This day three years ago THIN PLACES, my debut book, came into the world.
I had a feeling last night before bed that there was something, right there, in the air; a wee memory of something important I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Then our toddler got sick, proper projectile vomiting, the most sick I have ever seen a person be, and after three sets of bedding changes and bed swaps I lost sight of whatever that something was…
…until I logged into Instagram and it all came flooding back.
My first book.
Published in the first winter of a global pandemic.
The book that made me who I am in many ways.
The book that took me to the very edge, to those thin places themselves, the book that I am still trying to define my relationship with.
A book I am unspeakably proud of, though I only began to feel that this year, really when I began writing my third.
A book that taught me so much about identity and healing.
A book that means I still have readers message me almost daily thanking me for it. Telling me what it means to them.
That it saved their life (and I understand what it means to feel that way and for this to be a thing we need to share.)
I launched it pregnant, in our small cottage at the end of a muddy laneway, in my pyjamas.
It was a million miles away from what I’d imagined when I’d signed the contract two years before. No in person launch, no book signings, no lunch with friends to celebrate. No tour. No meeting readers, or booksellers, or other writers, or anyone really.
It was quite an experience, to bring a book of such deeply excavated trauma out into a world where the things that might have made that pain somehow easier to deal with simply were not possible. I’m grateful beyond words to my partner for holding me through that wild and lonely time. I am just as grateful to the writers, booksellers and readers, mostly women it must be said, who held me, too. Many of whom I’d never met. Some who I still haven’t met.
Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this deepest joy of publishing a book and receiving the messages of solidarity the like of which I did.
Never could I have imagined the doors this book would open for me (I was published in Elle! I don’t know why , having never read it even, this somehow floored me more than the book winning a prize, say, or being reviewed well in the guardian , or being highly commended by the Wainwright Prize!)
Never could I have imagined the amazing people and incredible places I would encounter through having written it.
What a thing. How lucky I am.
How grateful.
There is so much I could say about memoir, how it isn’t necessarily cathartic for us all, even though it is the thing we are most regularly asked. How many of us come away from writing it in some ways in more pain for having unearthed it all. How the industry has so much to learn before writers, particularly women, can be properly held and supported through such a journey.
Before it can be a safe landscape to navigate, this one in which we lay the self on the page.
How it is such an individual journey really, and how lonely and scary an experience it can be for some of us.
But the thing is for the first time since this book came out, I have found a funny but very welcome sweet spot. I feel, for the first time, like I have finally found my feet. This book is, like my child, a toddler. Many people adore the newborn stage, but it terrified, unravelled; almost broke me. It took my child turning two before I could really breathe again. I guess with this book it took me til it turned three, and that is more than ok. I guess we have entered the stage of our relationship where we finally understand that we are separate, this book and me. But that we are of one another, and, as such, we love one another.
And so this is just a wee post to say exactly that. I have fallen in love with this book, my debut, like some mothers do with their children: slowly, over time. It did not happen straight away, nor was it natural for me. It was not easy and I am still learning how to live alongside this book, which is a powerful force all of its own existence, actually. It did not come easily, much of the process , and I’ve experienced much grief over that, about how hard I found much of the journey, but I am finally making my way through and feeling so grateful, even more so, these days.
It takes a whole village and what a village I got. Both at Canongate and Milkweed, and with my agent.
If you read, commented, shared or anything at all: thank you. It meant, and continues to mean, the absolute world.
This is just another way of me saying:
WRITE YOUR STORY.
It will change your world but , most importantly, it holds the power to make new worlds. Bright, hopeful, safe and free worlds. And we need those worlds; now more than ever. X
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Beautiful.. I heard you on a podcast with Katherine May, and from then have followed your writing. I love listening to you talk... and have now just found Substack - and you on it! What a novice I am..! Thank you for sharing your glimmers 💜
So grateful to have had your book find its way into my hands during lockdown, just when I needed it most. At a time when I was unravelling, it took me back to the thin places of childhood and made me seek out a new one to heal within. When I found it, I leant right in.
“I understand now that there are things that burrow inside of us and take years to unearth, to free ourselves from. That, in time, trust and hope might take the place of other things: things that we never, ever deserved to have to carry.”
I’ve been carrying this quote on my phone and your words in my heart ever since. A thousand thank yous Kerri 🧡