Am I in it?

I wasn’t particularly vocal about writing a book. It certainly wasn’t a secret, it just wasn’t something that I volunteered. I’d moan if I’d stayed up late writing, there was a point where I wouldn’t sleep until I’d written 1000 words, but largely I didn’t mention it. I would say to the girls that I was working when I dropped them off at nursery because I was, the few hours that they spent there meant that I could edit or squeeze in an extra few hundred words. It’s funny, when the girls were small, it was somehow deemed valid that I didn’t work, they were work enough it seemed but as they approach four and school age, it is somehow now not. So I would mention it, in passing to my in-laws if they came over to take the girls out to the park or wherever.

When it was finished and out there in the world, J was my social media cheerleader. He tweeted the link out, put tons of photos on instagram, promoted it on his facebook and I just sat there that first weekend, not writing for the first time in about six months and I accepted the surprised compliments from friends and family. A handful downloaded it that first weekend and I had a lovely chat with one of J’s cousins in Australia who was very complimentary and it was generally a lovely few days.

But what was odd was the questions? The big one, is it me? Is Emily, the main character, me? This is, of course, a ridiculous question. Of course she is, to an extent at least. She’s the person I’d quite like to be, she’s a bit more put together than me, she is calmer than me, as lonely, but she isn’t me. Not really. Some of her experiences are mine, the way that her husband dumps her is almost exactly the break up I had with an ex, written slightly differently (but only slightly!) knowing full well that there is more chance of the world ending than him reading it. Another character is based entirely on someone I know. Others are completely made up. I’m sure this is true of all books, isn’t it?

The other question, asked slightly shyly, is ‘am I in it?’. This was asked a lot and the answer was mostly the same. No. It’s too much to try to hide a person, change their hair colour or their name or the amount of children they have just to shoehorn them into a story. You can hide yourself, that’s easy, you know yourself better than anyone but someone else, not worth it.

There is a draft on my computer of something much more autobiographical but I wrote three chapters of it and it felt too hard to carry on. It’s a story I’d like to tell one day but maybe it needs to be a little more fictionalised, a little less me and a bit more padded out. Who knows? The second book, if it’s ever finished, is a sequel to the first. I needed to see what happened next, if Emily ended up happy.

It will be finished. I’ll reopen it tomorrow, read what I last wrote and crack on.

Hold me to it, would you….