is it possible to write like your parents are dead... when they are alive?

and a guest appearance from mum

I signed the contract for Love Me! on 1st March 2020. We went into lockdown on the 23rd and around early April I had a phone call with mum to check she was alive. She was - and more than that she kept going to the garden centre. ‘You’re not meant to be going out,’ I snapped. ‘I can’t just stay in all day,’ she replied. I told her that was literally what we were meant to be doing.

I was such a good girl, following the rules.

I was also a good girl who had just signed a contract to write a book about sex - specifically my search to get over my Irish Catholic convent school girl hangups via tantra retreats and free love.

I had been going on said tantra retreats for the last eighteen months but had not been telling mum. ‘I’m going to a yoga retreat,’ I said once. ‘Since when do you do yoga?’ she asked. ‘I’m going to a communication workshop,’ I said another time. ‘What kind of communication?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I replied.

But now I had signed a contract to write a book about it and so I had to tell her. On that April call, when everything in the world was weird, I did my best. Part of the conversation forms the opening of the book.

Me : About this book.
Mum : Yes?
Me : There’s going to be sex in it – is that OK with you?
Mum : Write whatever you want, Marianne!
Me : Good. I was worried I’d embarrass you.
Mum : But you’re not writing about yourself again, are you?
Me : Yes.
Mum : Don’t you think people have had enough of that?

The conversation was actually much longer than that and included the fact that people my age had real lives and real problems and nobody would be able to relate to me examining non-existent problems. She asked me why I couldn’t just write factually and not put myself into it. “People don’t want to read it, Marianne,’ She said before adding: “I don’t want to read it.”

I came off the phone and cried for weeks. If I’m honest, months.

I was (am) a middle aged woman but I am still my mother’s daughter. I love her very much and take what she says seriously. She tends to be right about things and to not have her blessing felt awful.

Still I kept writing the book - I had signed the contract, I needed the money and also on some level it wasn’t up to me. It was coming to life in my head and it was just the next thing in line to do. But all the while her voice was in my head like a prophecy of doom.

Philip Roth said that you should write like your parents are dead - but I don’t know how you do that. Maybe some people can. Maybe those people do not live on the same street as their mother.

Mum lived in my head (and my street) for most of the writing of the book, along with my Irish aunts and newspaper colleagues. They were all the voices saying ‘What the f*ck are you doing? Stop this! This is too much! This is embarrassing! This is a mistake. People have real problems, Marianne.’

But there were other voices too. Another Irish woman who lived in my head in the writing of Love Me! was Edna O’Brien. O’Brien wrote a book called The Country Girls which was published in 1960 and the subject of a ban and alleged book burnings in Ireland because it dared to write about young women and sex.

She later recounted that her own mother had ‘taken a pen with black ink and had inked out every offending word in the book. I found the book in a bolster case after my mother had died. I was so angry.’

O’ Brien lived long enough to see her work celebrated in Ireland. She died in July 2024 having written twenty novels and countless essays. Her funeral was on the news.

I thought if she had written about sex it was OK for me to too.

But then the voice went, ‘Don’t flatter yourself love, Edna O’Brien is a real writer, you can’t write like that.’

I kept taking the sex bits out of it. Then back in. And out. It was like a tantric Hokey Cokey.

I got sick. I stopped writing for months at a time. I wanted to give up but I couldn’t. I needed the money.

Lockdowns came and went and I remained stuck in my own Love Me! lockdown. I cried when anyone asked me about the book. On my street it became a running joke (I wasn’t laughing) that I should wear a t-shirt saying ‘Don’t ask about the book.’

My neighbour Mary offered to read pages to see if they were as bad as I thought they were. I sat at the table next to her as she read pages and laughed out loud and then looked into space. ‘Yes,’ she’s say, nodding to herself, before underlining a section.

‘This is sacred work,’ she said. ‘It’s important - this will change women’s lives,’

‘Steady on,’ I thought. ‘That’s a bit much.’ But her eyes were certain. For three months she sat with me as I finished it. We did a relay with me showing her pages and her giving them back to me with beautiful scribbles of questions and edits. I treasure these scribbles - with stars and hearts, exclamation marks and questions. ‘Do you mean to say this?’ she’d ask about a badly phrased sentence.

I thought that even if just Mary loved it this much, it would have been enough.

But also I needed the money.

I sent it to the publisher three years after signing the contract. It was real. I had written a book about love and sex and my genitals and feeling women’s boobs and learning how to give handjobs and it was about to go into the world.

I told mum not to read it and she agreed.

She lied.

One evening I was sitting outside a restaurant on my street (which mum also lives on) and my mum walked past walking my sister’s dog. She sat down.

‘I read your book by the way,’ she said.

She told me she took a proof copy from my sister’s flat. Sneaky.

‘I was shocked,’ she said. ‘I had no idea you were doing all that,’

‘I know,’ I said. I felt bad for keeping it from her.

There was a pause.

‘I don’t know anyone else who is brave enough to not only do what you did but to write about it, she said.

Another pause.

‘I never talked to you girls about sex,’ she said. ‘Nobody talked to me about it - except to instil fear. This book is not about fear, it’s about pleasure. It’s very important.’

And with that she stood up and walked the dog back home. I burst into tears and got drunk.

Since then my mum has been one of my biggest champions. She asked me to forward every good review or kind message I get about the book. She tells me I’m changing people’s lives and that very few people do that.

Then she tells me to wash my hair.

A few weeks ago I was teaching a workshop on writing about your life. A lot of people in the class were worried about what their family would think. It’s a very real concern. I wish I could tell everyone not to worry about it - but I worried about it every day.

Anne Lamott reckons you own everything that ever happened to you and you can write what you want. I don’t feel that way. Wish I did but I don’t.

But this isn’t just about writing it’s about living. It’s about how much we follow our parents’ rules. Society’s rules. How often we don’t do the things we want to do because of what our parents or friends might think.

At some point in my book writing I read Untamed by Glennon Doyle. This passage became a talisman for me. I don’t know if talisman is the right word but it’s the one I want to write.

“A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter. When she finally understands that she is creating something different from what her parents created. When she begins to build her island not to their specifications but to hers. When she finally understands that it is not her duty to convince everyone on her island to accept and respect her.”

― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

I am not a parent but I believe I took a step towards adulthood when I disobeyed my mother.

Our family - and perhaps friends - say things to keep us safe. I know there are many times I have cautioned people against doing things that it was important for them to do. I remember once when we were much younger, my sister was offered a big job. ‘Are you sure you will be OK with it?’ I asked. ‘Marianne, don’t,’ she replied. She was right. I was pushing my own fears onto her. She did the job and got paid a ton of money and had a ball.

I’m realising more and more than we need to be our own authorities. To learn to trust ourselves.

I was asking my mother for approval that was not hers to give.

This week the paperback issue of my book landed. I gave mum the new copy. This is a video I made of the moment.

After I finished recording the video mum asked me if she’d really said that people had had enough of hearing about me. ‘You did,’ I said.

‘I’m glad you didn’t listen.’

xxx

PS for the record I love the cover, but I also like that mum thinks that I’m too much of an intellectual heavyweight for yellow.

PPS I’ll be speaking at Wilderness festival this weekend if anybody is there. I’ll be alongside comedian Suzi Ruffell who has written a gorgeous memoir called Am I Having Fun Now about love, sexuality and anxiety. The conversation is hosted by Anna Higgs. We’ll be chatting on Friday. So thrilled to be asked to do these things and to be well enough to do them.

PPPS - if any of you could spare the time to answer this questionnaire it would really help out a friend. https://form.typeform.com/to/Xrn9s6Zw