What I've been reading in May
quite an eclectic mix, yet with similar themes
I’ve had the joy of several train journeys this month and that means nose-in-a-book time. My reading is always an eclectic mix of subjects, but there are often threads that bind the books together even if I only see the connections afterwards.
My train reading included the living autobiography of British author, Deborah Levy. The trilogy, Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate, charts different times in her life as a writer. The first book, Things I Don't Want to Know, tells the story of her childhood in South Africa and teenage-hood in London, navigating confusion and turbulence as her father is imprisoned (when she was five years old) for supporting the African National Congress movement and then the separation of her parents after the family is exiled to England on her father’s release from prison.
Levy’s second volume, The Cost of Living, speaks to the challenges and essential questions of midlife, reflecting on a period when her mother was dying, her marriage was coming to an end and she moved from the family home to a tiny high-rise flat with one teenage daughter, the other heading off to college. During this time she rented a friend’s garden shed to write her novel Hot Milk (which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize).
Real Estate takes the common thread of imagining the dream house/forever home and the actual ‘real estate’ or legacy that we are living and creating. As her life weaves around a different writing shed in another friend’s garden, a writing residency in Paris, the high-rise flat that she still lives in with all the same quirks and that she still hopes will one day turn into a villa by the sea, she writes about life lived in the present tense and the poignant question of ‘what really matters right now and how does that create the ‘real estate’ that is us?’.
I really enjoyed the simplicity of Levy’s storytelling as she wrote about what was happening in her world as she lived it. She has inspired my own writing and I’m now looking forward to reading her novels and her latest book The Position of Spoons.
Love, loss and gardening
My bedtime reading this month was All My Wild Mothers; Motherhood, Loss and an Apothecary Garden by Victoria Bennett. At seven months pregnant, Bennett learns that her eldest sister has died in a canoeing accident and the trauma of that event almost causes a miscarriage. She has already lost several pregnancies through miscarriage. Her son survives, but as a toddler is diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, which brings a whole new world of monitoring, testing and managing of blood sugar and insulin.
Five years later, and struggling with the demands of motherhood, grief and full-time care of her young son, Bennett and her family move to a new social housing estate in rural Cumbria. Here, in the rubble and mud, she and her son begin to grow a wild apothecary garden from plants they find locally, and which most gardeners would consider weeds. All My Wild Mothers interweaves the efficacy and use of wild plants such as daisy (for resilience), dandelion (for strength against adversity) and sow thistle (to lift melancholy), with Bennett’s story of navigating loss, reflecting on her own childhood and raising a child who needs full time care and supervision.
It is a beautiful book, sometimes quite triggering for our own loss and trauma, but helps us know that we are not alone in our trials and experiences. It reminded me of how much I have forgotten about the wild flowers of my childhood and how much I want to remember again.
Healing the wounded adult
Right now, I am reading Childhood Disrupted; How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal by Donna Jackson Nakazawa.
Childhood Disrupted shows the link between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and adult illnesses such as heart disease, autoimmune disease, and cancer. The book also explains how to cope with these emotional traumas and heal from them.
The emotional trauma we suffer as children not only shapes our emotional lives as adults, it also affects our physical health, longevity, and overall wellbeing. Our biography becomes our biology. Scientists now know on a bio-chemical level exactly how parents’ chronic fighting, divorce, death in the family, being bullied, and growing up with a hypercritical, alcoholic, or mentally ill parent can leave permanent, physical “prints” on our brains and increase the risk of physical ill health and autoimmune diseases later in life. It is actually quite shocking to read some of the stats, and particularly the stats for women.
“This link between being female, facing adversity in childhood, and later developing a serious autoimmune disease is so consequential that is resembles the link between smoking and lung cancer, drunk driving and car accidents, and unprotected sex and pregnancy.”
In a study that followed eight hundred youngsters from the age of sixteen through to age forty three, those whose teachers had reported that they had problematic peer relationships had a greater likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and obesity in middle age. And that in an age before cyber-bullying added to the peer pressure.
Kids with an ACE score of two or above are three times more likely to have ADHD, and those with Adverse Childhood Experiences are thirty times more likely to have behaviour or learning problems than kids with no ACEs. A child could be diagnosed with ADHD, when what they really need is treatment for trauma or PTSD.
You would think with stats like that the book makes for grim reading, but actually it is both upbeat and promising. The more we can understand about the effects of ACEs on our biology, and the understanding of the intergenerational trauma that more often than not lies behind it, the better able we are to recognise the root cause of health issues and heal them. The second half of the book is dedicated to practices and strategies for recovering from childhood adversity, as a personal journey or with the help and guidance of a professional.
Whether or not you experienced a disrupted childhood, this book is worth a read. It may change the way you think about dis-ease, how you relate to others, and how well you nurture and raise your own children. If nothing else, it will give you a greater awareness, empathy and compassion for other people’s physical and/or emotional struggles - even or especially world leaders. Yes, there is a direct correlation between ACEs and presidents of the US (most of them, not just the current one.)
Connecting the dots
So the thread between all these books, that I didn’t plan but noticed with hindsight: disrupted childhoods.
Victoria Bennett refers to her own childhood experiences throughout All My Wild Mothers, but one particular reference sticks in mind when her family was living abroad and in 1975 split in two: “three children kept, three sent away. They were there and then they weren’t, and no one thought to explain to the little girl, who looked and looked but could not find. It took until I was twenty eight to find out what happened and why they went away.”
She goes on to describe a mother struggling, isolated and lonely, in a land she did not fit in and a father often absent with work. Her eldest sister and second brother send to boarding school in England, her eldest brother (who had both drug and alcohol addictions) sent off to trek the Pacific West Trail (alone) on a quest to sort out his mental health struggles. In the summer of 1976, the remaining family moved back to England, but only in 1977 did they move to the “house of my childhood” with wildflowers and a horse chestnut growing outside her bedroom. Finally she was able to put down roots.
Bennett’s resonance with wild flowers is as much about remembering her own wildness, and growing a wild garden with her son is putting down those same roots that she found in the house with the horse chestnut tree.
Deborah Levy starts Things I Don’t Want to Know with “That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations. … It was as if the momentum of the escalator carrying me forwards and upwards was a physical expression of a conversation I was having with myself.”
The recounting of her childhood in South Africa takes place in a restaurant in Majorca in a conversation with a Chinese shopkeeper, who had asked her why she became a writer. She tells him that after her father had been sent to prison, she struggled to speak up: “The volume of my voice had somehow been turned down and I didn’t know how to turn it up again.”
At the end of the book she writes: “I had told the Chinese shopkeeper that to become a writer, I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all. My conversation with him had taken me to places I did not want to revisit [Africa]. Yet, as he had pointed out, Africa had already returned to me when I found myself sobbing on escalators in London. If I was not thinking about the past, the past was thinking about me.”
There are themes in both Bennett’s and Levy’s stories around voice, safety, loss and separation that are prominent in Childhood Disrupted. Also in all of these books are themes of love, resilience and finding strength in adversity. Ultimately, we are all wild flowers looking for our place to root and bloom.
Until next time… when we will be in June. Already!
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