Aye, that’ll do 2017
I started 2017 on a beach in Portugal. I had a perfect bruise imprint of a giant black dog’s teeth on the fleshy part of my upper arm. That morning a dog had leapt at me, teeth bared and bit down hard while its owner casually hit it until it released me. Thanks to my big winter coat, I didn’t lose a chunk of my arm and we caught a coach to the beach as planned. At midnight we watched fireworks over the inky sea and then later, down at the shore, witnessed a line of over-boozed teenage boys peeing long arcs into the famous Nazare waves while their skimpily dressed girlfriends shivered patiently beside them.
I woke on the first morning of 2017 knowing how I should restructure my third novel (which had massively and fucking annoyingly eluded me for most 2016) and with a fresh understanding that, in the wake of Brexit and Trump the rise right wing fuckwittery generally, I needed my writing to ‘do something’. Of course all writing ‘does something’ but I needed what I wrote to fit into my own personal sense of trying to resist, persist, to fight…and that is when I started thinking about writing a book about what it is like to grow up in poverty, to grow up in a society which is structurally unequal and to question how, decade to decade, nothing seems change though the problems are clear.
In 2017 we travelled through ten countries. From Lisbon we travelled to Bangkok where we spent two months exploring our neighbourhood Sois, careening across the city on motorbikes, sometimes taking a trip to the sea where we slept in bamboo rooms on stilts, the sound of the waves whooshing underneath us like breath.
Next, I wanted to show Peter my beloved Vietnam. We took sleeper trains from Saigon to Hanoi. I showed him my old haunts, we found new ones. On a windy mountain pass in Sapa Peter proposed with a tiny sapphire ring carried with him all the way from Saigon. I said yes and we sat down with our motorcycle drivers and a man who owned the tarpaulin shack at the edge of the mountain and drank 2in1 coffee and Redbulls in celebration. It was perfect.
We flew to Malaysia and trekked a National Park where giant lizards roamed and ended up on a beach with hammocks and cheeky one armed monkeys. Otherwise in Malaysia we ate. Bowls and bowls of Chinese, Indian, Malay food our faces full of happiness and noodles.
After that there was a month in Prague, two months in a much changed Budapest in a grand, crumbling apartment, a month in summery Krakow swimming in quarries and drinking in Absinthe bars. I briefly returned to the UK to meet a ton of excellent writers and literary types as part of International Literary Showcase in Norwich. I have plenty to say about these places and that time but probably the most important thing to mention is that in Krakow I finally (fucking finally) finished that tricky (so fucking tricky) third novel and wrote the proposal for my first nonfiction book, Lowborn - the book I want to write to ‘do something’.
When we’d left the UK our intention had been to travel and work indefinitely but, as has always happened to me after five or more months on the road, I started to wish for ‘home’. Nowhere seemed quite right enough to put down roots, learn a language and bend ourselves to a place’s new ways. Besides, I had a book to write which would see me travel up and down the UK. And so we moved to Liverpool.
I wouldn’t quite say we picked Liverpool by sticking a pin in a map but mostly we did. We knew that London, as much as it was home, had become financially impossible – we didn’t want to be clinging on to our fingernails to a city. We wanted a city that wanted us. Scotland was too far from our former life, friends and family. We’d both visited Liverpool and quite liked it, it was ‘in the middle things’, it was a city, it had a Tate and the seaside nearby. OK, we thought, why not there?
It was risky and it was also the best decision we ever made. Liverpool is one of the warmest, most humane places I have ever lived. Every day I leave my house and have an interaction that renews my faith in the inherent goodness of people. There is gold to be found in Liverpool – brilliant art, gigs, food, drink, cinema and all the rest of it. London will always have a piece of my heart. I miss the hubbub, the sheer abundance of life there. It was the closest thing I’d ever had to home. But Liverpool is treating us so well. There’s less ‘noise’, it’s less exhausting and in that new space there is time to think, to be creative. Every day I say to Peter, ‘I love it here’.
In Autumn I announced my new books would be published by Chatto & Windus. This is not a literary climate in which to count your chickens and especially not if you’re writing feminist, working class, literary fiction and happy is an inadequate word for how I feel about getting to write two more books, particularly with a publisher who have always championed (and an editor who makes infinitely better) my strange brand of writing. Lowborn will be published a January 2019, the novel after that.
There have been other wonderful things this year. The opportunity to write a monthly series about writing Lowborn for The Pool (side note: in 2017 writing a single article for The Pool was my greatest ambition). Those pieces are the most personal thing I have ever written, I feel nervous to the pit of my stomach each time they are published, and they are one of the best things in a good long run of best things I’ve had. Getting to write about things that I feel are important, for such a broad audience and the responses to those articles have been a joy, an utter joy. Likewise, my beautiful three weeks in snowy, mystical Latvia on residency thanks to the Writer’s Centre Norwich and the British Council. I ate a lot of soup, drank gallons of coffee, wrote tens of thousands words of Lowbown, fell in love with the residency cat, Rudi, and wandered the winter streets thinking, untangling, reassembling. It was bliss.
2017 hasn’t all been cake and delight, mind. I’ve struggled with anxiety this year and have fought those untamed things that have followed me for years no matter how far I travelled. But, like that big black dog in Portugal trying to sink its teeth in, they bruised but didn’t break the skin. Instead, they allowed for a big shift and an important change of perspective. But that’s probably another piece of writing for another time.
In 2018? I will write each day, think about the messy world we live in and where I stand within it. I’ll continue to explore how to make change, resist, persist, live well and with decency and I can’t think of anything I could be more grateful for.
Happy new year to youse lot.