The lie that tells the truth

On the healing power of writing my first novel

Thank you for reading Beyond Survival, a publication about life after trauma. This is the first installment of a new series on writing about trauma. This edition is about revising my novel and getting it ready for submission. Subscribe to get future editions in your inbox: 

During the pandemic, I wrote a novel. 

I was flailing in my writing at the time. I wasn’t ready to write publicly about trauma but was unfulfilled by the link-based newsletters I was compiling. I wanted a more substantial project, which I assumed would be non-fiction as that had always been my primary mode as a writer. But when I gathered the snippets of scenes and ideas I’d accumulated throughout my 20s and hung them on a wall, an outline of a novel emerged.

Mapping my first novel

The book’s basic premise was: 

A young Irish woman graduates university in September 2008. Two weeks later, the Irish economy collapses. Our protagonist - Mary - moves to Dublin and struggles to find a job in a city  vice-gripped by a steep recession. She is alone in the world, grieving her mother (who died in a car accident several years before) and trying to establish a stable life for herself. It’s a coming of age story about grief, sexual trauma and what it means to grow up.

Even casual readers of my work will see a significant overlap between Mary’s life and my own story. The story is fictional. I made up the characters, settings and plot. But it’s also deeply emotionally true.

I wrote about the death of Mary’s beloved grandmother and how her house was cleared out before Mary got to salvage a few mementos.

I wrote about the days after a serious sexual assault and how Mary scalded her skin in the shower, desperately trying to erase the perpetrator's fingertips. 

I wrote about a hapless therapist, quirky co-workers and the drafty office I once worked in. 

I started in June 2020, writing by hand on an A4 pad. By December, I had a first draft.

I often cried as I wrote. 

The cloak of fiction allowed me to inhabit a character and guide her through some version of my young adult life. I transplanted some of the worst experiences of my life from the soupy waters of my unconscious into the story. On the page, I could see Mary’s breathtaking vulnerability. I returned to the person I was at 18 and 21 and 25, and tried to capture the scale of her losses.

Part of it, I’m sure, was the sense of control I felt. I went from being the victim of shitty life circumstances, to the woman who wrote a book about shitty life circumstances. Trauma, at its core, is a stripping away of one’s own agency. Writing enabled me to take the reins of my life again. I could tell this story however I wanted to. After so many years of processing my pain in private, feeling isolated and almost otherworldly because of the depth of my sorrow, it was a revelation to feel that nothing was unsayable.  

I worried that I was subjecting my protagonist to too much pain, that it wasn’t “realistic”. But not only was it realistic, it was real. It was (a version of) my story. Realising that the life I’d lived was too upsetting to inflict on a fictional character allowed me to grieve another layer of my own experience. 

This is the magic of fiction. The writerly form which is a lie (a fabricated reality), but which tells the truth. 

In particular, writing that book allowed me to grieve a series of relationships which were central to my life until they evaporated soon after my mother’s death. I’d talked about those relationships thousands of times in therapy. I’d wailed with despair at how profoundly I’d been let down. I’d re-considered my own behaviour, and acknowledged my own mistakes and failures. But those relationships couldn’t be repaired. I knew I would be met with recrimination rather than compassion. I knew the people involved wouldn’t be able to face their own behaviour. I knew I had to let them go, but I hadn’t been able to until I started writing. 

Writing the novel brought movement to my stagnant pain. It allowed me to grieve the things I’d lost and see if there was anything I wanted to salvage from the wreckage. (Short answer: Nothing. Leave it all behind.) Through the eyes of a fictional character, I could see the truth more clearly. As a version of my younger self’s story cohered on the page, I could make sense of what I’d been through. Not completely, but significantly. By the time I’d finished my first draft, I was a different person. 

Though I’d been in therapy for many years and had already cried rivers oceans of tears, writing the book allowed me to access my pain in a different way. It was only when I finished it that I understood how much unresolved anguish I’d been lugging around. By writing the book and expelling that pain, I made space for a richer, more joyful life. Six months later, I met my partner. 

At the time, writing a novel didn’t make a lot of sense. I was primarily a non-fiction writer and knew I was unlikely to sell a novel in the short-term. But when I sat down to write, this story was the only thing that bubbled to the front of my consciousness. It was in my fingertips, itching to be born. I couldn’t write anything else, until I had written it. I had to respect the urgency of a throbbing wound and see what it had to teach me.

The novel has sat in a (digital) drawer for more than three years, but I’m ready to return to it. Even if it's never published, it will always be the book that changed my life. I’d like to give it a chance to live in the world, to be published and find readers who might also find it meaningful. Looking back, I wonder if it was supposed to live in a drawer for a few years so that the life I have now had time to strengthen and take root. So that I could return to it knowing that the toughest chapters of my life were never going to be the whole story. 

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Huge thanks to

Emily Wick

and

Dana Leigh Lyons

for their recent posts on writing. Reading (& responding to) your work helped me formulate what I wanted to say here. Highly recommend both pieces on the fear of finishing and how our relationships with writing change over time. 

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💬 In the comments, I’d love to hear about your experiences writing fiction as a way to soothe old wounds. Is there a story that’s stuck in your fingertips right now? 

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