Write it down

Our dad always used to say to us, ‘Write it down’. If we’d have an idea or even tell a funny story. Write it down. His mother, our grandmother, kept a diary her entire life, into which her unfiltered thoughts would be poured like honey from a jar. Did she think anybody would read it? Was it just for her?

I never kept a diary properly. My diaries are all elaborate first entries followed by months-later apologies (to the diary? to myself?) for not having provided more constant updates. I preferred to imagine entire worlds and turn them into books and plays and films and stories.

Now, though, I’ve written a book about my life, my family, and the strange fact that other people seemed to know our Dad everywhere we went. A lot had to change for me to make the decision to write it, but now that the book is in bookshops, the strange new part for me is that I don’t get to be there for the next bit. Unlike in theatre, where by the end of the first week of the season you’re quite sure which bits work and which bits don’t, this is in other people’s hands now.

I was pleased to discover though, that some of the anxieties I had to tackle head-on in writing the book had been noticed by Matthew Ricketson, who reviewed it for The Conversation. WOULD THAT BE FUNNY is definitely the most personal thing I’ve written. This weekend, instead of doing the list of things I’d been planning, I slept. And then I accidentally slept again. And then again. Is it possible that talking about yourself is more exhausting than making up a whole world? I posit to you that it is, because I’m suddenly becoming unaccountably sleepy. If you can’t sleep tonight, may I suggest you pretend to do a radio interview with someone you’ve never met about your childhood. Really tuckers you out.