Reflect | January

Reflecting on my writing life this month: conversations with the dead, time as a concertina and structure as map-making

I spent the first weeks of the New Year slowly transcribing the blog Mum made to chronicle her first round of radiotherapy for her yoga students. I’d thought it was lost forever, vanished into a digital oblivion, but while visiting my dad over Christmas I looked through Mum’s desk and discovered that she’d made a printed hard copy of her blog. As well as reading her words, I decided to type up my own digital copy of them.

The process of transcribing Mum’s blog in this way has been a little like having a conversation with her. She’s there on the page, and I can hear her voice in my head again as I copy her words out. There are stories I know and others that I’m learning for the first time. The time she and her friends went round to John Lennon’s aunt’s house in 1963 to ask if he was in (he was!). Taking the ferry cross the Mersey on her lunch break from a summer job when she was a student, and staying on board on the Birkenhead side so she didn’t have pay for a ticket. There are so many questions I want to ask, details I want to find out.

I met John Lennon once in the 60s. My school was next door to his. He’d left by the time I got there but one school lunchtime my friends Barbara, Mary and I decided on a short walk to Menlove Avenue. Aunt Mimi opened the door of Mendips and I said “Is John in?” And she said “I’ll go and get him”. We were speechless!

Mum and Dad drove from their home on the North Wales coast to Clatterbridge Hospital on the Wirral every weekday for six weeks to complete her course of radiotherapy, a round trip of 2 hours and almost 90 miles a day. They crafted a silver lining from this enforced daily pilgrimage, the pause button it pressed on their normal lives, and spent part of each day exploring the woods and beaches and coastal paths of the Wirral. I love that they made space for joy and exploration alongside all the waiting and worrying that Mum’s treatment involved. I love reading her accounts of the walks they did and the places they visited, little snippets of nature writing that I must have read before but had forgotten.

Thurstaston Hill, another sandstone outcrop with tidal ripples still visible on the stone, was another favourite place. Along with teenage friends I would travel by bus, ferry and bus to this place and climb upon Thor’s Stone. This country is bright and colourful in the sunshine; the gorse and heather are in full bloom this month, contrasting with the varied reds of the rocks.

Her anger that the brain tumour she’d had surgically removed in 2003 had returned comes through clearly in her writing, but so does her acceptance. This was happening. This was what needed to be faced. This was the treatment her doctors had advised that would hopefully stop or slow the tumour’s growth. She was facing an unknown future that could involve another decade or more of regular CT and MRI scans to monitor the tumour, or that might include brain surgery, another round of radiotherapy, chemotherapy and ultimately death, all within a few short years. Sadly, it was the latter series of events that came to pass but, of course, none of knew it at the time. It’s strange to think back to that summer, to remember all the fear and anxiety, but also all the hope and possibility.

Mum’s blog ends with her final radiotherapy appointment. She’s looking forward to a visit from me, my partner (now husband) and our son, looking forward to a period of rest before starting her yoga classes up again in the autumn. She posted a photo of herself, taken by my husband on the beach five minutes walk from my childhood home. She’s beaming, triumphant, hopeful, whole. She will be dead within two years.

Now I’ve completed my six week course and I’m released! I give my thanks to all those who treated me at Clatterbridge. It’s time now to take up normal life, time for my r+r, for my holiday, for the end of my blog.

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Transcribing Mum’s blog and thinking back to the summer of 2013 has also made me realise how subjective our experience of time is. On paper, there’s just 24 months between summer 2013 and summer 2015. In my embodied experience of time, they belong to entirely different geological ages. So much happened in those two years so much changed, that it feels like there must be many more years separating them.

In summer 2013 my eldest son was one, and those first 12 months of his life already felt like an eon. I couldn’t imagine a world without him in it, I couldn’t remember my life before him. At the same time, it felt like he’d gone from a (not so) tiny curled up pink shrimp of a newborn to a gregarious toddler grinning in delight as he took his first steps in the blink of an eye. By summer 2015 he was three and an entirely different person again: talking, running, drawing, due to start nursery that autumn. Alongside the expansive timeframe of my son’s life - each month, almost each week, its own world - my mum’s descent through medical treatment after medical treatment, scan after scan, and increasingly dire pronouncements from the doctors felt similarly glacial.

Look back from the dizzy heights of 2025 though, and time concertinas. All those weeks and months fold in on each other and everything feels like it was happening very quickly, one thing after another, a flood of significant life events all tangled up together. Summer 2012 and my eldest son was born. Summer 2013, Mum’s tumour was back and she had radiotherapy. Summer 2014 and we got married and bought a house. Autumn 2014, Mum had brain surgery. Winter 2014, radiotherapy round 2. Spring 2015, chemotherapy and a terminal diagnosis. Summer 2015, Mum died and I got pregnant. Within the space of three years I became a mum and lost my mum.

At the moment, I’m framing my memoir around the almost simultaneous events of Mum’s death and my pregnancy. But there’s another, wider frame I could use that plots the recurrence of her brain tumour alongside my transition into motherhood. Two very different but very embodied processes. Birth and death. Growth and decay. The physical transformations of pregnancy and cancer.

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January writing goals

I set myself three writing goals for this month:

I’ve completed 2 out of 3 them, which I’m pleased with. And if I include my two Substack posts, then I’ve more than completed the final goal (write 7,000 words) as well.

COMPLETED: review the 30,000 words I wrote in November 2024

Re-reading the over 30,000 words I wrote in November has been just as painful and delightful as I expected it to be. I’ve cringed at clumsy sentences and cliched turns of phrase. I’ve scribbled copious notes with ideas of how I could frame a particular scene, or where a scene might fit within the overall structure of my memoir narrative. Occasionally, I’ve come across a sentence or a paragraph that I like and felt a warm glow of pride (I wrote that!) alongside reassurance (I can do this, I can write).

My work in progress (WIP) has already evolved and shapeshifted into a new form. Some of the topics I wrote about in November now have a walk-on bit part, rather than being a central pillar of the narrative. I’m trying to keep my planned structure loose and fluid, to leave room for these topics to re-emerge in a new form or through a different lens as I continue to write. It’s like the endless task of weeding a garden: I’ll pulled up all the dandelions I can see, but I know I’m likely to have missed some. Rather than nuke the entire garden with weed killer, I’m leaving space for the dandelions scenes I’ve cut to potentially sprout up somewhere else.

COMPLETED: map out a potential structure for my WIP

Mapping out a potential structure for my memoir project has surprisingly been a source of deep joy. I felt sure I needed to at least build a rough idea of the overall structure of the narrative before embarking on a likely 80,000 words of intensive writing. But I was also worried that I might get bogged down in structure and get stuck - whether pleasurably or not - in the planning stages, distracted from the actual writing. That’s why I set it as a goal to be completed by the end of January. I allowed myself one month to explore and wander around possible routes through the story I want to tell, but no more.

I think setting myself a time limit worked well. It gave me the time and space to mull over different approaches, and ultimately to map out a structure that feels right - almost too right! Now I’m worried that I might cleave too closely to the route I’ve plotted, even if in the process of writing a different path starts to emerge. Like I say above, I’ll try to keep my planned structure loose and fluid, to remind myself that it’s likely to change and evolve as the project progresses.

Deeply satisfying: mapping out a structure and themes for my work in progress

My current plan is to take the central point in my narrative (the two weeks in summer 2015 in which my mum died and my younger child was conceived) and move 9 months forward and 9 months backward in time from that event. 9 months is, of course, the standard duration of a human pregnancy. After looking through my diary planners for the year or so before Mum died, I discovered that a key event took place almost exactly 9 months before she died - serendipity! Or perhaps more accurately, the human urge to make patterns and find meaning. Now I’m deep in thoughts and scribbled notes about what tense to write in, which perspective(s) I could use, and how I could incorporate events outside this 18 month window of time into the narrative.

PARTIALLY COMPLETED: write 7,000 words

I’ve written just under 4,000 words of my WIP this month. Progress has been slow, which honestly I’m not surprised about as January is one of the busiest months of the year in my day job. I’ve also been more focussed on reviewing the posts I published in November, mapping out a structure and transcribing Mum’s blog. I’m a little disappointed not to have smashed all my goals, but I’m reminding myself to focus on the big picture. I think taking some time this month to feel my way into my project will pay off in the long run - and perhaps has already started to do so! Now I’ve got a potential structure for my WIP that I’m really happy with, the words have been flying out of me, mainly in the early mornings before anyone else is awake.

Word count is a rolling goal anyway. It’s likely to appear in my monthly writing goals for every month this year, so I’ll carry over the 3,000 words I didn’t write in January and add them to my word count goals for February and future months.