Anorexia, Self Harm, Janet Ellis and Stephen King

      My daughter, whom I thought would be home soon, has just had a relapse, as far as her anorexia is concerned. She’s back on `the tube’ and the prospect of home is receding fast, along with her ability to sit her `A’ levels.

     My son is becoming an ever more difficult question mark and definitely won’t be home any time soon. Social Services have begun nosing around, uttering phrases like `the importance of keeping him safe’ and `this is no reflection on your parenting’, `court order’, which make me want to stamp my foot and scream down the phone, the very antithesis of the reasonable therapist persona I usually manage to cultivate.

     Another daughter (there are 6 adopted siblings) appears to have suffered a psychotic break and her 6 month old son has been taken into temporary foster care. She’s taken to ringing me at all hours to ask about dates and holidays, the timing of events and celebrations, the same tearful questions over and over, as if I had an aging parent on the phone. I try to cultivate patience and calm, very challenging in a dry January.

      As for writing, Janet Ellis, who was on the same Curtis Brown Creative course as me was picked by the Observer in its `Meet the New Faces of Fiction for 2016’ list. I’m not usually subject to envy, conscious that I’ve had my fair share of privilege and luck in life, but I did feel a sharp pang on opening the paper. Janet’s book, `The Butcher’s Hook’, is wonderfully written, it didn’t seem to need the endless drafts mine has, and she well deserves this launch next month. But I would so like to be in her (beautiful) shoes.

But as my personal reality has become ever bleaker this past week, my resolve seems only to have stiffened. I’ve switched off my phone, shut down my laptop and returned to Stephen King for more gems:

·       `When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure’. (And when you’re not so young? I wonder)

·       `One thing I’ve noticed is that when you’ve had a little success, magazines are a lot less apt to use that phrase, `Not for us.’ (Just need to get that little success...)

·       Gould, the editor of a local newpaper King worked on as a teen told him, `When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.’ The best advice, ever.

·       Gould also told him: `Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.’

·       `I don’t want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network), but there was a view among the student writers I knew at that time that good writing came spontaneously, in an uprush of feeling that had to come at once; when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven, you couldn’t just stand around with your hammer in your hand.’ (`I didn’t cop to much of this attitude’, he adds, neatly puncturing the conceit.)