no.50. Happy birthday, WAW! 5 thoughts on writing newsletters

And a few thoughts on friendships after babies

Happy birthday Writing About Women! This is the 50th edition! Perhaps?! Tiredness has meant some mis-numbering along the way but I won’t let the devil of that detail spoil the party. Not least because I’ve just deleted something cynical and earnest I had written, droning on about the importance of modest celebrations. When I read it I thought, who is this miserable woman? I know I’m prone to not making a fuss - nothing to see here, no big deal etc etc. But actually, sticking with this newsletter for nearly four years is a big deal. In that time I have experienced a global pandemic, moved to a new city, had a baby, published a book, learned to drive and am managing an ongoing, all-consuming career crisis the entire time! And so I wanted to mark the occasion by writing something about writing.

I also wanted to say thank you for reading any of the last 50 newsletters. I’m grateful beyond words for every email opened, every email sent in return, every kind word or shared experience, every like or retweet or pledge or Ko-fi. It truly means the world.

1. Writing is the art of keeping on writing. When you don’t think you have anything to say. When you’re nervous about what you want to say. When you are dog-tired and nervous none of it makes sense. When you think you don’t have time. When there’s something more urgent to be done, something less selfish. When everything around you feels like fire. When you have lost your voice, self, focus, command of the English language. When you want to sit on the sofa and drink wine. When your heart is broken or heavy or dull or numb. When everything is out of control. When people you love are doing terrible things. When you are sadder than all the waves in the all the oceans. When you worry you write in cliches. When you think you’re writing isn’t good enough. When you wish more people read your writing. When you wonder what the point is…When you start to remember what it is to feel inspired. When you remember the small wins. When you think you might just have something. Keep writing, keep writing. It will see you through. 

2. Writing for yourself is the greatest privilege. After years of writing for editors, being able to write exactly what you want feels like passing your driving test and being alone behind the wheel for the first time every time you sit down with your laptop - both thrilling and mildly terrifying. But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss being edited. WAW could really do with a good editor - for all the typos and grammatical errors, obviously, but also to ask the right questions, force me to think a bit harder, cut down all these long sentences. Sometimes it feels like I’m throwing glitter through my computer screen, hoping it catches the light as it lands in an inbox, reflecting something in that person’s life. But occasionally it would be nice to offer words that are more deliberate and considered, less left to the chance of which way the wind is blowing. 

3. Writing is vulnerability. The more honestly you write, the more people will read it. And I don’t mean being confessional, I mean in-your-bones-honesty. I mean finding a way to articulate something undeniable. And I don’t mean undeniable like the weather or a series of facts, but something true about what it is to be a mother, or a woman, or a writer, or whatever it is, whatever it is to be alive in that context, at that moment. And it doesn’t have to be a revelation (what is anymore?) but it feels revelatory because it evades language. We just feel it and know it, like air. And the only route to that kind of honesty is vulnerability, and vulnerability is the greatest and most powerful route to connection I’ve ever found, especially among women. 

4. Writing is the constant dance of self-doubt and self-belief (thank you Chimamanda).  Every time I send one of these out I have to push through all the endless reasons my writing isn’t good enough. And as I push through that army of self-doubt, I simultaneously have to fight for my tiny corner of the internet. I have to give it everything I have; the best, most honest writing I can offer, and believe in it entirely to find the mental fortitude to hit send. I am offence and defence and I play my heart out at both ends every month. 

5. Writing is how I understand myself, or at least try to. And that’s why I believe writing is essential. For me, like many others, writing isn’t a hobby. It isn’t journaling or one of those strange online sessions where people log on and write silently over Zoom. It’s not a self-branding exercise or an extension of a large Instagram following. Writing is like the white chalk they outline bodies with in murder scenes. It’s a flag on the moon. It’s a million selfies. It's the thing that we have that lets us know we are here. It tells the world who we are, and who we want to be. It marks the shape of us for all to see. And it sees me through. Especially since becoming a mother. This little space to write freely and honestly has held my head above the water more times than I can say.
   

   

   
   So happy birthday, Writing About Women.
   
   On with the show.
   
   
   

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We’re in her studio this time. Her artwork is as bright as her clothes and it’s hanging on the walls. There’s a makeshift bar and some sofas. She welcomes us in as if she’s known us forever but she’s only met my friend, M and her son, briefly a few hours earlier. She’s laid out toys for the little ones, as her eldest daughter and her friend watch Junior Eurovision on the Apple Mac. Soon her other friend, who is also her assistant, arrives with her daughter and husband. Now there is a gaggle of kids, of all different ages, playing in the next room, partitioned off by a wall of glass. A is running between the two spaces searching for breadsticks as wine is opened and conversation starts and people who were strangers that morning realise they were once in the same place, know the same people, went to the same warehouses. And it has all the warmth of a Shirley Hughes sketch but the colours are bold and striking and the afternoon wine reminds us that life isn’t just the cosiness of soft lines and gentle sketching. It’s so much harder than that. The imprint is so much deeper. It is so much more vibrant and electric and tougher than that. And the talk of London neighbourhoods and how things used to be is like showing each other our badges of honour; look how I have lived, look what I have done, look who I really am. And suddenly a little person needs a snack, and we’re all the things at once; the young ones in Dalston pretending not to be imitated but also mothers with bathtime looming. I sit in between one of my oldest friends and my newest friend and I feel held, suspended in some way, protected by calm hands as if cupped around a dandelion, like I ones I show A in the garden, sheltering the seeds from the wind before we blow them away.

And that’s how P made me feel, a week later, when I arrived at his front door and he took my bags and walked me to the seat I always sit in. And then, for the next 11 hours, I didn’t move, other than to walk into the kitchen to sit at the table and eat the dinner he’d cooked and drink wine he’d opened. And after all these long days of holding a baby, I felt held, a warm, protective drawing in. 

And it’s about here that I wanted to write something profound and true about friendship, write the kind of thing that maybe one friend might send to another by way of saying, look, that’s us. But instead, I need to write about how when I left P the next day all I could see was… Mount Rushmore? And comically and surreally, in my mind’s eye, my friend’s faces were carved on the mountainside, all pompous and self-righteous in red stone, in the place of presidents. And I knew then, like I’ve known for so long now, that these friendships are grand and epic, they are carved into me, or perhaps they have carved me. And they will stand the test of time, stand firm and solid in their loyalty. And the metaphors are terrible and endless but I was flooded with them: their friendship is the foundation of my life, it is imposing and solid and unmoveable, it is one of the great wonders of my world. And on and on it went. And when I had arrived at P’s house, sweaty and ill and exhausted, P said you look at the end of your tether, and I said, I am tetherless, and this great big giant of a friend, way up there in all my adoration, was still close enough to read the unspoken detail on my face, was close enough to know that I was one glass of wine away from tears. And in the morning we sat in the garden with the sun on our faces and I felt rested and calm and nourished from taking shelter at the foot of my Mount Rushmore. 

And when I got on the train home, I saw an email from someone I don’t know that well. She was responding to something I had written and she told me she was nervous about her friends starting to have babies, and she is unsure if she wants to, and what it would mean for her friendships. And all I could say is what I truly believe: that friendships have seasons and you'll know when they’re real because they’ll come back to you. And early motherhood is most definitely a season yet P doesn’t have kids, and I have taken most comfort from him in recent times. And while other members of Mount Rushmore are mothers and have held me through times like only they could, our best friendships, the very real ones, the ones carved into our landscapes, can endure nearly all weathers. And my correspondent’s angst and worry for what is to come is understandable, and perhaps some friendships won’t survive and perhaps she’ll find new, other friends who are available and not exhausted and broke. But I hope she’ll be as generous as P when her friends need her the most, and I hope I remember that Rushmore isn’t a one-way mountain, that we must always find time for our friends, wherever they are in their lives, whoever they’re with, whatever season they are in. Because they will save us, protect us from blowing winds, scoop us up and hold us tight, pour the wine and say, Yes I’ve got all night. Tell me everything. 

Great Things

Slim picking coming off the back of two weeks without childcare and with multiple illnesses in the house but… 

I really admired the honesty and vulnerability of Penny Wincer on being brave in her brilliant substack, Not Too Busy to Write.

I saw Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood at the Aflorni in Bristol. The docu-photography pieces were particularly powerful.

Was utterly gripped by Shogun. Mariko!! (And there’s possibly two new seasons?!)

Moira Donegan always saying what I need her to; on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s upside-down flag and on why it took video evidence to believe P Diddy is an abuser.

As always,

thank you for reading,

Mx