People LIke Her(37)
Since when did we even start calling mums mamas in this country?
Grace was a wonderful mother, just as I knew she would be. She kept saying to me, Mum, I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I’m going to be any good at it. I kept telling her, You are going to be wonderful. And I was not wrong. I can remember her telling me that first night after Ailsa was born, she barely slept, she was just staring at her and staring at her—she was so beautiful, so precious, such an awesome responsibility. What makes a great mum? The same thing that makes a great dad. Putting your child first—and not just when it suits or when a photo opportunity arises or when you feel like it. It means making decisions and thinking about things and being prepared to say no when you need to (and not just when it’s convenient). It means worrying. It means caring. It means constantly walking a fine line between joy and terror. It means constantly asking yourself whether you are making the right decisions, and for whose benefit you are really making them. It means being a parent all day every day and all night too, no matter where you are or what else you have going on. That was what made Grace a great mum.
And then there is Emmy’s approach.
The Have another glass of wine—it’s probably fine approach to parenting, where the only practical advice is a cheap trick to get you five more minutes in bed in the morning or to occupy them while you get on with something else. That is continually complaining that you don’t get to go to bars and drink cocktails until three a.m. or go on holiday to sophisticated places or have sex in the living room anymore. The good-enough, that’ll-do, we’re-all-heroes-just-for-putting-some-cornflakes-in-a-bowl-and-not-letting-them-drown-in-the-bath method of raising children. The How can I turn parenting into a profession? and let-them-eat-crisps-all-day-if-it-keeps-them-quiet-and-the-crisps-are-organic approach.
Guess which one of these people has won an award—an actual award—for their parenting. Guess who now gets paid to hold forth about parenting to other people. It is a terrible thing to say—it is a terrible thing to think—but sometimes I feel like some people don’t really deserve their children.
Dan
Lunches with my publisher have been on a trajectory of steadily diminishing impressiveness over the years. They started out, after I had signed (and faxed over) the contract for my first book, at a place opposite the Garrick—all white-aproned staff and napkins you can barely fold and menus on thick card embossed with curlicued lettering, like the seating plan outside the dining area at a fancy wedding. I ordered the quail. My editor was there, my agent, several other people from the publishing company, all of them laughing at my jokes and telling me how excited they were about the book, how their boyfriend had asked them what they were laughing about when they were reading the manuscript in bed and how he had now read it and loved it too, what a buzz there was about it in the marketing department.
After lunch we all went up to the office and people kept getting called over from their desks or out from their cubicles to meet me and say hello. After the book had come out, there followed several lunches of slightly lesser grandeur, just me and my new editor, strictly lunch break only, one glass of wine each and a starter and main course before they had to get back to the office, a chance to catch up and talk about the next book and how it was going. After two or three of these lunches, I found that I was the only one ordering a glass of wine. After a while, we dropped the starter. That editor left. I got a new editor. We had a getting-to-know-you lunch—in a Pizza Express. She showed no sign of having read my first novel or of having any particular interest in my second. Almost half the lunch consisted of her telling me about a house she and her fiancée were planning to buy in Crystal Palace. That was eighteen months ago. We haven’t lunched since.
Do I sound bitter? So be it.
You can imagine my surprise when that same editor suddenly got in touch out of the blue and told me they were really keen to meet up. Was I free next Monday? “Sure thing,” I said, without really checking. After all, it is not like Emmy consults with me every time she arranges a work thing. The editor suggested we meet at one o’clock at a new place serving Indian tapas near King’s Cross. Sounds intriguing, I wrote in my email. It was only after I had replied that she asked me to send what I had of the novel so she could look at it over the weekend.
A cold fist of fear gripped my guts. I have shown snippets of the novel to people over the years. Back when I first started it, I used to read Emmy bits I’d written that day that I was especially proud of. My agent and I had talked the project over a lot, early on, and I’d sent her a couple of chapters. She had been cautiously positive, although she had added it was hard to really comment until she saw more of it. That was five years ago.
Something I should make clear is that I’m not technically blocked when it comes to writing. Nor am I lazy. I don’t spend all day staring at a blank screen, nor do I spend my time lounging around in my underwear eating crisps. I’m actually quite diligent and industrious, as writers go. I’ve probably put down enough words on the page over the years to fill four or five novels. My problem is that I then go back and delete them all.
The thing no one tells you about your first novel is that it is by far the easiest one you’ll ever write. You’re young. You’re arrogant. You have an idea one day and you sit down that evening and start writing and what you are writing turns out pretty good and so you keep going and by the end of the week you have five thousand words and by the end of the month you have twenty thousand words. You show it to some close friends, and they really like it, so you keep going. And you finish it. And you are delighted with yourself just for having finished it. And when you send it to an agent and they like it too, you are so delighted with the book and with yourself that you walk around humming for days. And then someone says they want to publish it. And then suddenly you are a writer, a real writer, a soon-to-be-published writer. And maybe that is why writing a second book is hard. Because just writing a book suddenly does not seem like such an achievement anymore. And other days you’ll write something you really like but then you find yourself wondering whether it is too much like something you wrote in the first book. And some days you’ll write something you like but find yourself wondering whether this new novel is going to turn out too different from the first book. And the longer you have spent on a book, the more the pressure builds up, and the higher you imagine everyone’s expectations are going to be . . .