On falling asleep to Carol

And letting words get eaten

The final Christmas gift from Mum: the world aglow

Dear Friend,

As I walked home from the allotment earlier, I thought how ‘happy new year’ was a bit of a naff saying. Perhaps I’ll try, ‘good health’ or rather, ‘I wish you a bubble bath which stays hot long enough to read a chapter of a brilliant novel’. You get my drift. Happiness has never struck me as something wise to go in search of. Satisfaction is a far easier and attainable concept, and already, a few hours into 2025, I have these satisfying moments to share with you:

The pull cord in the bathroom worked first go. I ate laverbread on toast for breakfast with a fried egg cooked in a new copper pan and because I fell asleep at 10pm last night (N.Y.E.), I feel very rested (more on this later).

The late Joan Didion who died in December 2021 from Parkinson's disease.

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While I was in bed this morning, I opened Joan Didion’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’. Chapter one begins with:

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

These are the first lines from this beautiful and devastating book, which is about grief, and how we think, when we are in the thick of it. I am particularly drawn to the fourth line and how it shifts from the first three. This echoes how, from the incredibility of a sudden death, when all stability is gone, we circle back on ourselves to ask: how are we going to live now? How do I represent myself during this difficult time.

For those who didn’t read my previous Short Tall Letter ‘The Girls Are Alright’ (welcome to all you new subscribers!) December 2024 was dominated by the death of my mum Lily. Over the past three and a half weeks, since we found her, since I knew something was awry and dashed to her house - call it a telephone call from the womb - at times, I have felt like a teenager again.

Now both of my parents have gone, does this mean there are no longer any rules?

There’s a kind of she-who-dares-wins thrust to my walk at the moment. An urge to live, to rebel, to flee. Then I flatten out, exhausted, and take to my bed, curl up and cry, as I know it is better out than in. I fell apart at East Croydon station the other evening (though this may be more to do with the fact that it is the most depressing station in London).

On New Year’s Eve, I drifted off to sleep in front of the film ‘Carol’. I can remember my eyelids falling as Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara had sex. All I can think, is how I must be in an altered state, so deceptively unknowable to me, that I fell asleep to this great erotic scene, one which had, a few years back, made me pour a glass of wine down my top instead of in my mouth at a screening at the BFI London Film Festival (with the two leads in the same auditorium!).

Earlier yesterday, I had been obsessing about finding a black and white photograph of Mum taken in her twenties. We are putti together a film of stills for the funeral to honour all the many lives and looks of Lily. In this picture, she is sat at a desk, her black hair curled and she is animated, as if there is laughter in the room. In front of her is her Sumlock Comptometor - the first push button calculator to achieve commercial success - which she travelled around central London with. As a child I was fascinated by the buttons. As a young woman, I admired how strong Mum was as she carried it to work in its special case.

I had this photo pinned to my wall for the whole time I wrote my memoir, Lifting Off. The idea of women's work, or duty, features largely in both my fiction and non-fiction. When I teach writing, I always say to my students, but what do your characters do all day? Even if it doesn’t feature in the story, it is integral to a character’s being and purpose. Coming from a modest background, the idea that people don’t have to earn their crust, even in fictional realms, makes me rather cross.

When Mum talked about her early working years as a Comptometor operator, she would always break into the song, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. This was where she worked, Mayfair; such a far cry from Penge in South East London. Then she would always follow on with her anecdote about getting wedged in a sports car with a man named ‘John Thomas’ (which for those that don’t know, is slang for penis). This misplaced photograph encapsulates all of that time, all those stories, but even though I spent a whole afternoon going through box after box of photos, moving my desk and then hoovering up the dead moths, it did not appear.

While searching, I found two manuscripts of novels which hadn’t worked out. The Short Tall Summer (which is where the name for this letter comes from) and The Coffee Mug Mausoleum. They were in a box with an old KitKat, which I had put in there as an offering for energy (Egyptian tomb style) in case either of the books felt like resurrecting themselves.

There were multiple versions of each manuscript, with many crossing outs, emails from my ex-agent (that’s a story I shall take to my grave) and the knowledge that my previous publisher had passed on one of them. There were so many amendments and notes; the writing gone over too many times I had wrung all life, and sense, out of it. I tried to read a page, hoping for some hidden brilliance, but soon felt ill. I decided to stuff all the pages into a bag. Why was I holding onto all this? Some kind of vanity that the British Library would one day want to display them in a darkened room?

Deciding I wanted them shredded, I realised I didn’t have access to a shredder. Then it came to me: there is a place I have disappeared much matter this year - the allotment. This was the first place I thought of going when Mum died. It calls to me as a place of sanctuary. I would take the paper down to the allotment and let the millipedes, slugs and worms start eating my words.

By spring the novels will be dismantled. By summer my words, all the effort of trying, will have become compost. It will feed my onions, beetroot and rocket. These lost words will help an optimistic future thrive.

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In November 2015, when Dad died, I had visitations from a green parakeet which clung to the pebbledash, peeping into my sixth floor bedroom window. Then soon after, a chatty cat followed us all the way home, sauntering into the lift with us and then into our flat. She lay out in the bath, showing us her stomach and stayed over in a towel-lined box in the wardrobe, before asking to leave at 4am the next morning. These visitations felt magical, like when people infuse meaning to the sight of a robin after someone has died. Since Mum going, three weeks ago, there have been no birds and no cats. The magic, the magical thinking, the apparitions, the surety of her energy being passed into the natural world is not the way things are going. I don’t know how this works, all I do know is, that like the lost photograph, she is refusing to reappear.

A new year is upon us. The reality of it is found in my desk diary and the fact that Sainsbury’s is closing two hours early this evening. I can turn a page of this diary and look to the future. There is space within it to write. Mum would usually have called many times already today, often not realising she had rung a minute before. Now the phone is still and soon it will be time to take down the pom poms.

Each year, as we undress the Christmas from the front room (always leaving the fairy lights up, around the window - we’re not insane) I take stock through writing a note for my future self to read.

I began this in 2015. It was a time of stasis, pain, and stuckness. I needed to prove that things would change, and the tricky times might fall away. There would be written proof that a new future arrives, sometimes for the better. How could I remember the magic, the sorrow, how I lived through it all, if I didn’t note it down? So, rather than keeping a daily diary, I decided once a year, as the pom poms came down, I’d have a major check-in with myself. A yearly sum up and setting of intentions for the future. So, I started. Every letter begins with ‘The day the pom poms come down I…’

Now I have nearly ten years of the good, bad and the fuzzy. I know where I have been and where I hoped to go and I can see a pattern: she who dares wins. So, my teenage self was right all along. Be daring again Karen. Keep it going so you have something to write about, as the tinsel gets packed away for another year.

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Now, an announcement. Over the past year people I’ve met while touring, have been asking whether I will be running any of my writing courses online. So, as a little taster session for those interested in starting your own memoir/life writing, I am running an Introduction to Life Writing online on Sunday 2nd February 2025, 10am-1pm. It’ll be motivating and informative, and it’ll get you writing. More info here

As always, thank you for reading and supporting my writing. A big heartfelt thanks to those who are paid subscribers, you keep me going and in inky pens. Here’s to good company, good work, good books, shows, films and music. To moving our bodies together and keeping in motion. Here’s to moments of silence and letting it all go and then sleeping to heal the broken parts.

Here’s to love. Oh, and of course, to writing. To constructing our life, and finding meaning from it on the page.

‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at,

what I see and what it means.’ - Joan Didion

Write soon, write regularly,

Love Karen xxx