Selving: Creating ourselves
How do we create ourselves? And what happens when our carefully fashioned self no longer fits? Or falls apart?
Selving explores these questions in three independent but interconnected works that build into a nuanced and compelling investigation of a struggle that lies at the heart of identity politics past, present and future - how to make peace with our complex and contradictory selves?
Weaving together memoir, fictional narratives and academic inquiry, Selving puts one life at the heart of a broader investigation into the impulses and emotions that power our individual identities. And by tracing a common path through these personal experiences, invites us to reflect on the ways in which we all create our unique selves.
A Creative Act: Fashioning a self
As we grow older the young start their inevitable transformation from people we feel a part of into people we feel apart from - like the adults of our own youthful past. Until an unexpected look or a smile disarms and connects us again, despite our apparent differences: just as a familiar refrain or a forgotten garment has the power to return us, with rush of emotion, to those heightened and heady days when we too were striving to create our independent selves.
Causes and concerns also evolve over time. Familiar themes are remixed and updated by each new generation, as they fight for the right to define their lives and appearances with the same determination as those who came before; with the same determination that I fought to define myself, so many decades ago now, until that particular crusade came to an abrupt and difficult end….
A Creative Act is a thoughtful and engaging exploration of how we fashion our appearances along with our identity, as well as an evocative memoir of lesbian life in 80s London.
Drawing on lived experience, academic enquiry and the fictional narratives of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, A Creative Act offers a nuanced insight into the personal and emotional issues that power identity politics past and present - as it invites us to reflect on the complex and contradictory fears and desires that lie at the heart of all our bodily selves.
A Genius Uncle: Imagining a self
As children, many of us fantasise about a different life where we’re more powerful and important than we feel in our own. Fairy tales and children’s stories speak strongly to this desire: with their Cinderellas, pauper princes and talented protagonists who at first appear to be absolutely ordinary - before being revealed as someone very special indeed.
Like many others, I was enthralled by these revelatory tales. And I found them particularly meaningful as I had a real-life indication that I and my family, might not be quite as ordinary as we appeared: in the form of my extraordinary Uncle - Alasdair to me and Alasdair Gray to others - who would appear occasionally in Stevenage where I grew up, like a traveller from another world; and who we visited in return on our annual pilgrimages to his home and my mother’s birthplace, Glasgow….
A Genius Uncle weaves together personal experience, family letters and unheard audio recordings from the final months of the artist and writer Alasdair Gray’s life, to create a warm and entertaining account of the inspirational impact of Uncle Alasdair and his artistic existence in Glasgow.
It will resonate with anyone who believes in creativity and is looking forward to making a life of their own, or reflecting on the choices that have shaped the life they’ve led; as it raises fascinating questions about the people and experiences that form our identity and inspire our path through life, together with the impact of the decisions we all have to make in the face of life’s inevitable difficulties.
An Interior Life: Being a self
Before I started writing I had a strong sense of the story of my life – as many of us do. But as I spent time reflecting and researching, new stories emerged: not necessarily to challenge the old one, but to sit alongside it. I had a clearer understanding of my uncle’s inspirational impact on my life when I’d written about it. And after reflecting on my experiences as a lesbian in the 1980s I realised it wasn’t really the identity that mattered to me, so much as the community and purpose that came with it - which were both lost once I was forced to face the complexity and messiness concealed beneath that chosen and cherished label.
This third book always felt like it was going to be the hardest to write, because the narrative in my mind is one of loss and difficulty….
Drawing on an imaginative mix of fiction, fact and personal experience, An Interior Life will challenge us to rethink our experience of mental illness as a loss of self and acknowledge it instead, as an integral part of many of our lives.
Following a redemptive journey from breakdown and collapse through to the repair and reconstruction of a damaged mind, An Interior Life will be an honest and uplifting investigation into the impact of mental illness on our sense of self as well as an engaging evocation of bohemian life in 1990s Brighton.