I’m flat and cat-sitting for friends in Paris, a city which I’m told always empties out in August, and especially this year, perhaps, everything wavering in the heat of yet another blistering canicule. I actually love the city like this: slow and sleepy, half the shops and bars shut, deserted streets under painfully blue skies. It’s not quite as dry as London, there have been cloudbursts and hopeful spits of rain, but when I clamber up the paths of Buttes-Chaumont park the grass is mostly yellow and dead and studded with rubbish, even as sprinklers still tend to the bushes. I know the grass in the UK is even worse, that Wales is brown and dead in a way I’ve never before seen it in my life.

I’ve been walking everywhere because mostly everything is 90 mins away by foot max, and because it feels good to be putting the parts of the city together in my mind. A compact and walkable city, plenty of opportunities to sit and rehydrate in the shade. I could walk for an hour from my home in Walthamstow and barely reach Hackney properly, but here I walk from the 20th to the 9th in the same time. All over the city there are parts of pavement and road where the asphalt has simply melted then reformed, leaving huge wavy imprints like lava. Taking a walk along Canal Saint-Martin I pass crowds thronging its banks, intrepid swimmers, and a bad nightclub that I remember sitting outside at four am with my friend Andrew, whose flat I’m staying in now. In the mornings I like looking at the photos of his little family that are stuck to the fridge, but back then, when we met, having a family felt very far away.

The first week or so was for looking, and I wasn’t alone then anyway, a soft launch into solitude. I walked around glossy photographs at MEP and Carré de Baudouin, found Palais de Tokyo closed due to lack of air-conditioning. I’ll go if it cools down. On one of the hottest days I found myself dazed by the scale of Hilda af Klint’s mystical paintings at Grand Palais, drawn into them and hypnotised by the sense of premonition, of channelling, of some kind of peek behind a curtain. Sometimes I still feel like I can lift that curtain, sometimes I feel it billowing in the heat.

I’ve felt drawn towards the mystical generally this holiday, to signs and symbols and the devotional. Perhaps it’s the air of apocalypse, the prospect of the eclipse, which passed with little incident or fanfare in the part of Paris I found myself. Clair-Obscur at Bourse de Commerce was occult and hushed, dimly-lit, an exhibition where the beautiful and the macabre jostled next to each other in a way that never felt forced. In one room the paintings of Victor Man were so gorgeously illuminated, viewed with reverent hush by the slow-moving crowd. Yet in the photographs I took they seemed garish upon later viewing, the beauty doesn’t translate. Strange magic. In another room the disembodied sculptures of Alina Szapocznikow felt both irreverant and unsettling, and I’ve had them on my mind ever since. I went with my friend Ros, and it was an exhibition I’m glad I didn’t see in solitude, glad we could marvel at it together.

I’ve been reading, too, not as avidly or efficiently as I would like, but getting through a few books during the abundant Happy Hours, and over coffees at the restaurant downstairs. One was Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot, a novel about a woman who abandons her family for a cabin in the woods. From the perspective of those around her she is having a breakdown, leaving the world behind, leaving her children behind. Yet from her perspective the privilege and selfishness of solitude is not just luxurious, but connects her to the essential truth of herself: there’s a spiritual dimension in how she shuts herself off from one world but open to another, like she’s an anchorite.

Nature is an intrinsic part of this experience, a move towards a simpler existence that at first seems whimsical, but quickly becomes something more essential. The protagonist, Abra, moves with the rhythms of the seasons. Having never even enjoyed gardening before, suddenly she is opened up to the natural world. She depends on it for her sustenance, she falls ill once a year when the seasons shift. She has no watch or clock or mirror, only the world around her. Total solitude. And she makes it sound so deeply seductive, even when it’s difficult. Especially when you’re reading it and you yourself are alone, even if moving slowly to the rhythms of a city rather than nature.

But it’s not so easy to leave behind a whole other way of being, to renounce the world. Sitting in the park on a beach towel, on what was formerly grass but now barely recognisable as such, I think that we feel very far away from any kind of symbiosis; that maybe we’ve also renounced the world in a different way.

Sometimes the other version of the year makes itself known. In the Picasso museum gift shop I found a baby’s mobile and I thought I would have bought this, I would have been alone, but not alone. Being alone would have been over for me forever. Let it fall away. Teflon mind. Half the museum was closed due to heat, so I couldn’t see the things I wanted to, so I left.

I walked and walked and walked one day particularly, through four arrondissements and back. Felt the start of sunburn speckle my shoulders, did nothing about it. Started to feel dizzy, but also light and invincible. Being alone in my body has not been for lack of trying, I’ve been careless with it, but generous with it too. Flaming surges of desire. New hunger for the hot world, bending under my feet, hostile and burning. Already it feels like I hallucinated the months earlier in the year. In this body? I think, surveying new tan lines, sluggish with dehydration. The cat walks all over my stomach, I don't get anxious when I clean her litterbox.

Sometimes I’ll admit I’m compulsively walking, I’m compulsively remembering. I’m always trying to pinpoint the streets and bars from five years ago, when I came to Paris for a residency and fell in love for the city for the first time and really did lose my mind fully, though it was in a good way.

In the Musée de Cluny I found myself drawn to the smallest and most intricate objects, as well as little details in the largest. Animals sweetly woven into tapestries. Items of private devotion, portable altars, ivory combs carved with miniscule scenes of the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi. Items of private devotion has been going around in my head since then. In Permanence the two main characters put much faith in what they call votive objects, small and inconsequential things that act as their own items of private devotion.

2024 was a difficult year, and during it I developed a new compulsion for gathering smooth little stones and perfect shells wherever I went – on the shores of lakes in Scotland and Berlin, on the beaches of Wales and southern England and Ireland. Recently when I’ve been at the beach I haven’t felt so drawn to gathering these little stones, which I put in my pockets and in my bags at the time, and which still clink and tumble around whenever I put on a jacket I haven’t in a while, or dig out an old tote. When I find one I try to conjure up the memory of whatever beach I found it on but increasingly, now that I’ve divested the power they contained, the memories blur into one.

Waking up to a morning that’s mine and mine alone feels so luxurious, Cléa jumping into bed next to me, eating whatever and whenever I want. No ascetism in solitude here. I’m hungry, I want it all. I’m okay to go a whole day without speaking much to other people. I’ve developed a fascination with loneliness influencers, over the last few months, but watching their videos makes me feel panicky. The desire to shut yourself away, to cocoon and optimise yourself in preparation for some indeterminate point up ahead, makes me feel a deep existential dread. I watched one influencer eat what she called glass skin salad and tape up her mouth and do a deeply complicated and expensive skincare routine, baste herself in red light. All to go home night after night and rewatch the same TV show. What’s the point of it all? Solitude can be nourishing, and it can also be stasis. It can be breakdown or breakthrough.

Instead I’m going downstairs to the restaurant underneath the flat and drinking a coffee and practicing my bad French, I’m making myself elaborate little cheeseboards, I’m nursing a glass of cheap wine and watching everyone walking past. I’m reading and writing and napping and letting myself feel relaxed, letting my guard down, for the first time in a long time. I’m not preparing myself for anything and I’m definitely not optimised for anything, except maybe developing lactose intolerance from overexposure. Though it’s true I feel receptive, open to whatever the universe has planned. I’m out and about, eating steak tartare, blisters on my feet, meeting friends and acquaintances and strangers from time to time. I go to sleep definitely, deeply, but not really early. I wake up slowly into another strange heatwave day, still mostly alone.

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I make it out to Berlin somehow, though I can barely leave the house in the days before. The sequence of tasks is comforting: pack bag, get coach, buy tiny shampoos, drink one coffee, board, immediately eat lentilsuppe, pickles and bread with my friends when I arrive. Each completed task makes me feel better, and when I step off the plane I take a deep breath, I touch a version of myself without grief, or the grief is different. I let myself into the flat that I consider my home away from home, sit outside at a table and watch everyone passing. Later, walking down Hermannstrasse in clear evening light, I feel psychedelic with gratitude. Over the next days I do a beautiful event, I meet my German publisher, I buy a soft yellow raincoat, I send a draft of a novel to my agent. I eat falafel and cheeseboards and drink Suze tonics. You can run away from your problems, it turns out, or you mostly can. You can step back into a timeline where they never existed, where everything was deliciously formless and theoretical. There’s such relief on being on holiday from your life. I still find myself compulsively talking about when I was pregnant in the queue for the club toilets, but my friends are kind about it, though the next day I’m ashamed. There’s a clear dawn when we emerge.

2

A friend, D, comes to London; I’ve met him only once when our travels aligned, four years ago. Yet we’ve continued to talk often, despite living in other countries. For that one night we knew each other intimately. The first and only night, spinning around a new city together. But now we’re just penpals. We greet each other and somehow talk for nine hours straight. We want to see how far we can get along the river. We keep our eyes out for otters but find a drowned dog instead, distressingly. The sky is so blue. We stop for a drink. You haven’t changed, which makes me think maybe it’s possible I haven’t changed either? Which is comforting, he says. He says he still finds me effervescent, which I think I was once but am not now, have not been for years. Again, it’s nice to touch a previous version of myself, to remember what I was like. When I met him I was having the best summer of my life. Of course I was effervescent! I would give a lot to return to that summer: three weeks alone in Croatia, that delicious possibility-rich future again, slipping my easy body in and out of water. It really felt back then that anything could happen. Will you have kids? / I was pregnant recently, actually / There are just still lots of things I want to do first. We gesture with our hands on the wooden table of another pub to demonstrate how it might feel that the possibilities of our lives are narrowing, but it only takes one explosion to open up the funnel, and then the pipeline opens up even more than before. This is what his friend who is getting a divorce says, he explains. Evening slips on, it grows dark. I’m exactly one week older than him. You say we’re medium young, but soon we’ll be just medium, he says, shortly before we hug goodbye. Yes, I say. I know.

3

I love my bike, my silly peachy-pink bike, the bike which Luke said would change my life and, irritatingly, he was right. Sometimes I cycle 20-30 km in a day just getting around. I can go anywhere, I take the long routes, scenic and shaded. With each week that passes I feel my lungs and legs getting stronger, I can go faster, I use the higher gears. I wear sundresses with cycling shorts and tie the skirts up around my waist, then let them down – jaunty transformation! Shortly after I have my miscarriage we argue about nothing and then afterwards pedal bleakly together up the river the opposite direction to the way I’ll walk with D, because it felt like a thing you might do on a hot Saturday even if you’re angry with each other, to take a pleasure ride up past Tottenham and Edmonton, cool breeze on glaring water. Wild roses overrunning the hedgerows, sparking Luke’s hayfever as we stop off for a bacon sandwich and a coffee. It is so objectively pleasant, but I feel nothing. I have spent a lot of time lately googling nothing feels good and what’s the point in anything and no motivation, landing me always on the doorstop of anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure, which apparently might be normal and might pass. Weeks later I cycle back from an event, and the sunset is this beautiful shell-like peach-pink, and I feel a glimmer of something and think I am experiencing joy, and I go home and announce I think I experienced some joy just now! And Luke is thrilled for me.

4

In our house we have assigned our spare room as the airlock, the windows and doors closed and the bedding washed repeatedly and an air purifier running. A pollen-free zone, a sacred zone. Solving this task is satisfying. I don’t sleep in the airlock. I sleep instead carelessly and alone in the master bedroom with the windows open through the first heatwave, an industrial fan blowing pollen all over me, but it does nothing to me except maybe make my eyes a little sore. Nothing can touch me. With my eye mask on I can sleep and sleep and sleep for hours, through half the day, all the hours of sleep I missed in the weeks before.

5

I’m in Whitstable cooking breakfast for ten people at a hen do, my best friend Ed at my side, taking charge. We make halloumi, mushrooms, three bags of frozen hash browns, spinach, avocado, beans, so many different pots simmering, pour mimosas and juice. I am happy to be feeding everyone in this cavernous kitchen, unfamiliar happiness. Sometimes I’m forgetting what’s happened. I don’t wake up with sadness leading, with emptiness being the first thing on my mind. And all we have to do today is eat this brunch and then lie on the beach in the first tendrils of the heatwave. There is running into the sea. Fish and chips on the horizon. There is a day that feels like it will never end. Purity of purpose, purity of pleasure. It’s so simple. I’m on holiday from my life again. I come back with a bag rattling with oyster shells.

6

In less than a month I’ll be in Paris. In two months I’ll be in Switzerland, and the summer will be over. Everything is taking me away. My body is a strange place that isn’t behaving, a body acting up in ways that are unfamiliar to me, this body which has generally run like a clock until now, that has forgiven much. Though maybe it has not forgiven anything. There is a comforting simplicity in the times where I break down, I don’t know if I have ever cried so uncomplicatedly. I had something and then it was taken away; I had something and I lost it due to no fault of my own.

But still there are those shell-pink evenings. Cold water on a hot day. I can’t predict the future, but I resume the ability to finish reading a book. I even feel like writing, sometimes. I carry my friends’ six month year old baby around in my kitchen on my hip; she nestles her face into my shoulder. Her brother is three and draws bright scribbles on my patio in chalk. The swallows curl and shriek above.

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There’s something I was keeping from my last post about the weeks after publishing Permanence, an extra dimension to my waiting. In truth the strangeness wasn’t just a post-publication lull, but also because I was still adjusting to a new state altogether – a state that, abruptly, I am no longer in.

The first clue to this new state was perhaps in how bloated I felt at my book launch. But at least I had some unfamiliar cleavage, which I welcomed (second clue). The third clue was in how I slept so much on the long weekend following publication week, which I put down to book exhaustion. And the fourth was a startling nausea on the bus one evening after that weekend, mouth coppery and dry. It turned out that I was pregnant; but I would only remain so for four more weeks.

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Writing a novel is an unhinged enterprise, and it’s inevitable that you will feel slightly unhinged too. You wait and you wait, but actually what comes next is just your book being out in the world, and everything carrying on as before. You have permission to be a slightly altered and neurotic person for perhaps a month (I am reaching my allotted period), but things completely unrelated to your book will continue to need your attention, urgently and perhaps unexpectedly. You slowly realise, for the millionth time, that everything about a writing career is a marathon, not a sprint. There’s very little instant gratification, but there are so many tiny and major joys and weirdnesses and unexpected hurts. Some people you consider close friends or even lovers might not read your book, but strangers will tell you that they enjoyed it so much they’ve bought it for multiple people. You don’t get blasé about seeing your book in shop windows or on tables, or stop feeling mildly mortified if somewhere doesn’t stock it. The week after my launch I went for lunch with my best friend and, fortified by a bottle of wine, he went into a nearby bookshop and told them they should be stocking my book. He was so proud of me, even as I apologised and basically ran out of the shop, not before I caught him announcing “she was longlisted for the BOOKER!” (may we all have beloved friends who hype us thus).

Somehow I imagined a spring of great verve and personally-directed activity, and that imagined spring might yet happen! Any day now. I forgot about the sluggish period right after the high activity and drama and anticipation of a book launching, the adrenaline of appearing on the radio and speaking in front of crowds and also trying to hold onto some normality and meet deadlines and make up for the 5.45am wakings. Most reviews so far have been the raves of my dreams (Katie Kitamura describing my ‘power as a writer’ in the NYT!!!) and (most) indications (finally gave into the obsessive urge to scroll G**dreads, relationship ended with touching grass) are that people are enjoying my book.

And yet. How do we let ourselves feel the happiness of something when our mind and bodies haven’t caught up, when we feel suspended in this place of waiting? When there’s actually no defined point where the waiting will end, and you start to feel sick of waiting, of how much waiting in general has demanded of you, over the years. Waiting for news, for love, to see how something will pan out. Waiting becomes an unhealthy habit that stops you existing properly. Doing useful physical tasks helps. I re-organised my kitchen cupboards, or rather Luke did whilst I shimmered around, putting stuff in the bin, half present and half not. I continued to do my work at a painfully slow pace. And now I’m in Wales for a couple of days, continuing west after a delightful event at Small City Bookshop in Bristol.

In Wales I’ve been sleeping a lot (though still not past 6am, but then why waste the gorgeous verdant sunlight??) I visited my grandma and she made us oven chips and sausage that I folded ravenously into butties with heavily-buttered bread. We played rummy afterwards, and in the morning I ate crunchy nut cornflakes with ice cold milk, also ravenously. We walked down to Caerphilly castle, and the sun was shining. It was my grandma’s eighty-fifth birthday. Switch the numbers around, she kept joking. We saw many people that she knew and I waited patiently as each time she shared her gossip with the gravity and relish of an oracle – who was going out with who, who had committed a minor transgression of etiquette, who was in hospital. She is a lot smaller than me and hooked her arm into mine as she pointed out things like the cafe where she had met my grandad, who died twenty years ago now. At my parents’ house there’s a photo of her on her 50th, deeply glamorous with pale curls, cutting a cake while my grandad kisses her cheek and she laughs with her eyes closed. In her bathroom I felt moved by the tininess of the flip-flops she wears when she cleans the shower, size three. My grandma has no patience for waiting, which she would just call hanging around.

I saw a tarot reader just before my book came out, racked with uncertainty, and left our zoom session feeling incredibly calm. Perhaps I had just needed permission to believe that things would be fine, that nothing is that deep or irreversible, to remember that it’s impossible to be objective about one’s own success or perceived lack of it. I’m nostalgic for those couple of weeks after the session where people asked how I was doing and my response was “You know what…I’m actually so relaxed, what will be will be etc”. Luke (emotionally-attuned man who loves therapy) said I should be going to therapy and not tarot readers. Disagree! I miss that peaceful fortnight.

But I’m planning on re-emerging into the world any day now, with a second draft in progress and dramatically reduced screen time somehow and a sense of relief that the book is finally out there – beyond all else, what a miracle it feels like to write and to finish and to publish a book! Other things that need my attention have made themselves known. I’m so grateful sometimes, among all the weirdness, that I feel tearfully hallucinatory. I’ve had the strangest April of my life. But now May is coming, and everything else with it too.

Permanence is available now in the UK and the US!

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For example it once more seemed like the most important thing, suddenly, was to source a deeply glamorous outfit (understandable!), so I tried on so many options, cursing the Damson Madderfication of fashion lately and the abundance of overpriced polyester “Y2K” hell in vintage shops. I made sure to get a haircut from my blonde genius pal Lindsey the week before, and panic-bought moisturiser and retinol when I googled “best facials London??” and discovered that facials seem to cost £300 now. I planned to be deeply serene, to perhaps spend the afternoon relaxing in the bath, getting a restful sleep, get a manicure, etc etc.

What had happened is that I woke up after 5 hours of broken sleep and thought huh, you look terrible, better definitely have a nap later. But first, some work and some errands. I didn’t have a facial. Didn’t have time for a manicure. I travelled to the amazing TOAD Bakery to pick up my book launch cake (a calimansi curd and meringue cake, absolutely stun, no notes), and then after I got waylaid temporarily eating more TOAD pastries at home. I spent the afternoon doing stuff I should have done in the days before, and watching my window for a tiny nap narrow and narrow until it was almost gone. I managed five minutes in bed, a bad-tempered sleep, but then I woke up to my partner in the room, beaming, brandishing a bunch of flowers in the colours of the Permanence cover. I chose them all, he said, I wanted to get the colours perfect – and they were, peaches and pinks and a cloud of blue hydrangea, my favourite, in the middle.

The afternoon was kind of charmed, even given the frantic air of it, because after all the anxiety about what to wear I ended up finding my dream dress literally that afternoon, a pale blue silk slip from Hai. I paired it with a leather jacket I’ve had for forever that I bought on eBay, my favourite knee-high boots, and the first scruffy tote bag at hand, rather than the mythical illusory New Me outfit I had ambitiously planned, but it didn’t matter because despite it all I felt really beautiful and happy when I clattered out of the door, ten minutes late. Beautiful and happy and myself! A book launch isn’t to release some version of a New Me. A book launch is to celebrate the me that wrote the book! I told myself this when I was en route, and felt my stress start to dissipate.

Still, it’s hard to let go to my compulsions to get everything perfect. My preparations for getting ready reminded me of the early days of dating someone new, when I would almost obsessively try to be a perfect version of myself, physically and otherwise. I would scrub myself raw, perfect my eyeliner, my hands shaking. There was an adrenalised pleasure in this, a transformation. This time I wasn’t remotely perfect, but I had fun doing my makeup and I felt like a slippery, sexy seal in the luminous silk. I was in a taxi on a suddenly-sunny evening in spring, and it was not going to be a glamorous affair with canapés and champagne fountains and my face poreless and pristine, but so many people beloved to me were going to be there and the cake, the cake! I met my agent at Goodbye Horses before and drank a cucumber mint shrub and ate one (1) oyster; afterward the launch we went to the pub on the corner. I probably got a tiny bit of meringue and cream on everybody’s books when I signed them. It was low-key and it was perfect.

I think it’s so important to celebrate your book, to celebrate yourself, but it doesn’t have to be all bells and whistles (unless you want it to be!! It’s such a good excuse to have a huge party, after all.) But it can also be enough just be with the people you love and stand on the street and marvel at the Permanence-coded sunset that has poked through the cloud.

On my other IRL book launches the night has gone on much longer, stretching out into bars or afterparties. Last time, three years ago, we hosted an party at my partner’s old warehouse with litres of grapefruit negronis and music and Cursed Bread-inspired snacks. Now that warehouse is an island surrounded by Hackney Wick developments, the flat underneath evicted and in the process of being turned into shops. Lindsey does my hair in the warehouse, so I walked through the yard like I’ve done a million times over the last fourteen years, though now it was strange and sad and empty, cleared of all the rioting plants in containers and random art, and furniture where people would sit and relax and talk.

It was my first sober book launch, and it’s been three months since I drank today, actually, which now means it’s slightly longer than the last time I attempted sobriety, which means I’m now in uncharted territory. At times I felt overstimulated without alcohol’s buffer, but I think generally I am a kinder, more present person without the urge to keep refilling my glass as quickly as possible occupying my prefrontal cortex, and I felt that last night. I worried that I might not feel as euphoric, but I did, and this morning I joyfully cycled across the marshes to the sauna, and I cried the tiniest bit because I felt so happy and so lucky and loved. I sat among strangers in the heat and closed my eyes, and afterwards I had a tiny coffee and replied to my friends, looked at the photographs they had taken. It was grey today but I could smell greenery everywhere, and there was blossom scattered on the paths and the energetic singing of birds.

My amazing UK editor Hermione gave a brilliant speech which had everyone bowled over, especially me, describing my book as an impassioned defence of euphoric tyranny, which is all I have ever wanted to write and possibly all I ever want to write? How lucky I am to get to work with her editorial acuity and care, and for four entire books. Four speeches at four book launches. In the speech this time she referenced how meaningful it is to return to a space, how important it is to have writerly rituals. To stand in the same spot in the same bookshop but with a different book, and to think about all that has taken place in the three years between them. I felt like I was grappling with something, in those years, and I wrote the book through the grappling, because of the grappling. And then somehow I was standing in the same spot in my silk, clutching my warm glass of 0% champagne (totally fine, maybe even delicious). And maybe the grappling never ends, and I know there will be new things to grapple with. But I ate my cake with relish, and felt able to stand still for a minute.

Permanence is officially out tomorrow! I’m in conversation with Eliza Clark tomorrow 2nd April at Foyles TCR; in conversation with Daisy Johnson on 9th April at Daunts Notting Hill; in conversation on 14th April at Waterstones Nottingham. Come along :))

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For Permanence, it was the derangement of figuring out how to love. When I had the first seed of the idea I had just found myself newly single after many years, and I was profoundly weird and eager for romance, and so I went forth, attempting to re-learn how to navigate relationships in this strange, gulping, euphoric way. I had the tools and the desire, but no idea how to treat myself, or others, with any degree of measure.

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Maybe it’s because this year I’ve started writing a diary and have been trying to write in it daily. Surprisingly, it’s turned out to be one of my favourite changes of the year. Most of the entries have been pretty banal – dear diary, I ate some soup today, can’t think what else to write, byeee – but in others I’ve come to my diary feeling looser, or sadder, or just having woken up, which puts me sometimes in a bizarre state of clarity. At the very least it’s useful to track moods and impulses, to have something to be accountable to, and to write at least a sentence every day.

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Blue Ticket follows the narrator, Calla, who lives in a world where motherhood is decided by lottery in adolescence, and this then dictates the life you will live. Calla picks a blue ticket, which decides that she will not be a mother, and so she’s free to live another kind of life; but as she gets older, she feels an urge to get pregnant, to see what’s on the other side. She embarks on a strange road trip in a world both familiar and unfamiliar, a world I conceptualised as like a near-future but one which is much more analogue, like it was a future that forked off from ours several decades ago, one of mysterious surveillance and sinister doctors and ambiguous control. It’s a simplistic premise by design, as I was more interested in building a strange world and in Calla’s singular and claustrophobic experience, grappling with body and mind and landscape, instead of a prediction of the future.

I was prepared for the second novel to be Difficult, for the process of writing it to be Difficult, but I didn’t feel it at the time. Writing it was the only thing keeping me sane at a very insane time, and so I have a real affection for this, my weird second book, objectively my least successful and least popular, into which I poured so much and poured it relatively unselfconsciously, transported elsewhere from a life that felt overwhelming. I’m thinking of it now as I reflect on how the process of writing feels different to me these days; something I have more of a grasp of, I think, something which is more deliberate, or deliberate in a different way, which is good, largely, I think, though does lend itself to paralysis and self-loathing in ways it didn’t before. I worry there has been something else lost too – an ebullience, a playfulness. Writing now, I consciously try to get these elements back, to not overthink, but it will never be like how it was then.

Since it was published in 2020, reproductive rights have also regressed significantly. I never meant it to be a novel that was making a statement on reproductive rights as much as I meant it to be one that spoke to our anxieties around motherhood more generally, personal and cultural. By which I mean I didn’t see it as a new Handmaid’s Tale, but more of a meandering exploration of free will and maternal and survival instincts. Still, it’s impossible not to think about this, every time I google something about pregnancy or fertility and end up on Reddit boards of panicked expectant mothers based in the US, or if I check my temperature in the morning in the app that records my cycles and think about who else has access to these intimate details of me being pregnant or not-pregnant, or if I simply read the news.

In another version of my life I might now have a five year old, a four year old, which I can’t actually imagine at all. I wanted to be a mother so much, and then when it was out of the question again, when I was 32 and newly single, I hardly thought of it, except when it came to tentative conversations with people I was dating, or on birthdays where I would be like, huh, I’m 34. I’m 35. Etc etc. Now at almost 37 it’s on my mind again, though not with the same feverishness. I was seeking something else to love, I think now, seeking something to ground me, something to fix a life that felt uncontrollable. It felt like a want both small and outrageously huge. But how odd it also feels that something you want so much can be revealed as a circumstantial urge, something that can fade away, or at least fade to the background for a while.

In my febrile state back then I wrote a fairly deranged chapter that would lead to Blue Ticket’s end. It feels quite strange to revisit this, six years after writing it. The last two to three years feel like so little has happened to me personally in comparison to the years before that; those were years of illness and pandemic and upheaval and engagement and non-engagement and new love and living elsewhere. It feels like a different person wrote this chapter, and I don’t think I would be able to write something like it now, something so surreal and so sincere, because I’ve lost some kind of joy in my participation with the world, which also might just be a natural consequence of ageing and heartbreak and weariness and living in a world overshadowed by fascism’s approach. I wouldn’t say I’m cynical, but something has shifted in me, probably for good.

At the time of editing I was told this chapter would have to go, and at the time I was upset but reading back I’m like, yes, this is insane. It did have to go. But there’s also something beautiful in it, I think. And so I’m including it here, for paid subscribers.

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At two am I wake up and write with total clarity, I lived like that once. I was there. I worshipped at loves altar and now I need a new place to put my knees. Something for my heart gap

I wake up properly aro…

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Th…

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