Biographies,
memoirs,
where to begin...
I like to write and I like to make something beautiful with my words. I write about me mainly, partly because I do not have the wide exciting imagination so many other people have. I write about things many people have not experienced; about having a nurse follow me wherever I go for week after week, or skiing over frozen Lakes, sitting becalmed in Mid Atlantic, about living in a reality no one else does. I also write about things that we all experience or at least I hope some of us experience some of this; falling in love when you have given up on love, walking on the beach at dawn, listening to the crows across the road; trying to hold it together when the twins are having a terrible tantrum and lastly witnessing the death of people I love and learning so much from them and the people who loved them.
Feathers in My Soul
My first memoir. It was about the sea and beaches and rocks and life and published by Chipmunka Publishing. I will be honest here. It could have been a good book but was published at what should have been the first of many drafts. I really would only recommend reading it if you have a stomach for bad grammar and really, really want to know more about my life when I was growing up.
Start
Start was originally published by Fledgling Press and is now published by Geilston Press; this I am truly delighted with. do look further at the extract provided.
Start offers an intimate exploration of my life with a mental illness under a Compulsory Community Treatment Order. I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia over thirty five years ago. My memoir gives a candid account of my experiences, shedding light on the complexities of living with severe mental health illness.
Dance I must, to know how to love and how to relax and how to trust and how to smile without a reckoning at the back of my mind
Start is a journey into love, a journey from the worst of relationships, from loss, from the belief that life is over, into joy and acceptance; an unexpected bliss.
It is about madness, about schizophrenia, about compulsory treatment that lasts for year on year. Being shadowed for weeks by nurses to keep me safe.
It is a celebration of the Highlands, its mountains, lochs and beaches.
It is not about recovery, I don’t get better! It is about the wonder and the horror of severe mental illness. It is a celebration of those of us who are set aside.
I have an MBE for services to mental health. I have spoken to the United Nations about my experiences. I helped create the very laws under which I am now detained.
In summary, “Start” is a remarkable and engrossing read that provides an unflinching look at the realities of mental illness, while also celebrating the resilience of the human spirit and the pursuit of love and understanding.
Blackbird Singing
Blackbird Singing
Was also originally published by Fledgling Press but as, with START, is now published by Geilston Press.
Blackbird Singing” is my third memoir, serving as a continuation of my earlier work, “Start.” In this book, I talk about my experiences after I move from the Highlands to Argyll, delving deeper into my journey with schizophrenia and life under a compulsory community treatment order. I continue to talk about the natural world but key to it, is life with my new family and the death of my father and my partner’s father and how we came to terms with it.
It is a musing, a meandering through real life. It is not about drama, although there is drama. It is not about devastation, although there is devastation. This is a book about living, about understanding, about learning, about growing, about love and also grief; about summers walking the dog by the sea and winters when we are too tired to think.
It is about answering the alarm when the world is so surreal and dark that school and work seem like an absurdity and because it is me, it is about the world of mental illness and compulsory treatment and trying to live a normal life when everyone says there is no such thing as normal.
...the future
I am working very slowly on two more books; well, I have loads of books I want to write! But the one I can see looming but looming brightly, even if on a dark subject, is the one about my schooling, it is in its first draft and concentrates mainly on those of us who were sent away to boarding school at a young age. Yes, another one questioning why this happens and wondering what it did to some of the people who ended up leading our country. The other, well it is written, but it needs changing; a reflection on intimate partner violence when the victim is a man. One day I will work out in what form this hidden subject can be made public.
I write either once a week or twice a week on Substack. I don’t know why, as I need longer to create work I am happy with, but there is a link here that you can access it from.