Emotional Geology
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Rose Leonard is on the run from her life.
Taking refuge in a remote island community, she cocoons herself in work, silence and solitude in a house by the sea. But she is haunted by her past, by memories and desires she'd hoped were long dead. Rose must decide whether she has chosen a new life or just a different kind of death. Life and love are offered by new friends, her lonely daughter and most of all Calum, a fragile younger man who has his own demons to exorcise.
But does Rose, with her tenuous hold on life and sanity, have the courage to say yes to life and put her past behind her?...
PRAISE FOR EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY
"Lyrical, intriguing and haunting." Isla Dewar
"An un-put-downable page-turner." WELL? magazine
"A hymn of praise to the damaged, to the incomplete, a wonderful thing of hope."
Liz Dexter, www.BookCrossing.com
"One of the most outstanding first novels I believe I've ever read."
From a review by The Bluestalking Reader.
EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY was shortlisted for the 2006 Waverton Good Read Award, given by the readers of Waverton village in Cheshire to the best first novel by a UK author. It was also runner-up for the Pure Passion Award. North West Libraries chose EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY as one of 20 books on their Pure Passion - Recommended Reads booklist, promoting the best of romantic fiction in its many forms.
That title
People often ask me about that title.
EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY is a book in which nothing much happens. All sorts of tumultuous events occurred in the past, but what the characters are dealing with in the present is fall-out. So I had the idea of using geology as a metaphor.
Rock is a concrete record of the past, of what happened to the Earth - a build-up of pressure, seismic upheaval, erosion. When you look at rock you're actually looking at layers of time. I think our memories are like that - a record of what we've been through and the toll it has taken - so an "excavation" of the past (which is what happens in the novel) becomes emotional geology.
Breakdown or breakthrough? The Origins of EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY
When a disturbed pupil took a swing at me in the middle of a maths lesson, I saw the punch coming. I dodged and the blow landed on my shoulder. While the rest of the class waited, open-mouthed, to see what Miss would do (retaliate with a left hook?), I sent the boy out of the room, re-assembled what was left of my dignity and finished the lesson. What I didn't see coming was that the blow would signal the end of my teaching career and the beginning of a long mental illness. Nor could I have imagined that my illness would usher in a new and successful career as a novelist.
I was teaching in a school that served a socially deprived area and I was already struggling to maintain my mental equilibrium. The kids were challenging, but lovable, despite the fact some of the boys would have listed their hobbies as martial arts and drug dealing. Gallows humour kept the teaching staff going, but we taught in a climate of fear - fear of verbal and physical abuse from pupils and their parents.
Fear eventually takes its toll. My doctor signed me off sick, suffering from stress. Stress became profound depression. I was prescribed a series of anti-depressants, none of which seemed to help. My moods fluctuated wildly, from highs that took me on shopping sprees, to lows that had me planning the perfect suicide.
Teaching had been my vocation, but I was too ill to return to my old job or look for a new one. I was 47 and, as far as I was concerned, on the scrap heap. I sat at home, alternately doped and hyper, not getting any better. For some reason - the teacher in me, I suppose - I kept a chart of my mood swings, the black days and the better days. I became convinced there was a pattern and concluded that perhaps what I was suffering from was severe pre-menstrual syndrome, so I asked to be referred to a gynaecologist.
We were no more than ten minutes into the consultation when this wonderful man pronounced the words that would change my life and possibly saved it. He said, "You aren't suffering from PMS. I think you're suffering from bipolar affective disorder." Manic depression.
I knew nothing about this illness that wasn't seriously bad news. I thought I was the first person in my family to suffer from it (it runs in families) but as I learned more about the spectrum of behaviour, old tales of temperament and eccentricity took on a new perspective. And so did I. As I stood in a bookshop, poring over a medical textbook, I was appalled to see myself described in forensic detail. What I'd thought was my mercurial personality turned out to be a life-threatening illness. My world fell apart.
But I was a teacher. I'd also been a journalist, so I made it my business to educate myself on the subject of bipolarity. I read psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison's memoir, AN UNQUIET MIND. She's bipolar herself and was the first person to alert me to the idea that there could be some positive aspects to the disease. (You'll find a Mental Health section elsewhere on this website and a celebration of famous manic depressives: a long list of high-achieving people, dead and alive, many of them creative artists, some of them geniuses, all known or suspected to have been bipolar.)
My condition is mild and once on the correct medication, I stabilised. With the help of a supportive psychiatrist, I began to rebuild my life. Unemployed, technically disabled, I had a lot of time on my hands, so I read a lot of books and sewed a lot of patchwork quilts.
I read all sorts of fiction but struggled to find any that reflected my life and experience and there was very little that featured women of my age. Romantic heroines over forty simply did not exist in 1999. Mature women appeared only as Somebody's Mother or Somebody's Wife and I noted they never had sex, unless for comic effect.
Then one day, when I was reading Louise DeSalvo's WRITING AS A WAY OF HEALING, I came upon a paragraph that changed my life:
"I didn't know that you could write simply to take care of yourself, even if you have no desire to publish your work. I didn't know that if you want to become a writer, eventually you'll learn through writing - and only through writing - all you need to know about your craft. And that while learning, you're engaging in soul-satisfying, deeply nurturing labour. I didn't know that if you want to write and don't, because you don't feel worthy enough or able enough, not writing will eventually begin to erase who you are."
That was how I felt. Erased.
I laid the book aside and, as if in a trance, walked over to my PC, sat down and started to type. I wrote about "a woman alone in a light, white room". I could see the room and sense the atmosphere. I could see the woman and she was writing a letter, but I didn't know who she was or who she was writing to. With no thought of publication or even of writing well, I just started typing the first page of what was to become my first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY.
I didn't plan my first book. I was a sick woman. On bad days, compiling a shopping list was a challenge, so I just wrote. To begin with, I wrote lots of short, self-contained pieces that could be read in any order. If they told a story, it would be cumulatively, as a sort of collage. As I wrote, I noticed two things. The pain stopped. All kinds of pain. Writing, it seemed, was morphia for the soul. (And, incidentally, just as addictive.) I also noticed that time passed. I looked up and it was lunchtime. I looked up again and it was midnight. Hooray! I was exhausted and could sleep.
The word count grew, but still I avoided planning. Ducking the issue, I wondered if I could I write a "book-in-a-box," a non-linear novel that didn't need to be bound because the pages could be read in any order. (As a teacher and parent I'd been a big fan of those Choose Your Own Adventure books.) That idea worked for a while, but in the end I realised it did matter - from a dramatic point of view - what order you read the pages in. A final running order had to be established so I had fun carpeting the floor with printed sheets of A4, "designing" my book in much the same way I arranged blocks when assembling my quilts.
EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY wasn't autobiography, nor was it fictionalised memoir. I managed to avoid some first novel pitfalls by wanting so very badly to escape. It was bad enough living my life. I certainly didn't want to write about it, but I did want to tackle the issues.
What I wrote, instinctively and therapeutically, was an alternative autobiography - what my life might have been like under very different circumstances. I was married; my heroine was single. I quilted as a hobby; she was a professional textile artist. I lived in a Norwich suburb; she lived on the bleak and remote, Gaelic-speaking Hebridean island of North Uist, which I knew from family holidays on the west coast of Scotland.
I set out to write a thinking-woman's love story that tackled real issues. I wanted to put a sensitive, creative woman in the spotlight and ignore her age, just look at her heart and mind. I was able to write with passion and paint-stripper honesty because I knew my novel would never be published. (My mentally-ill romantic heroine was 47, and so was I. A less commercial proposition would be hard to imagine.) Hooked on writing, in love with both my heroes, I was fascinated to the point of obsession by the technical challenges of my story...
Was it possible to make a bipolar heroine sympathetic?
How could I convey her bouts of "madness"?
Could I depict the dreadful toll manic depression took on carers?
Was it possible to explore the undisputed links between creativity and bipolar without glamorising a potentially lethal illness?
How could I make depression interesting?
Could I, in short, come up with some good news about living, loving and working with bipolar?
I hadn't the faintest idea, but I needed to do these things if I was to make sense of my own life. I was writing for my life. Gradually writing became my life.
Structure was a problem from the start. EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY is a book in which nothing much happens, but all sorts of tumultuous events have occurred in the past. What the characters are dealing with in the present is fall-out. My heroine, Rose, lives alone but is haunted by her past. At times she's barely able to distinguish the new man in her life from memories of the one who got away. And that was the point. You can't out-run your past.
So I tried to construct a book that was confused, but not confusing. I came up with a kaleidoscopic structure, moving backwards and forwards in time. As I wrote, I delved into the layers of Rose's memory, all of which existed simultaneously, like an archaeological dig. Landscape and particularly geology became the book's dominant metaphors and so I arrived at my title: EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY.
I wrote my first novel just for myself, but I had a change of heart and decided to try and publish it after I read the results of a Depression Alliance survey in the UK which said 26% of those questioned did not believe mental illness was a genuine illness. That's one in four. Clearly, there was work to be done.
Encouraged by my writers' group, I sent my weird typescript to agents. To my astonishment, one took me on. (I think she fell in love with my hero. Or maybe it was the Hebrides.) Then we struck lucky. A new imprint, Transita was looking for books written by, for and about mature women. They bought EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY and published a wide variety of novels which were a hit with readers of all ages, but were dismissed by the UK media as "HRT Lit", "Hag Lit" and "Romance for Wrinklies."
Aged 53, with my first novel published, I concluded that my biggest "disability" as an author was not that I suffered from bipolar affective disorder, but that I was middle-aged, female and had had the temerity to write about a sexually active middle-aged woman. (The ageism and misogyny of British culture beggars belief, but hey, they used to burn us as witches! Things are definitely looking up.)
EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY comforts and confronts. It has appealed to people who have no knowledge of, or interest in mental illness and it was short-listed for the Waverton Good Read Award, given to the year's best first British novel. Well-received by the mental health press, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY was also runner-up in Pure Passion, a light-hearted library promotion of romantic reads.
At author events readers complain to me in a good-natured way that they've been up till 2.00 am, unable to put the book down. But very little actually happens, so how can it be un-put-downable? My theory is, since I write my books not knowing what happens next, nor even the final outcome, suspense and "hooks" for the reader are built in. Nobody wants to know what happens more than I do, so I'm writing as fast as I can, to find out. And that's how readers like to read. For this reason I'm anti-synopses. Publishers need them, but many writers don't. Your subconscious - if you let it - will write a better and braver book than your conscious mind.
Faced unexpectedly with publication and the inevitable marketing, I had to decide whether to be "out" about my own mental health history. Was I going to set myself up to be dismissed as a one-book wonder or an author of fictionalised memoir?
I'd complicated matters by moving to Skye, another Scottish island, which made my novel look far more autobiographical than it was. (Be careful what you wish for... Writing my alternative life gave me the courage to go and live it.) A double bereavement and children leaving home had led to some domestic stock-taking. My husband and I decided to live our dream and move to a big house on a hillside, facing the spectacular Cuillin mountain range on the Isle of Skye.
So I did what I thought was the only honest thing. I'd written a book in which manic depression was just one aspect of my heroine and secondary to her creativity. That's how it had to be for me too. So from the start I was "out" about my mental health history. Readers have come forward, in emails and in person, to thank me for the book and for standing up in public to demonstrate that there's life after breakdown, life after diagnosis; that it is never, ever too late to reinvent yourself.
I no longer live on Skye and I now live alone, quietly and creatively. I write, teach workshops and speak to groups about writing and mental health. As writers, we agonise about originality and commercial appeal, but what is unique to each of us is our way of seeing the world. That is the commodity writers have to sell, the "story" we have to tell. When we discover our true voice, it's as unique as our fingerprint. But it might take a long time and a lot of writing to find it. In the meantime, we must say what we want to say, in the way we want to say it. That's my definition of good writing.
Well, how could it be better?