It was Mother’s Day yesterday and that makes me think about my life. As you know I have just published my first novel and if I’m honest there are parts of it that are hard to read. The mother and daughter parts, mainly.
Sure, we authors make up stories. But we all mine our own lives for stories too. I’m no different. The germ of my idea for Stella’s Secret came from a real life experience that happened when I was about 17.
I really did walk to the Post Office one day, collect a package and then see a body lying in the alley on the way home.
That was my starting point and the rest, as they say, is history. Well some history and the rest fiction.
Except for the mother daughter part. That’s all true. My mother was a highly intelligent woman who lived in an era when you had to leave your job in the Commonwealth Public Service when you got married. Hard to believe that was the law until 1966. (You can read more about that here.)
She was a great cook and an excellent Minister’s wife. But she wasn’t emotionally intelligent. I realised when I was about seven years old that I was on my own there. My sisters tried their best and other people’s mothers were kind to me. But for the most part it was just me and my writing. My journal was my friend, my mother. It was her that I talked to.
Interesting that my mum kept a diary. After she died about ten years ago, I read it. Her diary was transactional. It was a record of events. My journals, on the other hand, were full of teenage angst. That is normal I know. It’s cringeworthy when I look back on it.
But apart from the tedious stuff about boys, those many volumes are full of poetry. Of conversations between me and my journal-friend. My journal-mother.
I’ve never put that into words until this very minute. I’ve never seen my journalling as a relationship before. Which proves my point, that writing is doing. It is creating. It is healing.
It is a beginning.
