Following on from last month’s post for World Suicide Prevention Day, I’m marking World Mental Health Day on Annecdotal this weekend. The 2015 theme is dignity, so I’m highlighting sympathetic portrayals of mental health issues in fiction. I’ve blogged elsewhere about the mental health themes in my own novel, Sugar and Snails

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In the midst of my writing, when I’m floored by a factual question to which neither Google nor my encyclopaedic husband can furnish the answer, he tells me to make it up. After all, it’s fiction I’m creating not the instruction manual for launching a rocket to Mars. While close attention to detail lends our work credibility, we should also cut ourselves some slack. It would be unreasonable to expect us to get everything right.


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With Alzheimer’s research in the news again lately, I thought I’d better knuckle down to my much foreshadowed post on literary dementia. For readers and writers who are wary of fictional old age, the spectre of dementia might seem a definite no-no. Yet there’s so much potential in the condition for creative exploration and expression: the poignancy of loss; the enigma of memory and identity; the frustrations experienced by family and other carers; even, for those who can achieve the right tone without denigration, humour. So it’s heartening to discover young women writers who are addressing these themes in their debut novels: Emma Healey in the UK with Elizabeth Is Missing, and Fiona McFarlane in Australia with The Night Guest. I thought I’d draw on those novels, along with two less recent novels from more established writers, Getting Away With It by Julie Cohen and Scar Tissue by Michael Ignatieff, to explore fictional representations of dementia.

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What do you understand by the term “a good child”? Does it imply a particular proficiency in getting up to mischief and other childish things? Or does it mean, as for the Saddeq children growing up in Lahore in the new nation of Pakistan, suppressing their own inclinations and desires in favour of their mother’s strict demands. In a divide-a-rule regime reminiscent of the British Raj, the boys, Sully and Jakie, are destined to be doctors, their learning beaten into them by a tutor they nickname, appropriately, Basher, while the girls, Mae and little Lana, hug their mother’s shadow, dressed up like dolls in scratchy frilly dresses unsuitable for the suffocating heat. Until the day they can escape their manipulative mother through marriage for the girls and education abroad for the boys, they have no choice but to comply.

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How does one write about terror? I don’t mean the delicious spine tingling sensation evoked by the thriller or horror story, the literary equivalent of Halloween or the latest upside-down turbocharged fairground ride. I’m thinking that raw state of mind when logic goes out the window and with it any trace of pride or self-consciousness, when body and brain conspire towards a sole objective: survival. Even Verdi’s glorious Dies Irae doesn’t do justice to the torment.

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With another choral concert in the offing, I’ve been conscious recently of my far-from-perfect pitch. Alas, it’s not just musically I’m challenged, but I’ve been struggling with pitching my fiction since an agent workshop around eighteen months ago when I failed dismally to reduce my oeuvre to three sentences, despite my novel being in a not-at-all-desperate state of health. Although I’ve improved dramatically since then, I still find pitching difficult

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Show, don’t tell is something of a cliché in creative writing parlance yet, when I first encountered it, it felt like a paradigm shift. I’d been writing on and off all my life without knowing there were any rules about it, and I embraced this one with gusto. My stories unfolded through a series of scenes, generously seasoned with dialogue and real-world interactions. I aspired to make my colours vivid and my smells pungent and anything masquerading as an information drop became taboo. My writing wasn’t particularly lyrical, and I learned to love cutting the bits that weren’t earning their keep, but overall I wanted the reader to get so close to my characters it was as if they’d taken up residence in their bodies.


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Any writer submitting her work for publication is supposed to know which genre tick-box it fits. Lucky for me, the rules aren’t so rigid for short stories, as I’ve got a fair few wacky ones I’m not sure how to categorise.

All fiction asks readers to suspend disbelief to a certain extent; slipstream, as I’m choosing to interpret it, asks them to go a step further, not only to care about made-up characters as if they were real people, but to accept a situation where a single law of physics or history or biology has been turned on its head. By my reckoning, The Time Traveler’s Wife meets slipstream criteria, as does Never Let Me Go, both novels where critics have disagreed over genre. After all, we can’t slip physically back and forth in time to revisit different versions of ourselves (although we all do that in our minds). And, the demonisation of the poor and disadvantaged notwithstanding, people aren’t cloned simply to furnish body parts for the elite.

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Published at the beginning of 2013, The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz is a gem of a book about psychoanalysis. Heavy with insight into the human condition while light on the jargon, it’s a most-read for any thoughtful individual, but I’m here to argue its particular value for readers and writers of fiction. If you like stories, I think you’ll be interested in these, and if you’re engaged in producing your own fiction, there’s as much to learn from these tales from the therapist’s couch as from any creative writing textbook. Here’s why:

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Back in the summer, I had occasion to take the bus – not something I do very often and I’m acutely aware of my limitations in that regard. (How assertively do I stick my arm out for the bus to stop? Do I have to have the right change? Why don’t the passengers have seat belts?) This time, the bus stopped at my request and I paid my fare without incident, then looked down the aisle for somewhere to sit. It was rush hour and all I could see were pairs of commuters locked into their own worlds of music or text messaging on their phones. As I was resigning myself to having to stand for the next half-hour, swaying with each turn of the wheel, a boy stood up to offer me his seat. At more or less the same time, I spotted a vacancy towards the back, so I thanked the boy and made my way towards it.

I was surprised by the young man’s offer, and somewhat amused, wondering what had evoked it. Did he see me as old and doddery? Okay, I’m past fifty, but hopefully I’ve got a few more years in me yet. I might have grey hair but, in a certain light if I’m wearing a hat (which, admittedly I wasn’t), I look like a teenaged boy, only without the pimples. Yet I wasn’t offended. I don’t mind being an unflattering stereotype if it elicits acts of generosity and politeness.

I was reminded of this incident on reading a lovely article by Penelope Lively on turning eighty. Amid the aches and pains and indignities, she finds plenty of consolation:

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