Editing: The Trouble with Conversation; to speak or not to speak…

The previous introductory chapter to this book was rubbish. When I read it back, months after writing it, I decided that it would put me off reading the book, rather than drawing me in. I needed to somehow communicate to the reader what the experience of reading the book was going to be like. From my previous intro, no reader would have been able to guess. I decided that the best way to do this would be to write an account of my childhood experiences that eventually compelled me to write the book.

One month later, the chapter was complete; it became much bigger in scope than I had originally imagined. Writing it was an emotional and cathartic experience, touching on a lot of deep emotional wounds, some of which I believe I had never written about, or even spoken about previously.

My father is long-since dead, so recording my impressions of him did not seem a problem. But my mother is still alive, and my portrayal of her is not greatly sympathetic. I know (her “child-like” character being what it is) that if she were to read this account, she would almost certainly be hurt, offended, outraged, and may possibly never speak to me again (some people might regard that an advantage). She would certainly not be able to recognise herself in the portrayal.

When I was reading back and editing the chapter, I was thinking about all this, and I started to wonder whether I might be exaggerating, whether I was just being too sensitive and that the situations had never been as bad as I now remember.

And here came another of those wonderful incidents of synchronicity that I’ve been noticing more and more over recent years. As I had this chapter open on my word processor, and I was editing it while having all the above doubts running through my mind, my phone (which is right beside my monitor) rang. I picked it up and it was my sister. And, while I was watching my words on the screen, she started telling me about how she had been suffering recently at the hands of mother’s various forms of abuse. She was in tears at several points as we discussed how mother had behaved through our childhood. Her own experience of mother had been very similar to my own. This was the first time we had talked about this. Previously I had always thought that she did not have too bad a time in the family home. Even though we had been fairly close as children, we had never discussed this (perhaps this was due to the “conspiracy of silence” in the family home, as mentioned in the chapter). As she described her experiences then and now, I realized that every word of my text should remain and that, if anything, I was probably understating the case (as writers tend to).

How uncanny that she should phone me to disclose all this at the very moment that I was editing my text and having serious doubts about publishing it.

Sometimes the truth has to be told.

The text is very personal, but I feel that that is the difference between being alive or not; if you’re not going to tell the truth about such injustices, then what’s the point of being alive. To not talk about such things, would be to denigrate the value of your own life. Such talk should not be suppressed.

 

Read the chapter

 

3 October 2008