Don’t write the trauma memoir until the trauma’s gone

It takes as long as it takes

Circa 2000, the author, his cousin and brother. Photo via Ellie Gomperts

It’s almost embarrassing how long it took. I’ve written about it, of course, so much so that even fans of my work, and there are a few, have told me that I might want to move on from the topic. But I couldn’t, and how I wanted to, quite shake it. It was like a smell, a constant odour which hung about myself, that I felt that all could detect, of a young man who’d underachieved, who’d squandered their talent, who’d fallen short.

In the words of the therapist at the time ‘that shafted you, I think.’ A fair observation. But I still felt embarrassed about it, that something so minor, albeit admittedly dramatic, the failure of a piece of a student drama, could have such a profound effect on me, could have so thoroughly sent the ball of my life crashing into my next door neighbour’s garden. All I could say is that for twenty years, no matter what I did – move to Germany, have success in comedy, fall in love and out of love and in love again – nothing quite healed the wound.

Until one day I looked down at the scar and it was gone. Or at least faded to the point of invisibility. It happened due to many things together, getting married and getting a job and finding a readership, but the main thing was that it was gone. I’d tried to get rid of it for so many years and it had finally, through some subtle concoction of events, come to pass.

I had tried to solve it by writing. I believed, rightly or wrongly that I could write my way out of the wounding. I chose fiction first, writing about it obliquely in my early unpublishable first novel and directly in the second self-published one, and then offering an honest account of events here in a piece which went viral.

However worthwhile that all was in literary terms, none of it really ended the pain. It was more like rearranging food around on my plate. Nor did success of some kind or other help really, which led me to conclude that it’s a mistake to think you can heal failure with success. Not least because failure tends to be rather more memorable. Anyway, we’re talking today about how I felt, and I felt, on a deep level, hurt.

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It makes me sceptical of the publishing industry’s current attitude to trauma. That attitude seems consistent with the poet John Berryman’s comment on suffering, namely that an artist, after they face ‘the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill them’, is ‘in business’. This is the attitude that all suffering is a precursor to literary possibility, that when bad stuff happens to an artist, it’s always to the benefit of their work. And in that spirit publishing says, OK, you had something awful happen to you - can you get us 100,000 words by the end of the year?’

Recently, I read Tara Westover’s memoir ‘Educated’ and, granting it’s a fascinating story, I found myself thinking, you are not finished living out the aftermath of this, this story is still in flux, your attitudes to the events are all in a parenthesis. It would be better for you to write this memoir later and allow your understanding of your own story to continue to evolve.

There are very basic things about my own experiences it took me a long time to understand. I always thought of myself as precocious, for example, but in the last years have realized I was actually an astonishingly immature young man. Sure, I was relatively artistically mature - I could for instance have written a trauma memoir about my parents’ visceral marriage - but in terms of understanding others and their needs I was a rube.

Such realizations are not necessarily amenable to publishing schedules. Unsurprisingly, ‘I’ll write this book in twenty years when the wounds life have given me have set’ isn’t a pitch most publishers are receptive to. Of course, in that case the book might for its part endure for a hundred years.

I’ve been thinking a lot of late about the cycles of life.

At 42, the time of life I feel suddenly oddly close to is my late teenage years. I mean just after I went off to uni aged 19; I’ve moved to a new city, a smaller one, and my until then longest relationship has broken down. I'm also starting again in a new career.

It feels like the whole two decades of my 20s through to 40 was a sort of fast rotating spin cycle of characters and jobs and different places that has all led me back to here, beginning again in midlife but with a calmer head. In fairness, I was always pretty calm.

I find myself looking back on that two-decade rotunda with a certain amount of neutrality now and with the additional sense that the epoch it belonged to has slid into the recent past. ‘Emotion recollected in tranquility’, as Wordsworth had it, but I’m not sure publishing wants the tranquility. It wants all the emotion now. It leaves me thinking what a strange epithet of praise in relation to writing ‘raw’ is; outside of certain sketchy sexual encounters, when is ‘raw’ ever considered a compliment?

I wouldn’t say that writing about wounds before they’re healed up is actively harmful to them. It just makes you write about them differently. I myself approached the subject many times, first through fiction, seeking to transmogrify the experience into something other than it had been. I’m not sure the attempt made any difference one way or other; healing continued on its own schedule.

All that it meant was that there was a note of falseness in how I discussed it in my writing, and beyond that in my life, because I couldn’t let on how I was really feeling. It just isn’t the done thing to admit to being trapped by your past, that a past experience trauma has become foundational to your identity. We're supposed to absorb lessons and move on.

Believe me, I felt as embarrassed as anyone that one night of student drama had me walking round feeling spiritually crippled for twenty years. But there we go. And I can assure you it wasn’t what felt like suffering in the absence of real suffering, because other on paper ‘worse’ things happened to me in that time which had less of an overall impact on me. Perhaps in part because they were the ‘normal’ things which go wrong in life; heartbreak, bereavement, illness.

I can only describe my experience being as there having been, just as the rocket ship of my life was set up to launch, a nasty accident which resulted in an abortive launch and casualties, and I spent the next decades researching engineering and interviewing experts to make sure the same thing never happened again. It led to a lifelong fascination with those such as Nick Drake or Syd Barrett whose lives similarly failed to take off after hugely promising beginnings in young adulthood.

Naturally, I survived. I’m writing this now. Nowadays my ship is confidently sailing the high or at least mid-ranking seas, headed by myself as the increasingly business-like and brisk captain, able, I dare say, to give a little more to others these days. I can at last say that I’m really over that foundational trauma now, but I would have said the same to you ten years ago and it would have been a lie. I suppose you’ll just have to take my word for it.

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Maybe more of us when we admit are holding some kind of deep and secret shame – and my advice is never to underestimate how small and specific that shame might look like for someone. Mine was founded on the fact that the play I wrote was a horrendous flop. Maybe we’re all like this, walking the world looking for something to heal our wounds quicker than obstreperous old time. Of course love helps, helps very much, but not just love on its own.

There may be no remedy for what ails you than the strange admixture of time and experience and intangibles which see you arriva at the day you struggle to remember where the wound even was. The body does this, just somehow one day sorts out a seemingly perennial problem, so why not the soul? Sometimes we talk about accepting the mystery of things, but there is a simplicity of things that can be challenging to accept too, like that in certain cases the only solution to a problem is to wait.

The lesson of all this, and it doesn’t seem a lesson our instant-fix age seems to want to heed, is that you heal when you heal. And how you heal too. You’re just as likely to heal from your friend gifting you a nice juicy black pudding as you are from writing an exhaustive seventy-thousand iteration of who hurt you and why. Certain things do seem to help; being heard, being loved, and yes, it does help when things go right for you professionally.

None of it fundamentally changes the timelines, which, in further good news for fans of ‘patience’, are unique to each and every one of us. I look back at my life and simply can’t believe it took me two decades to get over a student play I wrote going very badly wrong. But that was my fate, my own little thread in humanity’s rich weave. I wish to God it had been quicker but it wasn’t. I experienced a bad break, I guess, on a bone not yet formed, and hobbled about until it finally fixed.

I wish you all the greatest of luck – and here I speak from a perch harder-won than if I had pronounced the same sentiment earlier – on finding a way to survive for however long that the mysterious process of healing requires. Thriving may be an ask, but you should certainly hang in there.