I read this book in two days, which might be unremarkable were in not for the fact I am currently a fulltime carer for my four year old son, and occasionally find it too exhausting to eat - to put my hand to my mouth and chew and swallow, even if the food in placed directly in front of me - let alone to read a book. But I found myself peculiarly besotted with On The Calculation Of Volume, reading it compulsively, while the kettle boiled, while my son watched Octonauts; staying up late to read it in bed. Coming away from the book felt like waking up in the middle of the night having left a blissful dream, wanting to fall urgently back inside. Which is strange considering the book is about a woman’s despair as she fails to find her way out of the eighteenth of November, her desperation and grief as she sees the distance between herself and her love, and everyone else, grow unbreachable, as their timelines grow further and further apart. But I found the book, and the concept…extremely cosy? Profoundly reassuring? Actual heaven?!

I guess this is partially because of its dreamy sense of the uncanny, which I have always found both pleasurable and disturbing, in the way the dream logic of the novel plays out. It feels like a dissociative fantasy, somewhere between reality and irreality. It is also an objectively cosy book. It takes place at the pinnacle of autumn, and there is a lot of hot coffee, the patter of rain against the windows. There is a sequence in which she fries an egg that makes frying an egg seem like the most delectably nourishing act anyone has ever ventured upon. And though the novel takes place in rural France, it feels a very Nordic version of France (the author is Danish). It feels extremely fucking Danish! Though I suppose the main thing I find cosy and reassuring about the novel is the appeal of living in the eternal present.

My son is currently midway through a course of chemotherapy, having been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer three months earlier. My present is hard: seeing the effects chemotherapy has on his tiny body, watching him suffer various punishing procedures, the laborious day-to-day of taking care of him. I haven’t been to the office since April, cannot travel further than around an hour from the hospital, and am living in I guess an unusual domestic situation. He was due to start school this week, but will be deferring until January. I am looking forward to his treatment coming to its end, to some return to normality, but also, I am absolutely terrified of it, because I am terrified of the future. The present may be hard but it is (to a degree) certain: my boy is right there where I can touch him, often sleeping literally on top of me throughout the night. He is in treatment. He is getting better. We are up a mostly upward trajectory, but what happens beyond this is unknown. If I could press a button to remain suspended on a good or average day now, I would be tempted to press it.

There is also a lot of uncertainty in my current day-to-day. If my son has a temperature I have to take him straight into hospital for what is generally a 48 hour stay. He has mostly bounced back quickly from his chemotherapy infusions, but then unexpectedly, his most recent infusion knocked him off his feet, meaning he was too poorly to go for a walk in the park, to do very much beyond watch TV. Living in the eternal present, a day I already know the shape and rhythms of, is an extremely comforting prospect.

There are also frustrations in On The Calculation of Volume which I find soothingly recognisable. Tara relives the same day with the same quotidian events, over and over. It reminds me of Gertrude Stein and her repetition of words and phrases, the repeat exposure destabilising their meaning, growing new meanings, becoming absurd, eventually emptying entirely of meaning, just a strange sound. The more I go through the motions of care work, which is repetitive, laborious work, the less real it feels, and the more time seems elastic. I can’t get a handle on it or position myself within it.

Tara panics at the distance that emerges between her and her love as the days grow in number between them, she talks frequently of his time and her time. My time feels removed from everyone else’s, an entirely separate entity shared between me and my son and his dad. My friends are having babies, going out, getting married, falling in love. I am setting up nasogastric feeds, administering medication, waiting for hours in A&E. Time in hospital moves at the speed of light, filled with lengthy procedures, nerve-wracking meetings with oncologists, else it moves at an excruciatingly slow pace - how many ways can you entertain a four year old who is confined to a hospital bed and attached to a drip, for days at a time?

Something else that emerges in the novel is the theme of attention: of how we pay attention and what we pay attention to. Tara notices incremental shifts in temperature on a breeze, can predict patterns of birdsong, the sound of a car two streets away. As the day empties itself of new details, she starts noticing things at night: “You would think the dark wouldn’t have details, but that is only if you don’t count the sounds. Or the light glimpsed up there. A little snippet of sky.”

I think there is something quietly radical in exercising discipline around the things we choose give our attention to. I used to apply this thought to i.e. not giving a shit when Donald Trump says something sexist, but recently it has felt more personal. In the last couple weeks I have noticed myself growing depressed, not in the residues of shock, or in grief - just familiar old depression. Struggling to take pleasure in things that used to give me joy. Not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. Feeling just exquisitely sorry for myself. Probably I need to switch antidepressants, but in the meantime, noticing a particular aspect of light or the sound of the trees or the smell of the rain can keep me going a little longer. Last week, I had some focaccia that felt god sent; I couldn’t shut up about it. It turned my whole day around.

On The Calculation of Volume is, ridiculously, part of a seven-volume series - all set on the eighteenth of November. I have the second book, with a proof of the third in transit, but I want to meter them out a little. The series, originally written in Danish, is in the process of translation, and so the remaining books won’t be around to keep me company for a little while longer.

A few years earlier when I was having an extremely hard time with insomnia, I found myself listening to the Okkervil River song Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe for a little pep through those awful sleepless nights, and now I cannot bring myself to listen to the song at all, so entrenched is it within this difficult period of time for me. And so I suspect, when the final volumes of On The Calculation of Volume are released in English, I’ll be definitively done with it being the eighteenth of November.

My friend found this very amusing, and said I was mad. She asked me for other examples of weird light that I have found distressing. I answered quickly: an afternoon in my old flat, when there had been a big storm, and the light went this strange shade of green, a sickly yellow-green, sort of chartreuse. I can picture it now, and it is making me feel very uneasy. I pulled shut the blinds, wanted to block out outside, not think about it at all. As it happened a friend turned up on my doorstep that afternoon, after something upsetting had happened to her at work. I made her a cup of tea and tried very hard to listen to her tell me about what had happened, all the while thinking about the horrible green light outside, trying to not look too distracted by it. I was supposed to be going to some band thing, after, a festival in town, and I thought about cancelling, so I wouldn’t have to step outside, be bathed in this vile yellow-green light, light filtered through the flesh of a lime. I did go out, eventually, but only after the sun had gone down. The green light made it into my last book, so troubled I was by this light, just the worst light ever. If the light were to stay like this forever, I thought at the time. I would just have to kill myself.

On the tram my friend pointed at spots where the light had started to split, and I was comforted by this. I like it when the light begins to split, it feels like a relief, the way autumn feels elementally menstrual: tension, tension, tension, then release. She said there must be something in that: the build up, the looming threat. It made me think about the only time I’ve ever fainted, which I did during a writing workshop I was running, for school kids at an art gallery. A girl was telling me a quite distressing story about her life and I felt myself getting very hot and lightheaded. I thought with absolute clarity: I am going to faint. But I didn’t want the girl to think she was alienating me with the intensity of her candour, so I remained sitting on my heels, listening. It felt as if someone were turning down a dimmer switch in my brain, and then I woke up moments later on the floor, a bunch of fifteen year olds staring over me, looking completely horrified.         

I fixated on this moment for a long time after, replaying the sensation of the light fading to black. I booked a GP appointment a little after. My GP looked bemused as I tried to explain: it was like someone was turning down a dimmer switch in my brain! It felt like the world was narrowing in on me and I was about to die! You fainted, she said. But yes, it can be a bit scary. I suppose I feel some of this fear as the sun sets, a sense of the world narrowing in on me, forthcoming oblivion. I’ve never done well with the elements, used to crawl into bed with my sister during a storm. She told me she used to hear a crack of thunder and wait, before I inevitably knocked on her bedroom door, and she’d hold back the bedcovers to let me in.

It had more or less gotten dark by the time we got to our tram stop, and we picked up my son from nursery on the way home. My son is scared of the dark, as most children are, and constantly reprimands me for not having every available light switched on. But he loves walking home in the dark, finds it very magical, excitingly spooky. I am not sure how he feels about sunset, however, but I suspect he doesn’t like it. Like his mother, he struggles with transitions, with liminality. 

When I was 37, I told my mum I had found a single grey hair. “Oh Lara,” she replied. “It’s not like the women in our family to prematurely age.”

My family pride themselves on ageing well. My mum has always been an outrageous babe, and very indiscrete about it, collecting me from school wearing i.e. an FCUK (Fabulous Cleavage Underneath Kit) t-shirt or pink leather jumpsuit. Thanks mum. My grandma is 95, but has the most amazing, supple skin; like a baby. Ageing well has been set as a kind of benchmark for me; something I am working hard on.

I turn forty next year, and as a treat, I have allowed myself to totally lose my fucking mind.

Last night I went to see The Substance, a film about ageing and totally losing your fucking mind. Very good! I wanted to stand up and cheer in the cinema once it had finished. I went with my two best boy friends, and after, we ate chips and drank wine in the café, though they deserved neither chips nor wine, because they don’t get it: don’t get the horrors and indignities of ageing as a woman. They are only getting more gorgeous with age! And society is constantly reminding them of it!

The Substance is (spoiler!) about a middle-age TV star played by Demi Moore, who injects herself with the mysterious substance: a drug that reproduces her DNA, prompting her to “birth” a younger, better version of herself. She then sort of switches consciousness between the two bodies, living seven days as Demi Moore, seven days as Margaret Qualley.

Would I take The Substance?. Nearly forty is a strange age to watch the film. I am at the exact midpoint between Margaret Qualley (29) and Demi Moore’s character (50). There is a strange liminality to almost forty. Some days I feel closer to Margaret Qualley, a sense of my sexual power, potential for desirability, if only the edges of it; other days I feel closer to Demi Moore, hopelessly past my best, unfathomably old. I kind of vacillate between the two like I have already taken The Substance; one week on, one week off. 

And I already perform a series of violences to my body and face in the pursuit of conventional beauty: acid-based face masks, microcurrents, laser hair removal, sebum melts. In the last couple years I have become a Tretinoin devotee, cruising semi-legal French pharmaceutical sites, following strict application procedures lest my face start peeling off in chunks. This morning I received a face oil named “Conserve You”.  

Everyday abjection and micro-violence is something I think Coralie Fargeat, the director, does really well; both in The Substance and her debut film Revenge. There is also an interesting bleed, in which anything, in which everything, can become abject. The tear strip on a carboard box being ripped like skin. A fleshy olive at the bottom of a martini, violently pierced and eaten. The wincing squeak of a leather jacket. The froth and foam from a pint of beer.

Coralie Fargeat also seems attune to the attendant shame of everyday abjection, of trying to discipline a body that is ungovernable. Margaret Qualley runs from a one-night stand, her nose bleeding, to sort herself out in the bathroom. Do I take too much pleasure from regaling men with the gorier aspects of my menstrual cycle? It is possible. “You might be at a lunch or in a meeting, and you can literally feel yourself losing blood and clots of it,” I told my friend, after the film. “And you have to act like everything is normal.”

Later in the film, in her older body, she briefly becomes a kind of witch: white, wild hair; cackling; cooking complicated recipes for their abject potential rather than from any appetite to eat them. What would Silvia Federici make of this!!! I thought. Federici argued that land enclosure and the disintegration of communal forms of agriculture was a major factor in the production of witch hunts. Older women rebelled against their impoverishment, their social exclusion; the emergence of capitalism destroying their means of living. The film begins with Demi Moore being sacked from her breakfast TV aerobics slot for hitting 50; she is no longer viable as a product, no longer has a role in the machine. White haired and cackling is the closest she comes to happiness in the entire film; albeit a demented kind of happiness; leaning into what society expects from her (she is literally gifted the recipe book she cooks from as her leaving gift). But there is a definite sense of freedom in the acquiescence; a transgression, really.  

A while ago, one of my female friends told me they planned on “ageing gracefully”. I assumed what they meant was a lack of resistance, of intervention, allowing nature to take its course. I remember thinking it was the most self-possessed thing I’d ever heard anyone say. Unlikely to be me.

I got ID’d a couple weeks ago. I jumped for joy. I literally jumped for joy; happily brandishing my provisional driver’s licence. “1985!” the man at the till exclaimed. “Yes!” I replied. “That was a very long time ago!” I said I’d be forty soon. He asked me what I had planned for my fortieth, and I told him I wanted a party, a nice dinner, and a trip to New York. “New York,” he said, contemplatively. “What exact month?” “January,” I replied. “Shame,” he said. “It’d be much nicer to go at Christmas.”

Last week I got talking to a bodybuilder in the jacuzzi at my gym. I can’t remember how we got talking, but as soon as she told me she was a bodybuilder (which I guess was pretty obvious) I had a litany of questions I wanted to ask her, but restrained myself, because it seems rude to ask a stranger questions about their body, even if their body is their literal job. But she did volunteer a bit about her life. She’d recently quit her day job. She was in the “cutting” phase of her training: eating less than 700 calories a day to lose all her remaining body fat, on track to become pure sinew and muscle. She could only eat chicken, green vegetables, blueberries and apples, which she would have to weigh out. “You’ll have to pay me if you want to know my macros!” she said, and I nodded and giggled, having absolutely no idea what she meant.  I was very impressed with her discipline, though it did seem insane.

Kathy Acker talks about trying to write about her experiences of bodybuilding and weightlifting, and the impossibility of doing so, stating it is something which “rejects language”. She talks about the assumption that athletes are stupid, inarticulate, and how this is reinforced by the minimal and senseless vocabulary of weightlifting (“squats” “reps” “sets”). It made me think of a bit in Miranda July’s All Fours, in which she talks about not recognising the sounds that she makes as she moves through her deadlifts: guttural, animal sounds.

I’ve been weightlifting for just over two years now. I started after developing meralgia paresthetica in pregnancy: a condition where the nerve running through your pelvis is trapped beneath the weight of your growing belly. When I was around five months pregnant the surface of my thigh began burning and tingling, maddeningly, like I was being repeatedly run over by a bunch of tattoo guns (A body! Who’d have one! Gestating a baby! Even worse!). I went to a chiropractor who improbably magicked it away with the heel of her palm, but who made me promise to take up weightlifting after I’d given birth, to “stabilise” my pelvis so it didn’t return. 

I’ve always been weirdly strong. Boyfriends have dutifully passed me jars to open, and I’ve always opened them with pride. On tour with an old band, our van broke down, and alone I was able to push it across a service station carpark. I was the only person able to pry open a huge vat of salted butter beans at a beach bar in Lisbon, that was being passed along the bar, customer to customer, eliciting a round of applause (but no free butter beans). 

Recently, when I was being obnoxious at a party, I was offering to carry my friends “like a baby or bride”. I was initially very happy looking at the photographs: my friends seemingly floating in my arms, like I was exerting no effort at all. But the more I looked at them, the more ashamed I felt. Why do I pride myself on being so physically strong?! What am I trying to prove? I often feel this same shame at the gym, and recognise something in what Kathy Acker and Miranda July are saying: there is a baseness, an animalism, in lifting weights, and one that feels particularly unbecoming as a woman (when I first started weightlifting my mother, ever the chief functionary of my looks, begged me not to in case I got “too big”).   

Acker later goes on to argue the body is its own language, and that in moving through the process of breaking muscle down and building it back up (Brat!) there is a method for “understanding and controlling the physical which is also the self”, a moment in which “meaning and breath become one”. I like moving towards this thinking, as there can be a kind of grace in weightlifting: the methodical attunement to form, the slow articulation of pain, the musicality of the rhythm and repetition. 

Acker talks about the use of the word “failure” - you’re supposed to repeat lifts “until failure”. And it has made me wonder about where I am going, when I move the pin up a notch, when I adjust the weight I am lifting, when I add another disc to the barbell: the synonymy of strong enough and failure.

A few years ago I taught a semester at a university in Liverpool, in a former nunnery. I taught one class on intro to craft and I really liked my students, one of whom was a middle aged woman who had taken the course after sending off her children to university. After class I ran tutorials, in which students could come and talk to me ostensibly about the class, though in actuality talked to me about anything but, and she hung back to chat. She wanted me to read a short story she’d just come across: David Foster Wallace’s Incarnations of Burned Children. It’s a very short story, around 1000 words, about a mother who spills a pot of boiling water onto her baby. Her and the father rush the baby to the sink, run him under the cold tap, thinking they have prevented the worst of the damage, before realising they did not remove his nappy, which is still filled with boiling water. The baby dies, cooking in his own nappy. It is a horrific story. After reading this story, I felt like it was the main thing happening in my life. People would ask me how I was, and I would answer well, I have been thinking about this David Foster Wallace short story. I wanted to show it to other people, almost compulsively insisting other people read it, to share the burden of carrying this awful idea around with me. I once told a friend the premise of it. Neither of us were yet mothers, but we both hoped to be, and now I am, and she will be soon. We sat in her living room. I think I would remember to take off the nappy, I repeated. Yes you would, she reassured. Me too. I think I would remember to take off the nappy too. Since becoming a mother I cannot read the story; would rather cut off my own arm than read the story. Just now, I glossed over it, making sure I got the basic facts of it right. I understand my student, hanging back, wanting me to read it. David Foster Wallace didn’t have children, she told me. So how did he know? She asked me that question many times. How did he know that was what it was like, to have a child, to fear for your child, to love a child. How did he know?

Around the same time, I went to see Mother! with the friend I described earlier, and it was a similarly traumatic experience. We watched the film at a cinema in Copenhagen, where she lives, and spent much of it holding hands, crying, with a half-eaten box of flodeboller at our feet. The film is by Darren Aronofsky, about a pregnant woman and her poet husband, living in a big house which she is redecorating. A stranger turns up, asking to stay, and it escalates into a Sarah Kane-esque hell in which hundreds of people turn up at the house, and the house becomes simultaneously a party, a warzone and the site of a cult. The woman gives birth, and the father takes the baby from her, and it is passed around the group until its spine breaks. It is then eaten. As it reached its climax, we whispered to each other. Shall we leave? Let’s just leave. I think we should leave. I hated it at the time; wanted to beg people waiting in the atrium for the next screening, not to see it. Go do anything else! We went to a bar to drink wine, sitting in silence, sitting outside, though it was freezing, shivering beneath blankets and the overhead heaters. We went back to her flat, ate a Kraft Dinner, and watched Curb Your Enthusiasm. I remember feeling how I felt the first time I took magic mushrooms: I will never feel the same again. I was obsessed with one scene, in which the woman (Jennifer Lawrence) asks two people to stop sitting on her sink, while some random guy hits on her. She’s negotiating these two dynamics: trying to (politely) get these strangers to get off her sink, trying to (politely) manage this man’s feelings. The man calls her an arrogant cunt and the strangers break her sink, which comes off the wall gushing water everywhere. There was something peculiarly empathic about it: about being a woman! - the accumulative nature of what happens; of how she instinctively assumes responsibility for everyone; of how ineffectively she is able to assert her boundaries. I found myself thinking about Darren Aronofsky: How did he know?

I had a similar experience watching Yorgos Lathimos’ Kinds of Kindness last week. In the middle story (the film is a triptych of stories) a husband asks his wife to cut out her liver for him to eat. Yes! I thought. Men will literally have you cut out your own liver and serve it to them for their own fortification! Lanthimos has said this story (written in collaboration with his co-writer Efthimis Filippou) is about forgetting, or not recognising, the people that you love. That the wife is “offering parts of herself to someone to show her love”. Hmmm. Interestingly, the story ends with the death of the wife and the arrival of a new (identical) wife, which is also sort of how Mother! ends. And as I come to the end of writing this Substack (!) (in the form of a triptych!) (like Kinds of Kindness!!!) I realise I’m not entirely sure what I am getting at, but I know it has something to do with my student, staying back after class and insisting I look up this story on my phone; that I read it right there in front of her. The question: How did he know? - which feels bigger the more that I think about it

The pool was an old-fashioned one, with separate baths for men and women, plus a mixed bath. She swam in the mixed bath because she wasn’t fucking hysterical. Individual changing rooms lined the sides of the pool. They had heavy wooden doors, which covered you from neck to shin, topped with candy striped curtains. You had to be careful not to squat. She liked the changing rooms, with their cold Victorian tiles and forgivingly eroded mirrors. Sometimes she would find it hard to step outside them, her limbs heavy with disinclination. She would sit on the little bench, her clothes packed inside her handbag, her socks wet, already, and she wouldn’t be able to move.

In those moments she took the opportunity to look up on her phone other things that might ease her anxiety. She would Google things that might be making her more anxious: caffeine, Instagram. She would Google things that might make her less anxious: double cleansing or more ostensibly feminist porn. Sometimes she would hold her phone to her ear to listen to a meditation podcast: a podcast that always began by requesting she smooth out her forehead, which was like a hard-to-iron-fabric, once she’d flattened out one part, another bit had bunched up again. She wondered if it was the smoothness of swimming she craved. 

In the swimming pool, she did what she called interval training, borrowed from when she ran. Interval training was where you would sprint for a bit and then walk for a bit. It was supposed to increase stamina. In her swimming version, after each slow lap she rewarded herself with a long rest, watching her legs bloat inelegantly beneath the water. Despite what she considered the recent total decrepitation of her body and face, during these rests, men would try to talk to her. They would say things like: “nice day for it”; or: “that’s a pretty swimsuit”. She was grateful for their attention, and only slightly afraid.

In the pool she would swim for as long as she could bear, and then she would be back in the changing rooms, often the same stall; her body damp beneath her clothes, staring at the door. She started taking a book with her, so she had something to read. Once she made a pillow out of her sweatshirt and a blanket out of her towel, lay across the wooden bench and catnapped for an hour. “It’s okay to rest,” the podcast urged. “Whatever you feel is completely fine for you.”

When Anna was a runner she used to worry a lot about getting murdered. I hope I don’t get murdered, she used to think, before going for a run. When she got back from a run she thought: well I’m glad I wasn’t murdered. Sometimes her thoughts could be a performance. In the swimming pool she only worried about suddenly and violently menstruating, or one of her breasts popping out. But in these scenarios, she was not the victim. And in her little stall she had space for those thoughts: the real ones, the ones that were just for her. Listening to her podcast, she scanned the porcelain tiles: the smile of a toenail come loose from a toe, a dark hair tangled like an ampersand. The changing room was full of assurances. 

One of the men in the swimming pool was talking to her more regularly now. He was a lifeguard and he would say things like “you need to lift your head higher and keep your shoulders level so that you can breathe”; or: “are you okay?” Sometimes he would tell her when a swimming session was over, his uniform plimsolls level with her face. She would push herself away from the side of the pool, floating backwards. “What if I don’t want to?” she would reply, and pout. Could she be cute anymore? Was that something she could get away with? Could she move to South East Asia and teach English as a foreign language? Did it matter? 

The meditation podcast told her all things were possible: whatever you feel is completely fine for you. When she ran she used to listen to things she could also dance to: Prince, Fleetwood Mac, Len. The venn diagram of running and dancing produced a fat, pinched oval of commonality. She wondered what swimming overlapped with: it’s tedious back and forth. 

One evening after the lifeguard had informed her of the end of the swimming session and asked if she would vacate the pool, she did so, hurrying to her favoured stall, removing her swimsuit and putting on her everyday clothes. The same lethargy came over her, compacted by the lifeguard and the podcast: one questioning whether she was okay, the other affirming that she was. And when the lifeguard, or one of the other lifeguards, called to make sure everyone had gone, to their homes or their dinner plans or whatever else people did after an evening spent swimming, she remained silent, her legs crossed up on top of the wooden bench, the door left ajar. 

The swimming pool was dark at night, with occasional ponds of light near the windows. Anna left her stall only to use the bathroom, her feet bare against the cold tiles. She was not able to sleep until the very early hours of the morning, but it was a good sleep: the sort of sleep you are only capable of once you have progressively relaxed every muscle in your body, while mindfully deepening your breathing. 

She was awoken by a sound, something like a noisy kitchen in a high class restaurant. She leaned over to open the door just a touch. Beside the swimming pool were long tables covered with white linen tablecloths. On top of the tables were large bouquets of flowers and bottles of champagne cooling in metal buckets filled with ice. In the corner was a three-tiered cake. The pool itself had been drained, the water replaced with rows of seating and a central aisle. She pushed the door-to and tried smoothing out her forehead, which at this point might as well have been nylon or silk. 

Inside the changing room stall she heard all the many stages of a wedding: the ceremony, the photographs, the speeches, the dancing. Every now and again she allowed herself a glimpse of the action, everything happening in the now drained pool. She was relieved to see something take its place: something that couldn’t be contained, something naive if not ultimately hopeful. Towards the end they played a song she recognised from her running playlist, possibly Prince, and she thought about getting up to move.

I’m not sure if it is post-pregnancy/childbirth hangover, being more attuned to my body generally or, dear god, approaching perimenopause, but the ebbs and flows of my hormones and menstrual cycle feel infinitely more pronounced, more articulate, the past few years. I rattle with nerves as my period approaches. Last week I was listening to a song that had a loud drum sound I wasn’t expecting, and I nearly jumped out of my skin at it, as if a stranger had leapt out of the bushes to attack me. Each month I think, without fail, and without any remorse, purely pragmatically: I need to learn some new makeup tricks because I am quite ugly now. I want to lie down on the floor and die from despair during my actual period. But during my follicular phase I feel practically godlike. Um, am I actually gorgeous?! I rarely feel hungry, could exist off fresh air and vibes. I have so much energy; an acute feeling of my own competence in all things.

I had lunch with a friend recently. I think it is fair to say both of us are going through what could be termed a Hard Time. We were talking about the consolation of meeting ourselves where we are at. How do I feel today? She told me she asks herself: where can I physically locate this feeling? We took it in turns naming the emotional sites of our bodies. She feels sadness in her chest. I also feel sadness in my chest; find myself clawing at the skin there. Her anxiety is felt in her throat. Mine radiates up and down my arms, fizzes in my belly. Love is felt in the solar plexus, the pit of my gut. I find myself picking at food around my son, sometimes, because I feel so full up of love for him, there isn’t room for anything else. Jealousy I feel in my face, specifically, my cheeks. Frustration is in my hands. I could go on.

I am trying to embrace transience, recently. I am trying to accept how I feel, and feel it in my body. As a parent I hear myself saying it’s just a phase! an awful lot. Waking up at 5.30am? Just a phase. Crying at every nursery drop off? Just a phase. Insisting on wearing a knitted jumper at the height of summer. Just a phase. 

I often lament being so in thrall to the fluctuations of my hormones, how forcefully they determine my mood, how and what I think about something, but I am trying to accept them for what they are: the changing of a season: out with one, in with another. The lows can be low, but the highs can be ecstatic. Either way, they’re impermanent, and I always feel a little different the day after.

We were always close and so it is strange to be so far apart. They send me photos on Facebook messenger. I am forced to admit it does look nice. A-frame entrance and raised wooden porch. Cypress trees and banana plants. Big lake out back. They swim in it and then sunbathe by the side. Dad plays Joni Mitchell on his phone. I suppose now I will have to explain the whole thing. 

We had been apart once before. I went to university in Norwich. It was a four hour drive from the family home, in Bristol, and longer on the train. Still, I’d come home every other weekend: we’d go for walks along the Avon, book a table for lunch. Sometimes drive to the seaside so they could swim in the sea. Mum would make me sandwiches for the journey home; sweeping a knife over sliced bread, the smell of softening butter.

After graduation I got a job doing marketing for a small arts festival, then another job, doing marketing for a slightly bigger arts festival. I had friends. I would see a show once a week; text people with recommendations for beer. It was around that time I met Nora.

I met Nora at a social media seminar. I had not had a girlfriend before and the ease with which we became a couple was exhilarating. On the weekends we were together we’d eat crumpets with Marmite and a soft boiled egg. In the afternoons we’d take out the bikes. But every other weekend I’d go back to Bristol, go stay with mum and dad. Occasionally I’d bring Nora and it would be a big deal. We’d eat dinner in the conservatory and dad would top up her wine. But mostly she couldn’t understand why I went back so much, said it was ‘boring’, complained about having to sleep on the sofa. Once she was quite rude to mum, made one of her sarcastic comments, about the sandwiches and the sofa. She moved out not long after.

I got a new job managing the website for a company that sold distance learning packages. I started wearing a suit to work every day and joined a gym. I made new friends: friends who would text me about small plates restaurants and the different series they’d been watching on Netflix. I still saw the old friends, the ones I went to shows with, but I had less time for them. Their lives seemed so comparatively small and stilted. 

I’d visit my new friends at the pubs near their houses. Sometimes there would be an extra woman there, a friend of their girlfriend or wife, of varying levels of attractiveness, though always with a steady, stable job. They would stare at me like they were trying to force something to be something else, and I would smile self-consciously from behind my beer. On the weekends I was at home I ate crumpets, just with Marmite, no soft boiled egg, no bike ride after. And every other weekend I’d go back to Bristol, think about looking for a job there, scroll through the dating apps and talk to local girls. ‘I live in Norwich,’ I’d message them. ‘Cool,’, they’d reply. ‘I live in Bristol’. These conversations felt Shakepearean, doomed. ‘Whatever’, I’d reply after a while.

One evening I met one of my friends' girlfriend’s friends. She was telling me a story about how incompetent everyone at her work was and she was so outraged at their incompetence that I started feeling outraged too. ‘There’s just no joined up thinking!’ she exclaimed, pounding a fist to the table. I imagined our lives together, mutually outraged at the incompetence of other people. It seemed like such an important life. When I looked at her I had the novel thought that I wanted to get her pregnant. She was called Lucy and she had wavy, brown hair. I asked my friend, Michael, to ask his girlfriend to give her my number. A year later she moved in.

My parents liked Lucy. They said she took care of me. I would take her back to Bristol, not every other weekend, but at least more often than I took Nora. I’d leave her at the kitchen table talking to mum about the books they were reading or recipes they admired, and dad would take me out to the garden to show me what he was planning to do with the rockery. Once, Lucy saw mum making the sandwiches. She rested a hand on her wrist. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘We’ll just get something from Pret’.

Friends would come visit the pubs near our house and it felt like a victory. Our conversations were suddenly about how boring our lives had become. ‘Spent all morning looking at vacuums!’ Lucy’s friend said, and we all cheersed. ‘Eight o’clock,’ added her husband, tapping his wristwatch. ‘Bit late for me!’ I bought another round. Though we spent all evening talking about how much we enjoyed early nights, we would stay till closing, get so drunk we’d frequently throw up when we got home. Soon, came babies, and then there were no more late nights, no more semi-ironic conversations about how much we hated our lives. Lucy told me she wanted a baby, and I remembered looking at her from across the table, listening as she called her colleagues idiotic, wanting to impregnate her with my child. 

She downloaded an app to her phone and started tracking her temperature. She had well and truly called my bluff. I didn’t want a child; I was a child. I hated how she’d stopped mum from making my sandwiches, how now I’d eat ‘crayfish’ and ‘chipotle’ on bread that didn’t feel even slightly like a pillow. I started going back to Bristol to stay with my parents more, again, on my own. We’d visit our usual lunch spots and they’d ask me questions about my career. I’d speak in knowingly impenetrable technical terms and they’d tell me I was very clever. I’d trail behind them in the garden centre, messaging Lucy. ‘New blinds in the spare room!’, attaching a photograph. ‘I want you to come home and fuck me,’ she replied.  

Our home stopped feeling like our home. Lucy had started wearing underwear that made me panic. She didn’t talk about how stupid and ineffectual everyone was anymore, sometimes she’d even say nice things about the people we knew. At work I would look up Nora in an incognito window, minimised so it was the size of a business card, in the lower left corner of my screen. She retweeted gentle criticisms of politics, had retrained as a nurse. I thought about our mornings in bed, chewing marmite sodden crumpets, getting egg yolk on the sheets. I sent her a message on Facebook saying ‘Hey’ but she didn’t reply. I picked a fight with Lucy that evening, said she’d changed, was so obsessed with having a baby she’d become impossible. She looked very ugly when she cried. I noticed she no longer wore her hair in waves, and hadn’t done so for a while. ‘Why don’t you run home to mummy and daddy?’ she spat, as our argument neared its end. It was a good question and one I couldn’t think of a reasonable response to. I got in the car and drove four hours to Bristol. ‘What are you doing here?’ dad asked. It was the middle of the night and he was wearing his pyjamas. ‘Can I stay for a while?’ I said. He nodded his head.

I started doing freelance work, mainly SEO, bidding for jobs that didn’t pay for very much on websites that took a significant cut. I wondered what I was going to do with my life. One evening I messaged Nora again, a long, rambling message, apologising for the many mistakes I had made, saying she was getting sexier with age. The next day she had unfriended me, which meant I could no longer see where she was working or who she was going on holiday with. 

On Tuesdays I went with mum to the supermarket where we had lots of good private jokes. One about the woman who worked the cheese counter and another where I would pick up identical packets of biscuits and say: ‘This one? Or this one? Or this one?’ On Thursdays I went to the pub with dad and always paid for the round. It was at the pub that I ran into my old friend Richard, a friend who I used to go see shows with. Richard had moved to Bristol with his wife Rachel. They were looking to buy somewhere in Filton. ‘Rachel’s from the Peaks,’ Richard said, and I wondered why he had told me this information. We talked about Norwich and our jobs for a while, and then I said I needed to head back to my dad. ‘You still go see shows?’ Richard asked, as I was leaving. I told him I did not. 

Lying in bed I looked at photographs of the Peaks on my phone. I imagined moving through those dark mountains, the fresh capacities they might awake. I looked up rental properties, small terraces made of stone. I had savings. I made a plan. I heard dad go to the bathroom and flush. 

When mum told me they were moving to California I took it initially quite well. They said they wouldn’t move until I’d found somewhere to live, and then I did, a stucco fronted semi-detached in Chesterfield. They helped me move in. Mum sewed me some curtains. ‘You’re going to be happy here,’ she said, but she said it with a quiet upswing at the end, the fishhook of a question. 

On the morning of their flight I made a ham sandwich, sent a photo of it to mum. ‘Miss you already!’ I typed, then deleted it. I tracked their flight on the airline website. They rang me from the ranch. Mum sounded drunk. I hung up on them. I wasn’t going to beg.  

I think it might have been easier if they’d moved to the East Coast. Looking at the map the East Coast didn’t seem that far away. It was just one stretch of sea, if you ignored Ireland. I dragged my cursor over a map on my screen, trying to work out the fewest amount of states you would have to flyover. Also, I didn’t like the way California sat on the American map, how it hung low to the side. It reminded me of Tom Cruise clinging to a rock at the start of the first Mission Impossible, arrogant and precarious.  

We had a weekly scheduled video call: the late afternoon for me, the late morning for them. They would call from the porch, twist their iPad around to show me the weather. I would call from the sofa, moan about the rain. Mum started sending me gifts in the mail: crocheted poppy, plastic toy gecco, box of saltwater taffy. Even though all I did was walk I began gaining weight. ‘Such a big boy!’ dad would say. 

In the end, I did beg. It started with letters, sensible ones, in which I made lists of the logical reasons they should return. Climate change. Shoddy American healthcare. What if I had a baby and I needed the extra help. They wrote back assuring me that they weren’t worried and had insurance. That if I did have a baby we would work something out. I thought about getting in touch with Lucy, telling her I was ready to have a child, but she was married now. And I thought back to the message I had sent Nora. I put this to my parents: Should I try to start things up with Lucy again? Should I find another way of contacting Nora? Please come back, I will do anything.   

The Black Hole appeared on my six month in the High Peaks. I was speaking with my parents only once every few weeks at that point and I wasn’t sleeping. They say you cannot see a Black Hole because the gravitational pull is so strong no light can escape it, and that you need light to be able to see. But I could see this Black Hole. It was like a blue tornado ringed with fire. It hung low in the sky. I stared up at it and thought of Lucy’s friend, spending a full morning looking at vacuums.

I went about my business as usual. I wrote SEO copy from home. I took long walks in the evenings and afternoons. I still sent photographs of my sandwiches to mum. Occasionally, I went on dates with women from the websites, and we’d discuss television shows and the news.

The Black Hole was getting bigger everyday, hanging lower in the sky. I told mum and dad about it, all the facts I’d been learning: how they are formed from the embers of a dying star. ‘The sun will never become a Black Hole,’ I said. ‘It is too small’. They stopped telling me about California, about the jojoba trees and the size of the avocados and their trips to Santa Monica to swim. Instead they just asked questions about the Black Hole: Was it still there? Was it getting any smaller? Could I see it right now? 

They told me they were taking a trip home. I met them at the train station. Dad sat in the front and mum sat in the back with the luggage. I took them on the scenic route. I pointed out some of my favourite sights, the walks I enjoyed the most. I told them about how moisture hung in the air, how when you got home you were as hungry as if you had been swimming. When we got back to mine I helped them with the luggage then took them into the back garden, the spot from which you could see the Black Hole the clearest. ‘Do you see?’ I asked. ‘Can you see it?’ They tilted their heads towards the sky and we looked at it together. 

I was pregnant during the pandemic: a time of great remaking. During this time I would compulsively Google the same two phrases every day, often many times a day: “Covid vaccination” and “McDonalds vegan burger”. The future had never been more opaque, less accessible. I couldn’t imaginatively project myself into it, both the wider world and myself, as a mother, moving within it. Every day brought the need for fresh recalibrations, both at a near-sighted and bodily level, and then within a broader context. Today I feel so sick I need to lie on the ground. Today I can manage a single ginger biscuit. Today I can go for a walk in the park with my friend. Today the same thing is literally illegal. I couldn’t get comfortable in any one mode; the shape of an identity was constantly changing, forever in flux. 

I read many pregnancy and early motherhood memoirs, desperate for a voice I could relate to. The only two I found recognisable in terms of what I was thinking and feeling, were Nine Moons by Gabriela Weiner and Inferno by Catherine Cho; the former of which I once read reviewed as reviewed as “ hazardous”, and the latter is an account of postpartum psychosis, which gives some indication of the state of mind I was in. I clung to these books. I feel very grateful for these books. I am compelled to say these books saved me, in their own small way. Both wrote candidly about the thing I was struggling with above all: ambivalence. I think ambivalence is often mischaracterised as indifference, or nonchalance, but for me the ambivalence I felt on becoming pregnant felt violent, seismic, apocalyptic. I wanted two directly contradictory things with an all-encompassing ferocity that made me feel I was being physically torn apart. 

I had always wanted to have a child; always knew I wanted to be a mother; and I got knocked up almost immediately after a lifetime spent fretting over my fertility due to endometriosis. The changes were so sudden, so absolute. Overnight, I could no longer drink. I felt so sick I couldn’t eat for months. I felt morbidly depressed. I napped four to five times a day. I felt like I was inhabiting a different body, that I had been given a different brain, within about two weeks of making the decision to start trying. I’d expected a little more time to find my feet, to make my reconciliations. One of the biggest reasons I found my future self so inconceivable was because of the total loss of sense of identity I was wrangling with. 

“You’re really hung up on this identity thing,” my therapist told me. I felt strangely ashamed, exposed by his observation. I am quite attached to a sense of identity, it feels something tangible to cling to, to be anchored by. My broader sense of self is so abstract and nebulous, I for the most part have no idea who I am, or what I think or feel, at any given moment. But I have a set of identity markers, I suppose, that make me feel I must be doing okay: author, lecturer, nice outfits, good taste in music. Music, in particular, has always felt a comforting cornerstone of my identity. I have a pretty decent working knowledge of Bob Dylan’s eighties and nineties studio albums. I used to run a band night named after a Casiotone For The Painfully Alone song. I played drums in a legitimate hype band! A hype band!

During pregnancy, I almost entirely stopped listening to music. The only music I could really metabolise was instrumental, and only in the bath, where I would ill-advisedly stew, listening to Grouper, Vivaldi and Philip Glass, on rotation. My former relationship with music felt so unattainable. When, once becoming a mother, would I get the chance to intensely listen to something on my headphones. How could I ever possibly play in a band? When would I go to a concert or gig? How would I even find out about them?! 

In the early days of motherhood I spent a lot of time walking in the park, often walking for three, four hours at a time. I’d listen to podcasts while my baby slept, and every now and then I’d attempt listening to an old playlist. One morning I put on the Spotify Discover playlist, for lack of anything else coming to mind. The song 2HB by Roxy Music came on. I found myself listening to it on repeat, for days on end. There was something alien about it; something antithetical to my present that I found appealing (apparently it is a tribute to Humphrey Bogart). I began listening to Roxy Music, and in particular their debut album, for the first time in my life. I liked being able to coexist in two realities. Exhausted new mother, pushing baby endlessly through the park. Another, living through this quite libidinous, urbane album, dripping in glamour and sex. Sometimes I think the only way I am able to find the reality of my present tolerable is by projecting myself into something else. Maybe this has always been the function of music for me? 

When my baby was about three months old, and when some of the lockdown limitations eased, I signed myself up for what was ostensibly a mother/baby exercise/dance class. You strap your baby to your body in a sling, and then an instructor teaches you a series of extremely low effort “dance moves”. I don’t know what compelled me to sign up for this class! I suppose I enjoy, and missed, dancing very much.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, maybe just something to pass the time? I took my place at the back, nearest the door, in case I decided to leave. I felt wildly self-conscious, both of my abilities as a mother, and in my desires to do something so, well, lame. The first song was by Sigrid. I had seen her two years earlier, at Primavera, leaving the group I was with to watch her on my own. The smell of sunscreen and beer, dancing in a crowd of strangers. Now I was in a roomful of mums with their babies, as we slowly moved our postpartum bodies around. I was surprised to find myself crying, while I danced. Not out of self-pity, as I might have expected, but more from a weird kind of acceptance. Mum things tend towards the same purview: almost wilfully uncool, and also a bit shit; and there was something very moving to me, in that moment, about that. You can do many of the same things you used to, just more slowly, laboriously, now physically weighed down. That you might be lucky enough to get a new kind of freedom, just one in which this little creature is now more or less permanently attached. But while body could still remember how to move, but I still couldn’t quite get it to move in the way that I wanted to. 

I thought about a play I’d seen a few years earlier, I’m a Phoenix, Bitch, by Bryony Kimmings, about breaking up with her boyfriend and nearly losing her baby. I thought it was terrible at the time. I remember telling a friend I found it so bad it made me feel mentally unwell. But there was one scene I found very affecting: she, the performer and mother Bryony, tries to dance with a projected image of herself, from before she became a parent. But the two selves can’t quite line up, can’t quite reach a rhythm. I remember my friends who were mums being a lot more impressed by the play than I was, and I’d like to revisit it at some point in the future. I’ve come to accept I am a different person now, with different sensibilities and different tastes. I have a bit more time for things wilfully uncool, and a bit shit. I, too, cannot (still cannot!) get my identity/ies to line up, to find a rhythm. I can’t imagine dancing with my old self ever again.

I now mainly listen to music with my son, who is three years old, most mornings, while we do puzzles or knead our fingers through playdough or kinetic sand. I always play him full albums. I have a 6Music dad fancy that I am giving him an education. I enjoy my delusions: that he has preferences and leanings of his own. He likes Nick Drake; The Beach Boys; Peter, Paul and Mary; Alex G. He does NOT like Television! He clapped his hands to his ears when I recently attempt to play him Shellac, shouting “too loud!".

A few months ago, I found myself putting on the first Roxy Music album, and when 2HB came on, I said to him “I used to dance with you to this song, when you were a tiny baby”. He put out his arms to me, like he wanted to be held. I lifted him off the ground, and he rested his head on my shoulder, and we danced to 2HB, in the living room, again.  

My sister lives in a three bedroom house, with a garden and a pond. “The napkins are in the sunroom,” was a sentence I once heard her say. 

As soon as I got in and saw her little girl sleeping on her chest, her tiny inked on features, the face of a sleeping cat, I started jumping up and down. I was very excited! My mum and sister told me to calm down. I am always jumping up and down because I am very excited, and I am always being told to calm down.

Later that afternoon, I commented on my sister’s husband’s ability to quieten the baby. “Martin has a very calm energy,” my mum offered. “And your sister also has a very calm energy.” She looked over at me. “It is just you who is chaotic.”

A while ago, my friend and I were assigning ourselves Dungeons and Dragons alignments (Lawful Good, etc..) She assigned herself Chaotic Good. I identified as Chaotic Neutral. I liked that about myself. That I had not identified as good. It made me suspect I was really very good indeed. 

But we had both agreed we were chaotic.

On the way home I missed the train I’d intended to get back, so content I was, with my little niece resting on my chest. The nothing-weight of her. Watching the skin of her throat contract and expand, like a bullfrog, croaking. Her eyes fluttering open, half rolled back into her head; the unfathomable content of her dreams. I’d get the next train! It was not a big deal! 

The next train back ended up being very delayed. I sat beneath the filthy awning of the shelter, just me and a man in a high vis jacket beside me, who offered me a tin of Stella, which I declined, and then regretted doing so the more delayed the train was. 

On the train I made a playlist of very sad songs, then listened to them all, looking out of the window. The fields were so flat, so sprawling. I hate the unbroken plains of the Midlands, the landscape I grew up in. There is something existentially terrifying about them; something which makes me want to curl up into a ball and cover my head with my hands. I have had a joke with all (both) of my boyfriends that I like to be hemmed in, always picking the seat in the restaurant next to a wall, some space in which I might feel encased. The flatness was making me nervous; I couldn’t listen to sad songs anymore. I needed something I could hold up to my face, so I started reading.

I started reading Leslie Jamison’s memoir of blowing up her life, Splinters. I was so engrossed in it, I missed my stop, not realising this until I got to the end of the line on the train. The train was going back the same way, so I remained on it. One of two teenage boys drinking cans of Monster, sat diagonally across from me, said “did you miss your stop too?” I replied “yes” but what I really wanted to say was, yes, but I am a nearly forty year old mother!

I once ended up in London, accidentally. There had been a bunch of train cancellations, and I’d had to take four separate trains from Nottingham back to Manchester. I’d gotten the wrong one, at some point, blithely settling into the journey until the train moved past Wandsworth. That’s down south, I remembered thinking. I sat on the train until it pulled into Euston, where I got a gin and tonic from the shop, sat outside in the warm night to drink it, then got the train back home. It seemed scarcely a big deal, just a little inconvenient.

On this journey I had to change at Derby, then change at Sheffield again. I briefly wondered what I would do, if I missed the last train back home. Would I book into a hotel for the night? Did I know anyone I could stay with? This is a situation I find myself in roughly once a year.

I hadn’t had any dinner, and at Sheffield only the One Stop was open. I bought a packet of crisps, a creme egg and a Sprite, eating them while staring at the departures board; the second time I have eaten a packet of crisps for dinner this week.

On the train back to Manchester, my mum rang me. “Why aren’t you back yet?!” she asked. My two hour train journey had taken five. “There’s a problem with the trains,” I replied, impatiently. “There’s a problem with all of the trains…I don’t want to talk about it.” 

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I went to a convent school for primary school - not a Catholic school, a convent school - in which the majority of our lessons were taught by nuns. It was a strange place. For a while we weren’t allowed mirrors in the bathrooms, because they promoted vanity. If we misbehaved, we were dragged to the front of the class, so that the nuns could remove our underwear (!) and smack our bottoms (!!!). Approximately once a year I have to confirm with my sister that this actually happened, because I’m scared it is some deranged false memory. 

The nuns gave me and my sister preferential treatment, because we were from a Polish family, and thus proper Catholics, so we didn’t experience too many smacked bottoms. Good for us.

My parents once left us at the convent for the weekend, for reasons unclear. We spent a lot of time in mass, and when we weren’t in mass, we took it in turns to ride the stair lift at the convent. I can’t remember where we slept, or if we did anything else, other than attend mass and ride the stair lift.

I was taught to swim by the nuns, by one nun, in particular: Sister Marie Claire. A tiny, white-haired French lady we were all terrified and in awe of, in exactly equal measure. She ran swimming classes at a local RAF base, and one of her strategies in teaching us to swim was tying a rope around our waists, and walking us like a dog, from one end of the pool to the other, then back again. She wore her full habit while doing so. This is all true.  

We went on a school trip to another convent in France with Sister Marie Claire. If we walked anywhere she made my sister go in a pram, which she would push, even though my sister was laughably too old to be pushed in a pram, that it was ridiculous and weird to see her in a pram. 

I wanted to be a nun for a long time. I’d hang pillow bags over the back of my head, read the Bible an awful lot, even though reading the Bible is not an especially Catholic activity. 

Films like The Nun’s Story, Ida and Black Narcissus fill me with such aesthetic pleasure it feels like my brain is being caressed. I’ve not yet seen Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, because I’m not sure I can cope. 

I ran into Sister Marie Claire about seven years ago, back home, in Lincoln. She ran over to me, cosmically identical to the last time I’d seen her, maybe twenty years earlier. Are you a Miss or a Mrs? she asked. She was absolutely mortified to find I had not married. I think she actually tutted. But you’re still a writer, she added. I told her I was. We always knew you’d be a writer! she said. Even when you were little! 

She told me she hoped I still say my prayers, which I do sometimes, even though I have no idea what I believe anymore. I really hope I get to see her again; to tell her I still have all these memories of her; that I will never forget. 

My first was at a soft play centre with my son. I unthinkingly ripped one of my half-broken nails off with my teeth, then had nowhere to put it. There were no bins, and I couldn’t drop it on the floor lest a soft-footed toddler impale themselves. And so I put it in the pocket of my jeans. I’ve worn these jeans a few times since, and every time I put my hand in my pocket I felt the hard arc of it, a sharp crescent moon. There never seems to be anywhere to dispose of the nail, when I remember to, and so it remains there now. 

The second was on the train. I looked down and saw a huge nail clipping on the ledge beside the seat. It might have been a toenail, or from a very large thumb. I was horrified, appalled; sick with misanthropy.

Once, I bought a McDonalds, then took it on the tram to eat at home. The milkshake sweated through the paper, tearing through and spilling everywhere. The man across from me held his head in his hands as if it were the most depressing thing he had ever seen. I had a magazine in my bag and I tried desperately to scrape the spilt milkshake onto it, with my bare hands on the filthy tram floor. “There’s nothing you can do,” the man said. “People will get on and see it, and think ‘what dickhead did that?’. And today, that dickhead is you.”

And so I was being unfair, I think.

The third fingernail was the most surprising. I was wearing a bodysuit beneath a blouse, and felt something catching just above my stomach. I assumed it was a stray piece of a plastic tagging, then fished it out from between my breasts; hoping nobody in the busy bar I was in had noticed. When I removed it, I found it was not a tag, but a tiny fingernail, obviously my son’s. It was a nice fingernail to find, as fingernails go, but I do not know how it got there.

My own fingernails are perpetually decrepit and disgusting. I bite the skin around them until it bleeds. I paint them once in a blue moon, then let the paint chip off for weeks after. They are all different shapes and lengths, always broken or torn. I do my best to keep them clean but I am only human. 

The state of my horrible nails is a running joke in my family; a family composed entirely of women, and factually no men. I am generally quite a vain person; fastidious when it comes to grooming. But the remit of my pride doesn’t quite reach the tips of my fingers, which are only getting worse, are actually borderline offensive. They are quite a good indication of my mental state, and right now they are bitten and sore, chipped and claw-like. Yet as I write this I am wearing a full face of makeup. My hair is in a “snatched bun” I had to watch an Instagram tutorial for. I’m wearing a silly little outfit, though I am just sitting and writing at home. I don’t know why I can’t extend this reach of care by just a couple more inches. But then, I quite like this fraying at the edges of myself. A dry cleaned coat, the hem caked and frayed, from being dragged through something disgusting. An atrophying little tell.

It made me think of a retreat in a similar vein I attended, over a decade ago now (!). It was marketed as an “Unplugged Weekend”: a “digital detox”. At the time I did not want a digital detox. I wanted to annihilate myself through my phone; scroll Twitter until my eyes bled. But the digital detox was run by a friend of a friend, and the friend wanted to go, had a discount, and it felt like something I should want to do, as a single, professional woman in my late twenties.

The weekend was located in the Welsh countryside. On the train ride down I learned my ex-boyfriend’s dad had died. I had known him for the best part of a decade. He’d helped me move house many times. He used to pick me up from the airport on the rare occasion I flew somewhere. I once casually mentioned that I had hardly any kitchenware, and the next time I saw him he presented me with an enormous cardboard box filled with things I needed to function and feed myself. “Sainsbury’s had a sale,” he said, handing it over dismissively. I still have a lot of those things now. 

I did not feel entitled to the shock and sadness I felt. I hadn't seen him for a couple of years. I swallowed it down, and went on to the retreat.

The retreat was populated almost exclusively by stressed out single, professional women in their late twenties; women who lived in London; women who spent what felt like a lot of time talking about the various routes they took on the tube. It was the first time I’d ever heard the words “Soho House”. 

We ceremonially handed over our phones the first evening of the retreat, and they were locked up in a big plastic box. The weekend was filled with activities which didn’t exactly pose an attractive alternative to disappearing inside of one’s phone. There was laughter yoga, which was exactly as horrific as it sounds. There was a lot of yoga, generally. I have a problem, I think, with processing form or shapes, which I occasionally suspect is dyspraxia, but which I instead term my “brain problem”, and so the instructor had to keep coming over to correct my position, getting increasingly frustrated as she did. At night we slept in bunk beds in shared accommodation, which meant I barely slept at all. I felt like Adam Scott in Parks & Recreation, face filled with acupuncture needles. This is the most stressed out I’ve ever been in my life!   

One of the last activities was eye gazing, in which we were paired up with strangers, to hold eye contact for a full five minutes, outside in the fresh air. “You’re so lucky,” the last woman I was paired with said to me on breaking eye contact. I have thought about this many times since. What had she seen?! I had felt very angry with her, at the time.

On the train home my friend and I posted a selfie. “You look glowing”, another friend replied. I felt sleep deprived and depressed; achingly alone. 

When I got home I rang my mum, told her about my ex-boyfriend’s dad, promptly bursting into tears, sobbing down the phone; feeling some of the clarity and catharsis that had eluded me during the yoga or the life drawing or the meditation or the “reconnection workshop”. A couple hours later, I messaged someone I’d been speaking to online, asked if they wanted to go see Eleanor Friedberger play that night. And I guess now we live together and have a house and baby and whatever, and I do feel lucky, very much so.

I remember messaging a friend the night before I went into labour, saying I hoped my unborn baby hung on for at least one more day, because I wanted to watch a particularly juicy episode of MAFS. My waters broke approximately fifteen minutes after that episode ended, so some message must have been received. 

A tiny pop. The quietest start to the most deafening experience of my life. 

Once your waters break you have to go into hospital so they can check you out. A barrier has been breached, and you are suddenly an infection risk.

In the hospital a midwife waxed lyrical her lunatic views on women and birth while she wired me up to a foetal heart monitor. “Pain is a social construct,” she said. “A fear construct.” I blinked at the ceiling. “If you tell yourself you’re in pain then you’ll be in pain. Do you see what I am saying?”

I was sent home with a clutch of disposable thermometers and an instruction to stay there as long as I possibly could. I lay in bed, my partner Pete asleep beside me, while waves of increasingly unbearable pain moved through me. 

Hazel, the rabbit, at that point would spend the nights perched at the foot of the bed, waking us periodically to stroke his head and, to his credit, only occasionally urinating when we did not immediately comply. He was my soft companion through the night; fluffing up the duvet around me, laying curled at my feet. I will show you a video of this if you ask me to, or even if you do not.

By the morning I was in enough pain that I wanted to go back in. Halfway there I made Pete turn the car around as I had not said goodbye to Hazel. I think now, that goodbye was necessary, because I was not the same person to him when I got back; returning with a wailing pink creature I was suddenly devoted to. It diminished my love for him; or shadowed it, rather. I feel very cruel saying this, because he is now very ill, and we are hand feeding him every meal, bathing him every night. But it is true.

Early on in my pregnancy, I’d wanted a caesarean section, and had been referred to a consultant midwife, essentially, to talk me out of it. And they did, telling me I could request an early epidural. This was what I was expecting, but at hospital I was told there were no birthing rooms free, and no anaesthetists available, and so I was put in a waiting bay, blue curtains pulled around me, the moans and shrieks of other women at other stages of labour all over. 

Like most women, I have dwelled on the realities of female pain not being taken seriously. Pain is a social construct. A fear construct. I have endometriosis, and so have experienced a reasonable amount of pain. I have gotten taxis home when I could not walk; have laid down on the floor of an office bathroom, curled around the base of the toilet, only to be told to hang on, that it would improve after I gave birth. Still, nothing prepared me for the pain of childbirth, and how hard I had to fight for recognition and treatment of it. In Leslie Jamison’s Grand Unifying Theory of Female Pain, she writes: 

A 2001 study called “The Girl Who Cried Pain” tries to make sense of the fact that men are more likely than women to be given medication when they report pain to their doctors. Women are more likely to be given sedatives. The study makes visible a disturbing set of assumptions: It’s not just that women are prone to hurting—​a pain that never goes away—​but also that they’re prone to making it up. The report finds that despite evidence that “women are biologically more sensitive to pain than men … [their] pain reports are taken less seriously.” Less seriously meaning, more specifically, “they are more likely to have their pain reports discounted as ‘emotional’ or ‘psychogenic’ and, therefore, ‘not real.’ ” 

I suppose I was forgotten about, in my blue little bay, as I spent around four to five hours there without so much as paracetamol. A caveat about how criminally underfunded the NHS is, is necessary here, and the vast majority of the midwives and nurse who cared for me throughout my pregnancy were consummate professionals, but at that point we could not get someone to bring me a glass of water. 

When I reached the point where my contractions were less than a minute apart, I dragged myself from my bed, trouserless and bleeding, through a hospital corridor, to present myself at the midwives station. “You’ve gone demented,” the attending midwife told me. Reader: I had. 

I was in transitional labour: peak pain, still no pain relief, and as one contraction finished another had already begun. I was taken to my birthing suite, given a shot of morphine. In my NCT class I was told morphine doesn’t really stop the pain, but it makes it feel like it is very far away. It felt a little like this, and also like I was aware of being in the most ungodly agony of my life, but also, that I didn’t care.

I was given an epidural shortly after the morphine. It took three attempts because I kept convulsing from pain; couldn’t stay still long enough. I thought about the David Cronenberg film Existenz, where video game ports are surgically inserted into players' spines. Post-human.

It took awhile for the numbness to travel through my lower body. It felt like ice cold water, moving through my veins. I remembered a quote I couldn’t (and still cannot) locate, about relief being the purest form of happiness. My midwife put on a light projector. It made the room watery and blue, like an aquarium. 

I remember very little beyond this. I think I slept a bit. I vomited constantly; filled pulpy cardboard commodes, one after another. I had a few albums downloaded that I had hoped to relax me: Grouper and Phillip Glass, but the speaker kept cutting out, then reconnecting to one of the other nearby birthing suite’s playlist, emitting bursts of very upbeat salsa.  

It seemed there were lots of people coming in and out of the room. My midwife changed shifts, and another midwife and student midwife took over. A paediatrician. The anaesthetist.  They were all brilliant. At some point I was told it was time. 

I felt very nervous, an expectation that now I was to perform. I could not conceptualise the baby I was about to have: his heartbeat bleeping via the monitor beside me. 

I don’t know if it was the morphine or (as a midwife later theorised, because I might have been holding my breath) but I kept passing out every time I pushed: pushing myself into literal unconsciousness. I would push, cinematic screaming etc, then pass out, waking up a few seconds later. I kept falling into a hallucination that I was a woodland creature, being hunted by woodsmen. I can picture it now: running on all fours, low in the grass. I would come to, my hands positioned like paws, paddling out in front of me. Later, when I told Pete about this hallucination, about my pawing hands, he said “Yes I wondered why you kept doing that”. 

I remember coming-to after one unconscious-making push and not knowing or understanding where I was: in this dark space, surrounded by strangers shouting at me to push. I turned to see Pete, holding my hand, telling me not to be scared. The naming of an emotion. I am! I am scared! 

I pushed for about forty minutes in total, I think. I was cut. They used a ventouse, and when that didn’t work, forceps. Horrible! Glad I didn’t see them until after! But then my baby was born, my little boy, my perfect little baby boy.

My sister is a teacher, and she told me a story a while ago, about one of her classes. This story has warped in my head over time, and the version that now exists in my mind is this: a phone kept ringing during one of her classes. It was a girl towards the back, and the girl kept rejecting the call, apologising, but then the phone would ring again. At the end of the class, when everyone stood up to leave, the girl saw that her best friend had been hiding beneath her desk for the entire duration of the class. It was her - her best friend - who had been calling her phone, from her little hiding place below. 

“It was you!” I imagined her saying, finding her best friend, who had been curled up there all along. Sending her little signs. “It was you! I didn’t know it had been you!”

I hated being pregnant. I had such extreme morning sickness that some days just keeping down one glass of water felt an insurmountable task. I was so tired; my brain was so foggy. The only thing I enjoyed was sitting in the bath, listening to Philip Glass and Vivaldi. But one thing that did help me get through my pregnancy, however, was the thought of eventually getting to see my placenta.

I remember looking up placentas sometime in my mid-twenties, being both horrified and compelled by the articulacy of their organness. I kept urging people I knew to look at photos of placentas. Why was nobody talking about this?! This enormous, veined, extra-terrestrial thing, nourishing our unborn children. I knew if ever I was pregnant I would want to keep mine. When in life are you afforded the opportunity to bring home one of your organs, to do with as you wish?

I brought it up with my midwife about midway through my pregnancy. She told me I just needed to make my wishes clear with the midwife delivering my baby, and bring something with me to take it home in. I brought a Tupperware container, something I used to store sandwiches.

I researched all the different things you can do with a placenta. There are of course ways of eating the placenta: you can remove small pieces of it and whizz it up in a smoothie, you can have it freeze dried and put into capsules. Eating the placenta has some (alleged) health benefits, such as reducing postpartum bleeding, improving mood blah blah. I was watching the television show Servant at the time, and there is a peculiarly luscious scene in which the recent father in the show bakes his wife’s placenta into opulent little pastries, for the guests at the baby’s baptism to unwittingly enjoy.

I did not want to eat my placenta. For a while I liked the idea of having a piece of it made into jewellery, but so far this is not a service I have seen. What I really wanted to do with my placenta was to study it. To marvel at it. To be repelled by it.

I had a horrible birth, which I will probably write about in a trauma-dumping Substack at some point, but I got to keep my placenta. I remember Pete holding it up, in the thin plastic paper they wrapped it in, like a cut of steak from the butchers. How it hung indecently over the sides of the Tupperware, ludicrously too big. I felt at that point, as much of a piece of meat as I am likely to ever feel. I was staying overnight in hospital with my baby while Pete was to go home, taking a slab of me with him. 

I had to stay in hospital for a couple days, but when I got home the placenta was in the fridge, waiting for me. When I at last had the energy, I handed Pete the baby, took it out, and emptied it into the kitchen sink. 

I’m not sure what I was expecting to feel, but whatever it was, I’m not sure I felt it. I just prodded it with my fingers for a bit, felt the weight of it in my hands. After a while Pete told me to throw it away, in the outside bin, which I did.

In the interview he describes buying a single envelope, and not having a stack of envelopes in a cupboard somewhere, as his wife suggests.

“So I go to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately.

I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience centre down the block at the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it.

Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time.”

I feel this sentiment in my bones. I recently enjoyed reading Heather Parry’s Substack post against convenience. She talks about first encountering Huel - the meal replacement shakes you’ve seen, designed for convenience as opposed to weight loss - how it makes up part of a broader culture of maximum convenience, geared towards freeing up our time to be more productive, to do more work.

Parry talks about some of the pleasures of inconvenience: of grinding the coffee beans, of slowly pouring over the water. She is also cognizant of the privileges and circumstances that allow for these pockets of time. In my pre-parenting days I, too, enjoyed slowly pouring over the water, watching it brew through the filter in exquisite little drips. Now I put the coffee on before bed, and it is set to a timer, so I can come downstairs and drink coffee until it bleeds out of my eyes, because it is not unlikely I spent several chunks of the night lying on the floor beside my toddler’s cot while he demanded "hold the hand!” (kiss the ring!) if I breathed so much as an intention of creeping back to my own soft, warm bed.

I started learning to drive as a bargaining chip when my mum started working for a posh gym chain, meaning she could bestow one free membership to either me or my sister. “If you give it to me,” I offered. “I will learn to drive.” My idiot sister had already learnt to drive! She didn’t have a foot to stand on! Also, I reasoned, it probably would improve my life to not have to take a tram and then a bus every time my son wants to see the dinosaurs at the museum (every week).

Now, eighteen months later I still cannot drive. But I like cycling to my gym, in one of Manchester’s weirdest suburbs, past the riding schools; horses grazing on the fields, the wind turbines spinning in the distance. I like walking to the Post Office, through the park, past the charity shops. I even like taking my son on the tram, watching him pull his hat over his eyes, singing the theme tune to Mickey Mouse Club House at the top of his lungs to the utter fucking indifference of the other commuters. Driving feels so antithetical to Vonnegut’s sentiment: training your body to move like a machine, not looking at the horses in the fields because if you do you might run someone over. It’s awful!

I have my driving test booked in three days, and it is possible, just, that by the time I publish this post, I would have passed. It is more possible I will not pass, and will just keep taking driving lessons indefinitely. I keep going to the hairdressers because my hair keeps growing. I keep going to the dentists because my teeth continue to rot. And I keep taking driving lessons because I cannot fucking learn to drive. But at least I am having a nice time farting around while I do so.

Once at secondary school the boy I fancied asked me out as a joke. It was a very cruel joke! When I quickly said yes, (“yes!!!”) he replied ‘sorry I forgot I’m gay’. That bit was quite funny. Later, he said he did not like me because I had big ears. To be clear, he added he would rather “get off with a toilet seat”. A bit much but okay. 

I used to imagine slicing them off with a surgical knife. How the skin would pull apart from the cartilage and I could slip them out like a hand from a glove. But since then I have made a kind of peace with them, even becoming a little fond of them in their ludicrous enormity. 

Someone once told me that ears do not count, and I guess they had a point. No longer caring about my ears made me feel hopeful, stupidly. You can move on from the crass vanities which preoccupy you. And so it was quite annoying to develop an ugly lifelong hum in them, giving me a reason to really hate them, a few years later. 

I developed tinnitus the same night I found out I had gotten my first book deal. I went to sleep thinking, my life could really change. I woke up with a ringing in my ears that has not yet gone away.

The first month of tinnitus was hell. My days became characterised by suicide ideation and nerves; life felt long and hard. It seems absurd to be so troubled by what is essentially an annoying sound; but its inescapability and totality is maddening.

Now I am well used to the sound, which is midway between the hiss of television static and the roar of the ocean. I rarely think about it, though recently I have been dipping in and out of Michael Faber’s new book Listen: On Music, Sound and Us, in which he announces also having the condition with “Whee! I have tinnitus.” I appreciate that introduction. It has an “I’m insane lol’ sensibility I can relate to.

He only mentions it a few times, saying he struggles to forget it, and is trying to train himself to ignore it. This feels quite alien for me, as I now rarely notice it. But it was one of the first things I thought about when I came up with the idea of writing a series of columns about abjection.

My initial feelings on developing tinnitus I think now, were of being abjected. It was akin to finding a spider or something unpleasant on my hand, then violently shaking it off: except the unpleasant thing was in my head, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

So little is known about what causes tinnitus and how it can be treated ,there is a desperate grapple for cause and effect; to make sense of this maddening, untreatable thing. Some think it is god: a platonic understanding of a formless entity unrelated to our senses and heard only by a few. I thought it was punishment but then I was raised Catholic. But there is something about it that is fundamentally impossible to parse. It is something from nothing, and it never goes away. 

“You can sit by my side if you like, with your ear against my head,” Faber writes. “...But you won’t be able to detect the metallic squeak.”

My grandma, who also hates her ears, who I no doubt inherited my generously proportioned ears from (and my loathing of them), who told me I should wear a headband on them at night to flatten them against my head, because that is what she did for twenty years and now they look fine, recently developed a form of tinnitus herself, called musical hallucinations. She hears music, everything from showtunes to waltzes (the waltzes are her favourite). Her theory is that she is picking up signals from a nearby radio. Sometimes she says, “they’re playing a good one now, a Polish one”, and she tilts her head to the side, looking happy.

There is something about this method that jars. I write in a more careful, roving and circuitous way: editing as I go, revisiting, making wholesale changes two thirds of the way in. I am a slow writer, a slow drafter. The thought of the Vomit Draft makes me bristle: the necessity of getting from point A to point B. When talking about the concept with a student recently, I was even moved to use the word phallocentric for the first time in my life.  

“You know if it’s a Lara Williams book,” one of my friends once said to me, “there’s going to be a lot of vomiting.”

There is a lot of vomit in my writing, but that was not something I was conscious of, or ever intending. Even the first post of this Substack contained vomit! I can’t get away from it. 

I think this is partially because I am a prolific vomiter. I was a teenage bulimic, something that feels wildly shameful to admit. But also, thinking of who I was then feels so unrecognisably divorced from who I am now, it is hard to really see them as connected to me in any shape or form. I worry that because I abused my body in that way during my teens, it is permanently broken: still prone to both symbolically and literally being sick. 

My son is of the age where he has a vomiting bug what feels like every other week, and they can be debilitating to me in a way they are not to others. I have a relatively low tolerance to alcohol, because after more than a few glasses of wine I just throw up. I also spend a not insignificant portion of my life feeling nauseous. Many things can trigger nausea or sickness for me. Too much garlic. Too much coffee. Car journeys. Certain shades of grey. 

Ottessa Moshfegh has an essay called How To Shit intended to offer advice to aspiring writers. In it she says: “...in writing, I think a lot about how to shit. What kind of stink do I want to make in the world? My new shit becomes the shit I eat. I learn by digesting my own delusions. It’s often very disgusting.”

I just finished the first draft of a novel I have been working on for almost two years. It’s the first novel I have written since becoming a parent, something I wasn’t sure I would be capable of doing, having abandoned my first novel-writing attempt. I wrote it all in very controlled little bursts, sitting with an idea for a long while, before venturing to write it down.

There is something that I recognise, in what Ottessa Moshfegh says, about writing. Ingestion and expulsion. What I imbibe becomes what I excrete. But still, writing as shitting doesn’t feel quite right to me. It does feel closer to vomiting. But perhaps the difference is, I can hold it in my stomach for a very long time, then choke it up at will.  

I started watching this wretched TV show after seeing Hot Fuzz for the first time one recent Friday night, and enjoying it so much it gave me what I kept pathetically describing as a “boost” which lasted “all weekend”. 

So far I am enjoying it. It is gently paced and distracting. Not laugh out loud funny but also not the worst thing I have ever seen (which is coincidentally also directed by Edgar Wright, and is Baby Driver). 

In Spaced, as you probably know, Tim (Simon Pegg) and Daisy (Jessica Stevenson), two virtual strangers in their twenties, find themselves living together in a London flatshare. 

One of the things I do enjoy about it is that it is quite gross. The flat is nicotine stained, with ugly patches of damp across the walls. Every surface is covered in cold cups of tea. Cigarette laden ashtrays make for the centrepiece of any table. I can feel on my skin how it would be to inhabit and move around that flat. It has made me feel nostalgic for the communal grubbiness of the house shares I lived in during my twenties. 

To live with another person is to know their body. You cook together and you eat together. You hear each other having sex through the walls. You share a sink, a shower, a toilet.  

I recently gave a speech at one of my best friend’s weddings - someone I have lived with in various places across Manchester - and so have been turning over lots of memories, looking for the ones which characterise our twenty years of friendship. Two in particular, stood out to me. 

One, in a house we shared, the morning after a night out in which I had brought back an ex-boyfriend. I had been very drunk and had vomited into my ex-boyfriend’s hands, which he had mysteriously cupped in front of him in order to catch it. Also, a little over the walls. 

The next morning my friend came to check up on me, having heard his voice as he left. She filled a bucket with warm, soapy water, and together we cleaned my vomit off the walls, while I poured out my heart.

A year or so earlier, we had shared a similar conversation, in which she revealed something tender that was happening in her life, and we talked about it while sitting on the bathroom floor, taking it in turns to pull out enormous clumps of clogged hair from the shower.

These memories are strangely precious to me. I cannot remember the content of those conversations, but those images are seared into my mind. My Coca-Cola-brown vomit on the wall. The long muculent globs of hair, pulled from the drain. The reciprocal care. The corporeal acceptance. The mutual cleaning up of what we had shed.