Linking Wait for Me Jack and Wah!

Lately it’s occurred to me all my books are about the same thing – my family. In particular, my parents. An interesting realisation, albeit a little worrying. Should I be worried? Elizabeth Strout is reassuring. In a Guardian interview about My Name is Lucy Barton, she says: ‘You will have only one story. You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story.’

I’ve written five novels and a collection of stories, and to varying degrees, my parents feed into all of these. They are Rose and Michael in Upstairs in the Tent, Jack and Mildred in Stepping Out, Joe and June Johnson in Love Letters from My Deathbed, Harry and Rose in I Love You Goodbye, and most overtly, Jack and Milly in Wait for Me, Jack. In this book, the chapters explore their relationship backwards down the years, through arguments and seemingly deal-breaking scenarios. Like Jack and Milly, and despite infidelities and disabilities and bratty children, my parents averted divorce - love won! I was glad of this, but still puzzled. Writing Wait for Me, Jack had felt necessary somehow, as if solving their marriage could answer questions in my own life.

Writing my memoir Wah! was probably inevitable, after writing Wait for Me, Jack. With their lives ending, parental restraints dissolved and I was able to write about them fully and directly. As if I was a portrait painter finally allowed to paint exactly what I saw – no more concealments and distortions. Previously, their fictional selves had different appearances, jobs, numbers of children and spouses, places of origin. Telling the truth was a great relief.

It's curious that I never noticed my obsession till recently. But isn’t that one of writing’s magic tricks? To reveal the writer’s inner workings? I may not always have the needed detachment to interpret my own, but there they are anyway, played out on the page for the whole world to see. Perhaps, deep down, we all know more about ourselves than we can possibly grasp – and activities like writing are a way of letting our subconscious have a (wiser) say. Maybe the trick is to be quiet and still enough to notice. But for the most part, I’m never quiet or still. Life seems relentlessly distracting.

What next? The no-longer-embarrassing truth is that another collection of George and Barbara Jones stories is accumulating. I’ve surrendered all attempt at dissembling, and am offering my beloved parents to the world in all their flawed and contradictory glory. But why continue, a reader might say. You’ve nailed their marriage already. It’s done, its over! I wish that was true. Oh, who am I kidding. Of course I don’t. I love them more, not less, as I age. Writing is a way of missing them less. A way, perhaps, of pretending they are not gone.