. And I have built my life around it.

I’ll make many coffees throughout the day, and eat a lot of carrots. I will sing along to CMAT or Self-Esteem while I cut cucumbers at lunch, drink a cup of tea in the garden with a few minutes of a podcast while I scroll the Guardian, cursing the world to the blackbirds. I’m unlikely to brush my hair and put SPF on until I run, usually late in the afternoon when I’m starting to panic about whatever it is that has been hanging over me, because there is always something. That is a downside of being alone a lot; thoughts and worries are free to run wild if you don’t keep an eye on them.

I almost always resent the need to run, because it eats into my precious writing time. Running is not advancing my work, it is zero words on a page, and so I put it off all day until I feel that I have done enough work to deserve the exercise that is so go for both my heart and my brain. (I know. Nonsensical. I don’t claim to be smart.) But then I do it, and I feel about one-million times less anxious, and tell myself I will remember how good it was for me tomorrow when I feel the same burning resentment. Much like that third glass of wine guaranteeing a hangover, I never learn.

I protect my time alone. I have to treat my work in the same way anyone else would a ‘real’ job because otherwise everything would come before it. I have to be the boss that yells if I take a sick day because I’ve stayed out too late the night before, or if I don’t write enough because other things have taken priority. I get furious when other parents send their sick kids into nursery, because I know that it all it takes is one literal degree in temperature for Astrid to be consigned to home for 48 hours and my working week wiped out with it. I split the day with her dad when this happens, but really there is little point, because when she is unwell she needs me and that is my primary job.

When I do feel really lonely, which of course happens a lot because I am a human being, I write. I put my phone — enemy of creativity, bastion of envy, distractor of minds, purveyor of hopeless misery — in the kitchen, and on silent. (The fucking thing should go in the bin, really, but I’m far to addicted to it to do anything as clever as that.) With the shitting, cursed thing out of sight, I allow myself to slip into a flow and put words one in front of the other until I have something that feels like it has a shape. Then I move those words around a bit, question them, play with them. This is the work. It’s silly, really, when you reduce it to this.

Writing is a solitary job. I sometimes find that I get to a Wednesday evening and I’ve not seen anyone outside of the house for three or four days. When this happens, I need to get out and see friends, to come out of myself and remember that there is a wider world. I will write better the next day if I do. It’s a fine balance.

I can no longer imagine a life in which I go into an office, engage in important meetings and small talk, even take the Tube every day. I’m almost certain that my mental health has been so much better since I stopped doing these things because I’m really not built for it.

It’s 5:30 p.m. now, and in a few minutes, I’ll hear a key in the door and I’ll spring back into the other version of me, the one that exists outside of my head. I’ll fill Astrid’s water beaker and hot water bottle and turn on her Moomin nightlight, optimistically set her Grow Clock for 7 a.m. and start sniffing around the fridge to see what’s for supper. I will be able to do these things, to be a mum and a person outside of my inner world, only because I have had so much time in it. On Wednesday I will see an inspiring group of women at the Her Table supper club in Islington (a few tickets still left) and on Friday I have dear friends from Iceland here, and we’ll see the Magnetic Fields play 69 Love Songs at the Union Chapel. Then it will be the weekend and I although I will do my very best to present, I know that a part of me will be looking forward to Monday, 9 a.m., when I can sink back into the worlds I so love making up in my weird little head.

Whilst I’m sure that most people here have read Bitter Sweet by now, if you’ve not, the very best way you can support me is by buying a copy! Hardback, ebook, audiobook, whatever your preference, it all really helps me. The other thing you can do is share my posts here and subscribe, which are both free. Thanks so much!

Bitter Sweet

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS:

• I did an interview with Raz for Running Sucks when I was in LA in June, talking more about running and mental health and writing, and you can read that here. Raz has a book about Run Clubs coming out next year.

• Do please check out Her Table if you live in London. They put on a few supper clubs a year. Amazing food, amazing women.

• EVENT NEWS! I’m appearing at Liverpool Literary Festival on Sunday the 19th of October at 1pm at Victoria Gallery & Museum. Please come. Tickets on sale now.

  

Yet I am here. I look at my daughter, and my best friend’s children. They are playing in the pool. It must be another universe these children inhabit than that of Gaza, or Sudan, or The Congo. They eat chips and peaches and swim in their new swimming costumes on their new inflatables. Food is left on their plates. They have everything. When the sky lit up late last night, they weren’t scared. They knew it was only lightning.

We are on this island for a week, my family and my best friend’s family. Holidays are different now; I optimistically have two books with me but I will be lucky to read fifty pages of one. There will be joy and chaos and early starts. There will be tantrums and, I expect, food thrown, drinks spilled, knees grazed, ice-creams dropped. Long lie-ins and hangovers and midday stubby beers in the pool are behind us, for now, but I suspect also somewhere not too far in the future. The children will only be little for a moment.

These reflective moments, when I can pause and really see my kid as clearly as I reach to daily, brings a lot back about my own childhood. I can give her my full focus and attention here without work, or the distractions of our routines. I want her to have everything.

I didn’t go on a plane until I was well into my twenties. My dad didn’t like flying so we never travelled further than northern France or Devon when I was a kid, much to mine, my brother and my mum’s disappointment. Summer holidays were fought for by my mum because my dad didn’t ever want to go away. He’s still like that. He would book us on the earliest ferry possible so we could leave the house in the middle of the night; he was paranoid that if anyone saw us leaving, they would break in. I hated the channel crossings. My mum would get so seasick and I was always very fearful about her being ill. We could have taken the Channel Tunnel of course. But my dad liked the boat.

Once in France we would drive an hour or so to stay at our family friend’s magical house in a tiny hamlet. In the mornings a bread van would come, beep its horn, and my brother and I would rush out to order baguettes and pain au chocolat in French, our pockets jangling full of Francs. Mum would read and cook. My brother would construct elaborate worlds with his Star Wars and Space Precinct action figures, often blowing them up with bangers. I would read and play with my Sylvanians and sit in the window of the ground-floor bedroom and dangle my feet in the buddleia and soft ferns, pretending I was in a novel, writing in my diary. I remember the smell and pattern of the bedsheets so clearly. There was a ping-pong table in the shed, a secret swing by the pond, and when we ventured further we found a derelict mansion at the end of the lane that we believed to be haunted. Going to the supermarket was incredibly exciting, as was getting frites from the van in the nearby town. Sugar lumps wrapped in paper popped onto my tongue, dissolving deliciously against the roof of my mouth. Ice-cold glass bottles of Orangina. These are good and happy memories.

I went back last year, to the hamlet we stayed in, and to the town of Hesdin that I felt so nostalgic about. Our friends sold the house years ago and it has a WW2 shell-riddled flint wall around it so you can’t see much. The town I remembered had changed unrecognisably and was run down. The cafe, The Globe, that we had loved and spent so much time in, was boarded up and the waiter who we doted on and made it such fun… well. It was a very long time ago. I’d guess he is over 70 now, wherever he is.

Like him, my mother was nowhere to be seen. I wish I had left that place as a memory.

But the here and now, where I am trying to stay. My best friend and I have been on many holidays together. This is our second with all of our children. When we were younger, in our teens, she came with my family to France. We are building loops. Beautiful loops, the kind where you have reference points for adult life that are twenty years ago. We grew-up together. Now our children are growing up together. We have new family holidays, the kind we wish we had had. Swimming pools and flights and friends and as many treats as can be crammed into seven days as possible. The answer is almost always ‘yes’ and when I was a kid, it always felt like ‘no’.

We have loved and lost and fought and together been through some absolute hells. It feels peaceful here with her. She is my person. She doesn’t exist on the internet. We don’t live in the same city. Sometimes I wonder if I imagined her into being because she is so extraordinary and in many ways our lives, day to day, are separate. We are tethered by our phones. We message daily, but we don’t call because we both dislike phonecalls. We can count the number of photos of us together that we like on one hand.

Her patience with me, her kindness and calm and forgiveness has sustained me and I feel quite sentimental being here with her. I am so grateful for her unconditional love. For her outrageous intellect and her mental agility for science as well as art. She is lovely to look at, a sort of Disney Princess. I envy her. I adore her. I couldn’t live without her. She reads my Substack in draft form every week before I publish. She is amongst the very first to read my novels. I trust her opinion over any other. When I am lost, I go towards her. It has been this way for 35 years. My second book is dedicated to her.

I know that our children are old enough to form memories now, and I wonder what they will take from this time together, if anything. I wonder if they will holiday together with their children, if they will stay friends because right now their connection is deep and lovely. I hope so. I will remember these beautiful days for as long as I live, these moments of pause where everything becomes so clear. The wild turquoise of the ocean that I can see from the terrace outside my room, the late night games of cards and bottles of wine drunk and enormous bowls of pasta eaten. The sandcastles built by the children that will be washed away by the tide, dissolved like those sugar lumps all those years ago.

I want this to last forever, but it can’t. The time is coming when home will call. There’s work to be done.

If you enjoyed reading this, you might enjoy my novel Bitter Sweet, which is out now. You can read the opening chapters for free on Substack here.

Bitter Sweet

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS:

• I went to see Dr Miriam last week in her Dalston clinic. She is an amazing aesthetician, skin health doctor and all-round good human. I can’t recommend her enough if you are in London.

• I am reading Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin and really enjoying it. I’ll be talking to Naimh about the book at Waterstones Streatham on Wednesday the 15th of October.

Who knows what it will be like this time. I wrote my second novel Beginning. Middle. End. pretty much as soon as I finished Bitter Sweet. When I worked in publishing I saw how hard the second novel can be and I was honestly terrified of it. I watched both authors and editors lose their minds over the sophomore slump. The difficult second album.

I was pretty sure that Bitter Sweet was a fluke and a one-off, and that I would never be able to write another book. I used that fear to write a first draft in seven weeks; the same time it took for my debut. With both books, I could clearly see the ending, and I believe that is why I could write them so fast. Before, I had attempted to write novels, but I never finished them because I didn’t know how the stories would end.

Can I do it again? I don’t know. The evidence suggests yes. My inner-narrator says no. Maybe I’ll have this same fear with every book I write. It’s only when I get to the last page, to the end of the ending, then I can let myself relax for a little while.

Onwards, always. To where, I don’t know. Life reflects the process of writing; always a race to the end. I have to keep moving.

I wrote my first two books before I had published anything. My only job, then, was to write novels. Now I am learning how to balance all of the things that need my attention — both people and work — and still find the weird, obsessive headspace required for the beautiful, incredibly difficult task of writing 100,000 words in an order that means something.

I always have three or four book outlines in my head but the idea that will get my full attention is always the one with the best, and clearest, ending. Because I have I absolutely have to know the ending. In art, and in life.

I struggle with both finality and with the unknown. I see endings everywhere. My daughter is currently obsessed with the teddybear I had as a kid and when I watch her play with him, I look at my beloved, scruffy old bear, and wonder when in the future no one will recognise him. I imagine him forgotten in an attic, discovered powdery with moths, and thrown in a skip. I think about the end of relationships. I think, most of all, about the ultimate ending: death.

My mind feels out all possibilities, all the time, my mental tendrils poking into scenarios I see clear as day in my mind’s eye. It’s sort of a security blanket; if I think it, maybe it won’t happen.

When I write fiction, I get to pick the ending. The characters that I love so much — that feel as real to me as friends, that I have to torture and torment for the sake of the story — the pay off is that I get to give them the ending I want for them. I get to ease their pain and discomfort, being the literary overlord that I am. It’s incredibly satisfying. I also like to tell the reader something of how the story will end on the first page. I hope that this means you enjoy the journey, less fixated on the destination.

In life, like all of us, I am a muddle. I can face the world brave and open, but when I’m threatened with pain and discomfort and uncertainty, I quickly retreat. I fear illness, so I take great care with hygiene, especially when I feel out of control in my life. This manifests in obsessive behaviours that I won’t bore you with; needless to say, when I am very anxious I start to see touch and contact as contamination. It’s incredibly unpleasant to be in this heightened, anxious state, because reaching for control makes me feel even more out of control as I realise it is impossible to stay clean and pure and healthy, and the harder I work the more intrusive the thoughts become.

With emotional pain and discomfort, well. I’ll put myself out in the world, but if I’m made to feel sad or insecure or unloved, I’m absolutely brutal. Door: slam. Instagram: block. Whatsapp history: delete. Contact: remove. THE END. I regret this sometimes, when I look back on people that I have loved and felt close to and hurt or been hurt by. Maybe I could have worked to fix things. But what’s done is done.

Ironically, writing is all about exposure and discomfort and pain. (I mean, as Veronica Henry said to me, it’s not coal mining, is it. But it is bloody hard.) When I feel passionate about something or someone, my aversions go out of the window and I can be both courageous and reckless in the pursuit of what I want.

What I am working very hard on at the moment (indeed I think I have been working on this forever) is learning to live with discomfort and uncertainty, and to have more patience with myself, with other people, and with time itself.

My desire for instant answers so that I can plan my next move is something that has almost certainly come from things in my past. Some of those things are my own fault, others not. It is chequered and complicated and often when I find myself going on and on about my childhood and twenties I think, just get over it, will you? Stop it. You’re 41. Move on. Stop whinging.

I’m sure some readers here might feel the same. They certainly do in the comments section of The Times.

I bang on about the bad things that have happened to me without ever really touching on the bad things I have done to myself. But the truth of it is that I was on self-destruct for a very long time. I had little to no care for myself because I couldn’t see the end. I couldn’t imagine getting old or having kids, so I damaged myself. I injured my heart, my body, my mind. Many of the wounds that I still carry are self-inflected.

I tried to write about this feeling from my twenties in Bitter Sweet.

“It sounded right, all of the words in a good order. It sounded like what someone normal would say about their future. When I thought about my future, I could see nothing. It was like trying to look through thick, frosted glass.”

That murkiness is still kind of there, but much less. I think we all have it, to an extent. We ‘manifest’, we protect our future selves with pensions and cardio, all whilst trying to live ‘in the moment’ for fear that old age won’t come.

When I see a group of elderly people on a day out from a local care home in Morrisons, all in their wheelchairs, I don’t want to imagine such an ending for myself. Then I think, I should be so fucking lucky. To live to see my daughter turn 45, or even 50 — that would be an enormous privilege. To see the world bounce back from this terrifying swing to the right, or not, to see the end of humankind, surely the most significant moment in history.

There is curiosity, there is fear, there is the great unknown. When I get to the airport in Menorca next weekend, and I walk through border control, I know that I will be imagining how it will feel come back the other way seven days later. How the airport, and how I, will feel different.

Why am I like this? I still think, I’ll get over it, about so many things. I’ll get better at it. Or, I’ll fix it. Like there is an end point, a goal. I’m always looking ahead, to when I will be a better version of Hattie. The finished version, fired and glazed.

It’s just that we are never finished, are we? There is no ‘getting over it’, or ‘closure’, not really. Certainly never after a death. When I think of those that I love that have died, it still feels utterly incomprehensible and unreal, be it my grandparents when I was tiny, my mum in my teens, or my friends in the last ten years or so… Although I suspect my own death will come with some sense of closure, when it comes.

I think that what I’m getting at, is that things end all the time, and never at all. A hundred tiny endings happen to us every year. And we rarely see them, because it is impossible to see the end when you are in it. The beginning, you can usually see. The middle, that’s easy. But the end, you often only see long after.

Just… Where you can, in life and in art, always, always choose the end best possible ending.

If you enjoyed reading this, and like a good ending, you might enjoy my novel Bitter Sweet, which is out now all over the world. You can read the opening chapters for free on Substack here.

Bitter Sweet

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS:

• I have been on an ‘elevated horror’ movie binge this week. I particularly liked Midsommer and Jordan Peele’s Us.

• I have taken the odd break from Blood Orange to listen to the excellent new Big Thief album and it’s another 5* for me.

• I have been sending any spare cash to Abdo and his family in Gaza via PayPal for the last year or so. While I can’t verify anything we have talked a lot and he has shared plenty about his life and kids and the horrors he is enduring. Him and his four children are displaced and starving. His cousin’s kids, two beautiful little boys, were murdered on Friday. If you feel inclined please follow him and say hi and if you can spare anything he would hugely appreciate it.

• Chloe Timms interviewed me last month for her Podcast Confessions of a Debut Novelist - I didn’t hate hearing myself talk as much as normal! You can listen now wherever you get your podcasts, or below.

I didn’t need to do the experiment to know what the answer would be; I’m a solid one and experience Hyperphantasia. I have an extremely vivid visual imagination. Before this, I hadn’t realised that there was a name for it. Honestly, much like my ears, I hadn’t really given it much thought at all.

This question often comes up at events and in interviews; how do I come up with my stories? How do I write characters that feel real? The answer is simple. I see them. I see all of it. It unfolds in front of me with little effort, and I write it down.

I am aware that this is annoying. I don’t feel like I can take credit for it, either. I think it’s just a case of tapping into the imagination I was born with. The actual work comes in being disciplined enough to sit down and do it, and then in the edit, when I have to polish and refine the story and its structure and interrogate the words I have used.

Many brilliant creatives have Aphantasia. Emily, for one, but also a friend of mine who is an excellent painter. The global bestseller John Green. The creative genius who co-founded Pixar, Ed Catmull, and Glen Keane, the famous Disney animator behind The Little Mermaid and Beauty and The Beast. It is clearly no barrier to creative thinking. It’s just a different way of thinking.

I’ve tried this apple experiment out on a few audiences, and on my friends in the pub, and I have been fascinated by how people react to it. Not because there is a right or a good answer. But because when you talk about the differences in what you see (or don’t see) in that intangible place, and when you try to describe what exactly it is that you understand to be ‘the mind’s eye’, you realise that language is entirely limiting when it comes to communicating how we experience the world, how we experience our own bodies and brains.

So what exactly is ‘the mind’s eye’?

How would you describe it?

When I rolled out this very blunt, unscientific experiment at the weekend, one friend described his mind’s eye as being somewhere above and around the top of his head. He drew a sort-of air halo around his crown. I agreed with this placement; it definitely feels above and to the back. (The areas responsible for visual processing are indeed towards the back of the skull.)

Another friend raised that he wasn’t sure enough of the definition or the task to decide either way. How could we possibly know if what we are describing is the same thing? We know what an apple tastes like, what it looks like, what it feels like. Are we just remembering an apple? If we close our eyes, we see black, so how can we also see an apple?

I had no answers, and from here the conversation moved onto colour. Is the blue I see the same as the blue you see? Or is your blue, my green? We can never know.

We can empathise but we can’t ever know what it is to be someone else.

This time of year stimulates my memory more than any other, and those memories are not only plentiful, but very visceral.

I remember being back in school after the summer, in my new uniform, the classroom windows steamed up, and dripping with condensation in the yellow light, the sky outside still a little dark.

I remember a particular rainy Saturday afternoon in Costa Coffee in Worthing with my Mum, and a few of my friends. I remember that she bought hot-chocolate for everyone and sat and listened to us chat, and how much I liked her being there, sharing my world with her. I would have been sixteen or seventeen. It wasn’t much before she died.

I remember walking the beach in Littlehampton (where I did half of my growing-up) after the first storm of the autumn, and searching the shingle for big dead fish and big dead crabs; all were interesting, these alien things from the murky depths of the familiar sea, because we could never see beneath the surface. Those beach memories are many, compiled into a sort of best-of.

I remember the dark misery of getting the train to see Mum in hospital in Shoreham, the grim light of the ward, dry microwave jacket potatoes in the canteen.

I remember, many years before, my hair being wet in the cold night after swimming lessons, sectioning a Twix with my teeth on the way to the car. Little Chef for dinner, as a treat.

These memories of my childhood are thinning in number, now, but when I refer back to those that I have kept (whether I have wanted to or not) I see them clear as day in my mind’s eye. I can see the plate in Little Chef, the dents in the overcooked peas, the logo on the rim. I can feel the plastic seats, I can hear the cars on the A27, I can taste the vinegar in the off-brand ketchup.

I don’t know how Aphantasia and Hyperphantasia affects the processing of trauma, if one or the other makes it easier. I do know that I have learned to live with intrusive thoughts and memories, all of which come to me vividly. Sometimes I cope better than others. Autumn is hard.

If I couldn’t see these horrible things, I can’t imagine how I would process them. Would I just feel them? I can only imagine, but I think that would be worse. An Aphantasiac I know thinks it would be better to be able to see them. The seaweed is always greener.

(A therapist once taught me to set-up a movie theatre around my flashbacks, giving me an ability to pull a curtain on them, like they are just playing on a screen. This works sometimes, but it has taken years of practice.)

The visual capability of my imagination, my nimbleness in this strange space that may or may not be the same as what you imagine it to be, allows me to write. It is a gift that allows me to daydream and to fantasise, both of which are wonderful escapes but can lead me astray. I am a little at the mercy of my own brain, in this respect. It is such an essential part of me.

From the moment I learned to read, I have understood that books and characters exist inside of me just as my memories do. The characters, their bereavements, conversations, celebrations. . . when a book really connects with me, these things become one and the same as my own. It is the strange magic of fiction. Now that I am a writer, my characters, their homes, the way the rain falls darkening the tarmac, every detail feels like a memory. I even look out for Charlie when I’m in Stoke Newington.

It is only when I try and fail to describe these intangible things that I realise how utterly alone we all really are. The experience of being human is essentially really very internal, yet we constantly battle loneliness like it is isn’t our natural state, in search of connection.

Every one of us is just as complex and confused and real with a vast internal world that can not be voiced.

Some days, when I try to write about things like this, I feel lonely and I crave something bigger than words, bigger than language. And there are other things; there is affection and physical pain and touch and sex and laughter and that beautiful silence and quiet understanding that exists in the most intimate of moments between two humans.

But they are fleeting, impermanent, as everything outside and inside of us is, even the very universe.

I actually think what we are all craving, more than connection, more than anything at all, is peace.

But don’t ask me how to find that. I don’t have any idea what it looks like.

I’d love to know where do you fall on the Aphantasia scale. How do you experience memories? Can you ‘see’ with your mind’s eye, and if not, how do you feel it impacts your experience in the world? Let me know in the comments.

If you enjoyed reading this, you might enjoy my novel Bitter Sweet, which is out now. You can read the opening chapters for free on Substack here.

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BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS

• Emily Slapper’s new novel It Might Never Happen is out now and it is really very very good

• I have been listening to a lot of Blood Orange, especially the new album Essex Honey

• I have rewatched Max Porter’s Wild West, a soliloquy on the arms trade that feels ever more pertinent with every passing day

• Forgive me for recommending myself, but I did an Instagram Live with the magical which you can watch back HERE . . . I also wrote a feature for The Times on maternal mental health and my mostly brilliant experience with the NHS which you can read HERE.

  

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Let me remind you how it goes…

Holly: “You know those days when you get the mean reds?”

Paul: “The mean reds? You mean like the blues?”

Holly: “No. The blues are because you're getting fat, and maybe it's been raining too long. You're just sad, that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid, and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?”

The Mean Reds. I must have been eight or nine years old when I first saw the film, and the line really stuck with me. It’s really Truman Capote’s line, of course — the film is based on the 1958 novella of the same name. But there it is. Another metaphor for depression to be filed alongside The Big Bad, The Black Dog, The Abyss, Melancholia.

I felt to connected to Holly in this scene. She had articulated something that I already knew to be true, and that made me feel understood. Click.

I mercifully knew nothing of what was coming in my life, good or bad, but even when I was this little I could feel something inside of me that I didn’t like. It was shifting, moving around. It was depression, and it was waking up.

For those of us unfortunate enough to have experienced the kind of depressive illness that utterly grounds you and your pauses your whole life, that renders you unable to speak or eat or work or leave the house, you will know that depression is always there, even when it isn’t.

It is so debilitating that it leaves a part of you atrophied. I imagine a part of my brain permanently unlit, soft and grey and ashy next to vibrant pink squishiness all lit up by the sparkling blue neutrons that run through it like fairy lights.

This dead part of me — well. It will always be a part of me.

It helped to write about the kind of depression I experienced in my early twenties in Bitter Sweet. Readers have told me that this element of the story has both resonated with and comforted them. I love hearing this. It makes me feel like my illness has in some small way been helpful and if you can turn something as shitty as depression into something vaguely good, then that feels like success.

But there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t fear its return. I am too busy to get ill. Or, maybe, if I come at this from a different angle, I am so busy because I worry that it might creep in if I sit still. I suspect that some of the speed and urgency to my writing comes from my fear that at any moment I could be grounded indefinitely.

I have too much that I need to do with the years I have left, and that stirs something like panic. I came to both parenting and writing late, and I want to cram as much of both into my life as possible. I don’t want to miss anything of my daughter Astrid’s life, even the big bit I know I can’t be there for, short of something truly remarkable happening in science that offers the opportunity for me to live as an animated head in a jar.

As a child, I was so hyperaware of the head-start my parents had on me, and that they wouldn’t be around forever. Now I feel it in reverse. I don’t want to live a day without seeing her. Parenting is soft and hard and bitter and sweet. You think constantly about a future you might not get to appear in.

Last time I ‘got sunk’ and had a depressive episode, which was during COVID (I mean, most people went a bit mad, but I went really mad) it was the most long-lasting episode of my life. It look me close to two years to feel well again, and the version of myself I would have recognised from before was long gone. At one point I considered ECT; I was really desperate. Once the worst of it was over, I was left with this flatness, this dull hum in my head. I thought I would never feel happiness again.

But I did. It lifted, slowly, imperceptibly so. It always does, if you can stick around and bear it.

(I beg you, if you are in it, please stick around and try and bear it. It will lift but you have to be here for that to happen.)

Like everyone, I have low days, and that’s OK. I am hypervigilant for those Mean Reds that would, given the chance, send me to my bed and leave me there, weeping, sleeping, wanting to die. I spend a lot of time giving words to how I feel day-to-day, describing the experience of being me inside my head, because I know this helps. I’m taking extra care to eat. To be sociable. To create, to write.

I understand there is a clear difference between feeling a bit low and sad and being on the precipice of a deep depression. In the past I have been so watchful and so terrified that I have run to my psychiatrist and psychotherapist at the slightest hint of extended low mood and anxiety only to be reassured that I’m OK, that I’m just feeling the natural ebbs and lows of life.

Sadness, pain, anxiety, these things are useful and inevitable. They are a part of life. They can’t be eliminated and just need to be felt and tolerated and listened to, even when they cause us discomfort.

I am not good at discomfort. I don’t think any of us are. I think this is the very root of many of our collective problems. We all want to be fine all the time, like happiness is normal!

In spite of all of it, all the sadness, the fear, the fucking inevitability of it all, I persist. I am holding on, back straight, head high. My grip on the guardrail feels strong. I am surprised by myself and by my calmness and my level head and my steady hand.

For anyone out there that is feeling less than sparkly, anyone that is ‘just’ surviving, that is living in the shadow of serious mental illness, I wish you well. I wish you sleep and a smoothie and a sympathetic GP receptionist to speak to. I wish you a bowl of buttery spaghetti that you can face eating, a nourishing time with people who love you, creativity and a good walk and a funny podcast. I wish you medication that works with minimal side effects. I wish you the strength and patience required to get through this bad moment knowing that it isn’t forever; because it really isn’t forever. I promise you.

My novel Bitter Sweet is out now all over the world. You can order from the US HERE and the UK HERE. Please subscribe and share this post if you enjoyed reading it. Thank you! Keep reading for this week’s recommendations…

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BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS:

• I listened to my lovely friend Julia Raeside’s TV podcast Box of Delights because I’ve recorded a few episodes with her which will be out soon, when she relaunches the with a new series. It is clever and funny, as is Julia’s novel Don’t Make Me Laugh which is out now in paperback.

  

• I watched The Ballad of Wallis Island and it is really a very special wee film and I can’t find a single fault in it. Absolute perfect and this is the weather for it!

• My favourite (and most complimented) item of clothing, this cardigan made by Helen from Resting Stitch Face, has come out of the closet and I am delighted that it is cool enough to wear it again.

  

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Everywhere, the light is dying. Things are unbecoming. This is the cycle of things. Autumn has always been my favourite season but right now, the change feels impossible. I’m just not ready.

Soon enough the busses and Tubes will again be full in the mornings, and I’ll start remembering to take a jumper out with me. The leaves will turn overnight — or it will feel that way — and we will be plunged into a state close to hibernation. We will get ill, and we will make soup.

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I find that when I look back on this particular summer, it seems to have disappeared. It has been hot and long and I have been totally preoccupied. There have been wild highs, and plenty of lows. I have not felt grounded, or rooted, for what feels like a while. My perception of time is all off.

In the wild months before and then after the publication of Bitter Sweet I was so wonderfully distracted. It was a rush. All of my old life was on hold. Constant calls and messages and emails, exciting opportunities everywhere, never a dull day. I was becoming something new, I thought. I would be different.

Then it suddenly stopped, and the anticlimax of it all, the comedown, is hard. After years of build-up, it feels like it is all over. It isn’t, of course; the book keeps selling, the team keep working behind the scenes, people keep discovering the book, opportunities keep arising. But most of the PR is done. I still have a few book events in my calendar, but not many. This is the way it goes when you publish a book. The intensity is gone and with it I have found myself feeling quite. . . lost.

I don’t seem to have a grasp of where I exist amongst the many ‘hats’ I now wear. Mother. Author. Friend. Journalist. Partner. Screenwriter. Essayist. Vegetarian. Runner. Depressive. Wise old sage. Loose canon. Introvert. Party girl. Good girl. Eccentric. Grief expert. Greenhorn. Over-achiever. Under-qualified-loud-mouth. Nothing at all.

In an attempt to find steady ground and come back to myself, following the advice of a friend, I made a list of everything that is true and certain that stands out to me when I think about what I have done and felt in the last month that life has been quieter again. It helped. Here is an edited version of that list.

• I have felt floored with admiration and been totally humbled by Sally Rooney and Alice Oswald as they have taken career-changing and life-changing action in support of Palestine, and rebelling against our government.

• I have failed to find my daughter’s left Croc (she is three, Crocs are acceptable) after carelessly leaving them outside one evening. I am certain that it has been taken by the fox that shits on my garden furniture every single night.

• I have been to Barcelona on a very last-minute trip, and spent the most dreamy, wild three days with one of my oldest and most inspirational friends in her perfect apartment in Gràcia. We drank vermouth and sat on the beach and danced to Maribou State at Poble Espanyol in the glorious evening heat and we ate a lot of potatoes and I left feeling renewed (and hungover).

• I have spilled a glass of wine so spectacularly that it drew into question everything I thought I knew about physics, and in doing so ruined two of my daughter’s favourite books.

• I have been on BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour and talked about grief and parenting and this was one of the highs of my whole long life.

• I have eaten half a can of Perelló olives with a glass of white wine and called it supper.

• I have allowed allowed my child to have a single chocolate cupcake and called it supper, just to avoid an argument.

• I have fixed the baby gate. All by myself.

• I have solo parented (see points above)

• I have deep-cleaned my cursed air fryer, scrubbing it until my fingernails broke. (My best friend has just informed me that you can put the trays in the dishwasher?! Please confirm)

• I have deleted Instagram from my phone in an attempt to break-up with my own heartache, and constant need for validation. It has made me feel much better.

• I have written more freely than I have in my life.

• I have been to see Oasis. . .

• I have battled with the kid about why 5:15am is not an acceptable time to get out of bed, and lost every single time.

• I have made music with my friend, and written my first song in five years. It has been cathartic and reminded me how much I love writing music, and how much the feeling of it differs to writing prose.

• I have deepened and nurtured new friendships, and done a lot of laughing in the process.

• I have exchanged countless voice-notes with my friends, and it has helped those far away feel closer.

• I have given advice that I can’t take, wondering who I am really talking to.

• I have written bad poetry in my notes app and it has been totally freeing to write for absolute no one but myself.

• I have felt creatively inspired despite my low energy levels, which has been deeply reassuring about the longevity of my career.

• I have been (or was, at one point) so consumed by my own shit that I couldn’t find it in me to feel truly happy for a friend that has finally found some love and peace in this world. I allowed this sadness 24 hours to consume me and then picked myself up and made enthusiastic amends.

• I have felt enormous pride at two massive work achievements (to be announced), and cried at the accompanying unhappiness I still feel somewhere unreachable inside of me. It’s fuckin’ bittersweet, this life, isn’t it.

• I have felt like a success and a failure and a good and a bad mother and a good and bad friend and every contradiction you can feel.

• I have felt utter, total despair at both the world and myself, and not known what to do about it.

• I have looked to astrology for guidance and wisdom and found that no, it is not compatible with my personality. This was disappointing. I really wanted it to be. It had the potential to be such a huge comfort. Sigh.

• I have tried to be brave and courageous and go after what I want, and to be curious and open-hearted and generous when it hasn’t gone my way.

• I have completed a course of antibiotics.

• I have revisited, and edited, the first 20k words of my third book, which I wrote earlier this year when my life and the people in it were different. I have struggled to know if I can now finish it, because it really hurts to think of where I was then, all those months ago. I have decided that this is what is going to make it the best thing I have ever written.

Ultimately, what I have learned, is that whatever success looks like, in reality success is a feeling. Achievements can satiate a rough day but if you do not really feel pride and happiness and a true sense of accomplishment then it can still feel like everything good is out of reach. I do feel some of it, but not always. I put enormous pressure on myself in every aspect of my life, so I am more often than not disappointed when I know that I should be inwardly compassionate.

Even this feels like a failure. But. . .

This is as much for me as it is for you, dear reader: Binaries do not exist. Look at what is, and the contradictions of it all. Many things can be true at once. If you, too, feel a bit lost with this change in season, make your own list like this, for yourself or for the world, it doesn’t matter. But be honest about what you are and what you are not, because somewhere in between you will find the truth.

My debut novel Bitter Sweet is out now. You can order a copy wherever you are in the world by clicking the button below. This is the best way you can support me and my writing. Thank you!

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BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS:

• I have just watched all two seasons of Kat Sadler’s Such Brave Girls. It is one of the best shows I have seen in years.

• I have re-read Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff and felt again that I will never write anything as good, ever, ever. It is a perfect novel.

• I have been listening to the brilliant Amy Poehler’s Podcast Good Hang, and rewatching Parks and Recreation because it is such a good comfort blanket.

  

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When I’m happy and full of possibility I often say that I want to feel all of life, to live the biggest life, to experience all of the world and myself and people. Because I love people. It’s easy to feel infinite and invincible when you are happy. But, in my low moments (and there are many) I am none of those things. Like you, like all of us, I am fragile. And when my heart is broken, and it has been broken many times and in a myriad of different ways, I feel soft and small. And in these moments, that other enviable version of me feels impossible. How could she even be real?

I wonder if you feel like that, too. If you are open-hearted enough to have had your heart broken then I imagine that there is some resonance my words. It takes courage to be so vulnerable. I applaud you for it.

Sadness can feel like sickness, like nausea. In the moments when my own heart has felt broken, I have craved anger as a balm for my pain.

Anger is easier to manage than sadness, but long term, it leaves a much deeper, uglier scar. So, I want to tell you this; feel the anger when it comes, notice it, watch it, be curious about it. . . and then try your very best to let it go. Even if you need to scream into a pillow for that to happen.

Anger will not serve you, even if you have been wronged or let down, which you likely feel that you have.

But don’t ignore it. Anger should still be listened to. All of our feelings should be listened to, because they likely have something very important to tell us.

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This probably isn’t the first time that your heart has been broken, even if it is the worst break. I’m sorry to say that it likely won’t be the last. So think of it not as an irreparable break, like a shattered glass vase on a concrete floor. Instead, think of this experience as a crack, or a fracture. It will heal. Your integrity will hold, even if it that seems wildly impossible right now.

I think it can be helpful, when a romantic relationship ends, to look back and remember not only the good, but the bad. Can you see it for it really was? Probably not if you are in the heat of it. Rejection is as unbearable as sadness and it can cloud our minds and make it hard to see the truth of something. Is the person you are separating your existence from as perfect as you remember them, right now? Think about the details of them, all of them. Were they always a little out of reach, were you ever truly yourself with them - the truest version of you? Were there red flags, the whole way through, that you chose to ignore?

Maybe not. But maybe, just maybe, this will ring true.

Now make a list of those things. You can keep adding to it. It will help. Only the bad and questionable things have a place on this list. Pettiness can sometimes be restorative.

We both know that this is going to hurt for a while. No one can tell you how long for. This is life, to feel this; this is what it means to live.

Settle into it. Distract yourself. Do what you love doing, be with people who love you unconditionally and without judgement. Talk to them about it, cry, rant, scream, feel indignation. Whatever your comfort, indulge it. Go to the cinema, alone. Buy a new book. Drink a glass of wine in a bar with said book. Make yourself a too-large portion of spaghetti, and cover it in butter. Play your favourite album, loud. When you feel like you can’t take it anymore, have a freezing cold shower. Run, meditate, do breath work, do whatever you can do for your body that is within your physical means.

In a single moment of exquisite pain, write words about how you feel in your notes app, or notebook. Write these words only for you, but if you feel inclined, share them with your friends.

Always, always be gentle with yourself. ALWAYS. Treat yourself with the same kindness and care that you would give your most treasured friend were they in your shoes.

It won’t feel like this forever. You will be OK. Your heart will be OK. Your children will be OK. You will get through this and you will look back on this time, one day, and you might even feel glad that this happened. Imagine that!

When I think back to old heartbreaks, I look at my life now and the people in it, and they flicker, disappearing momentarily. I consider what my life would be without them, because they would not be here, had my heart not been broken.

I truly believe that if this lost love you are hurting over is meant to be, then it will come back to you sometime in the future.

Probably when you least expect it. Life is funny like that.

But for now, close the door. Don’t send that text you have drafted, especially not after a glass of wine when it seems like a really good idea. Don’t look at their Instagram, don’t watch their Stories. And definitely don’t call or email.

But also, don’t delete the photos. Just, don’t. Hide them somewhere instead, somewhere on a computer where you have to really look hard if you want to see them.

Just let the heartache be. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Love,

Hattie x

My debut novel Bitter Sweet is out NOW.

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS:

Heartbreak specific recommendations this week. Please share your go-to films, TV shows, songs, books and poems in the comments.

• Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind is my favourite heartbreak movie. I’d also say to watch Lost In Translation, Donnie Darko, and Almost Famous

• Literally any album by the National will help

• Never Enough by Turnstile is full of angry, post-hardcore heartbreak songs

• Complicated Woman by Self Esteem for more heartbreak rage, with dancing and crying. I won’t stop talking about this album

• XO by Elliott Smith is the ultimate heartbreak record

• When I’m sad I always return to my favourite comfort shows; Normal People, Parks and Recreation, Twin Peaks, Star Trek Voyager, The X-Files, Community and Buffy

• If you really need to cry, but feel blocked, watch All of Us Strangers

• Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes is the saddest poetry you will find

• Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler, and Plainsong by Kent Haruf, are a novels that I have always loved and revisited when I am sad.