Lifting Off
Time to strap in
Hello there Friend,
I hope you are well and finding time for yourself? Wasn’t Sunak V Starmer dull on TV last night? As I watched Sunak bluff his way through his broken script, I yearned for a blown up swimming pool to appear, full of banana milkshake. The loser of ‘the debate’ would get dunked, and we would watch them in their soaked underpants being led off in a neck-chain by a group of leather clad Bears. I learnt absolutely f*** all. Still, let’s get the Tories out, shall we?
Excuse my flight of fancy there. So, this morning at 7.45am, while I filled one hundred tiny miniature bottles with vodka and gin through a funnel (for my book launch party, not for breakfast) mum rang and left a message,
“Morning Karen, Give me a call and let me know where you are today, yeah? It’s your mother speaking.”
I love the way her demand is sort of witty, yet not. She’s still pulling rank, even in her static position from her chair. Of course, she has command over me - I am her baby - and I am so glad she’s having a better ride of things, yet I have learnt not everything has to be responded to immediately. After being on high alert for so many months, it has been a gradual come down into a lovely place called ‘normal’.
The last big event I celebrated with her in attendance was my 50th birthday party, held at a pub in Penge. It was the last time she left her house (apart from in an ambulance) and was brought along to the party in a wheelchair. At sometime during this party, as friends read out their raucous and sweet stories about me, she had a stroke. She was discreetly wheeled out the party, while the ambulance was called. My family kept it all from me, and I remember seeing the blue lights outside the pub as we partied on, thinking, typical Penge on a Saturday night.
She survived. A friend of mine calls her ‘Lily nine lives’.
So…drumroll, triangles tinging, tamborines shaking… Tomorrow my baby gets born. Lifting Off - at last it’s here. Over the past years I have written over 180,000 words, not all good, some excellent, then slimmed, sliced, discarded and finally shaped into seventy-two thousand; tomorrow its final form becomes earthbound.
Mum, once an avid reader of romance novels, now doesn’t read anything but the TV guide. So last week I took a copy of the book to show her. Since the memoir details true stories around me, mum and dad and his drinking, how mum was the complex life jacket, there is some relief to knowing she won’t, or can’t read it.
When she held the book in her hands, turning it this way and that, I asked whether she wanted me to read a bit to her. She nodded, so I read out part of the acknowledgements. As she recognised the names and odes to them, the nerves across her face pulsed under her skin. She can only take a minute or two of information before her gaze drifts out the window, so I kept it short, and left out anything which might cause her pain.
After I stopped reading, she dipped her head.
‘Aren’t you clever. You’re so much cleverer than me,’ she said, not disguising her thoughtfulness - which presents on her face as sadness.
And I couldn’t bear this, you know. I couldn’t bear the idea that my mum thinks this. She’s said it twice in my life, always around the times of major artistic achievements. What am I to say? Thank you? And why does it feel so upsetting, like a world of distance has come between us.
So I said, ‘You were the one telling stories mum. Funny stories. You’re clever too.’
The film Educating Rita discusses this inner turmoil many of us from working class backgrounds experience. The desire to leave the boundaries of your social class, and yet remain close to the people. For Rita (played by the wondrous Julie Walters) education provided power and emancipation creating a struggle and crisis of identity. Rita’s story is familiar to many of us. This is a life’s work, negotiating this terrain.
Written about as honestly as I could in Lifting Off, is my struggle with alcohol and not following the path trodden by my dad. This was the riskiest most shameful thing I could write about. What I could not guess was that through the writing of this memoir, I would manage to unlock the shame. Writing is a powerful tool. There is catharsis, then there is artfulness. Life writing can enable us to live better and deeper; to look ahead through a cleaned window.
This is a picture of a quote I pinned above my writing desk during the writing of the book:
If you have never heard of the wise and big-hearted, Cheryl Strayed, her podcast ran for some years and the archive can be found here: Dear Sugar. Her book Tiny Beautiful Things is an act of radical empathy and saw me through many a difficult moment.
Now, as well as you reading and following my work, I have something extra to ask of you my friend. Tomorrow is the publication of Lifting Off. Plus on the same day, there is a re-issue of my debut novel, In Search of the Missing Eyelash both published by Kate Beale and Sarah Beale (sisters, not wives) at Muswell Press. So please do consider ordering a copy, giving it as a gift, or pack in your holiday suitcase. AND if you like it, do tell your pals, and consider writing up a good, or in the least decent, review on Goodreads. This helps get the word out even more. If you don’t like aspects of it, please remember I am only human, so maybe keep those thoughts for your diary!
The best way of selling a book is via word-of-mouth. So booksellers, authors, friends, I am already really grateful for the support you give me, but any more assistance is brilliant. I really am dead proud of this memoir. See what the Observer wrote this weekend:
So there we have it. It’s time to fasten those seatbelts and keep them on for the forseeable.
Doors to automatic and cross-check.
I’ll write soon.
Keep safe,
Love Karen xxx
P.S. For my VIP Velvet paid subscriber community, you will be receiving a special Lifting Off video of a reading early next week. If you do not subscribe yet, please do consider upgrading your subscription and putting some more ink in my pen! There’s still so much more to come…K xx